Pertamina and Boeing Sign MOU to Build Indonesia's SAF Industry

Indonesian state energy firm Pertamina has signed a memorandum of understanding with US planemaker Boeing to explore development of a SAF industry in Indonesia. The agreement covers identifying feedstock sources, developing SAF production technologies, and supporting SAF policy development, and follows the same week as the B50 biodiesel mandate rollout, giving Indonesia two active biofuel workstreams running in parallel across road and aviation fuel.

Pertamina has existing SAF groundwork to build on, including certified SAF used on selected Pelita Air flights and the Cilacap Biorefinery project, which produces SAF and renewable diesel from used cooking oil and other waste-based feedstocks. What Boeing brings is aviation-demand expertise and access to a global manufacturer's view of where SAF specification and offtake requirements are heading, rather than production technology of its own.

The Numbers Behind Indonesia's SAF Ambition

Boeing projects Southeast Asian passenger traffic growing roughly 7% annually through 2044, requiring nearly 4,900 new aircraft, a demand curve Indonesia is positioning its SAF industry against. Separately, the ASEAN 2050 SAF Outlook projects Indonesia among ASEAN's top three SAF producers, with an estimated surplus of 2.2 million barrels per day by 2050, though that projection sits several decades out and depends on feedstock and investment assumptions playing out as modelled.

Two Biofuel Policies, Two Different Feedstock Logics Indonesia's B50 mandate runs on palm oil FAME; Pertamina's SAF ambitions, via Cilacap, run on used cooking oil and other waste-based feedstocks, a deliberately different, less food-crop-adjacent feedstock base for aviation than for road transport. Running both simultaneously means Indonesia is drawing on two separate feedstock pools rather than a single one stretched across both, which reduces at least one source of cross-sector competition other Asian markets are still working through.

Source: Reuters, 9 July 2026