SAF Gets a Line in China's Sweeping New Ecological Plan

China's State Council has issued the "Beautiful China" 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), a sweeping national ecological and climate policy document covering air quality, water and soil pollution, biodiversity, nuclear safety, and climate targets through 2030 and 2035. It sets national goals including cutting economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 7-10% below peak by 2035 and bringing PM2.5 concentrations below 25 micrograms per cubic metre. This is a national environmental framework, not a fuels policy, but two specific lines inside it belong in this brief.

The SAF Line, in Context

Within a section on greening key transport and industrial sectors, the plan calls for accelerating airport operational electrification, full adoption of shore power at ports, and development of sustainable aviation fuel. It sits alongside targets to raise the share of rail and waterway freight, expand new-energy vehicle transport, and build "zero-carbon transport corridors," with a goal of 75% clean transport in key industries nationally and 85% in regions with the most severe air pollution problems. SAF appears as one item in a long list of transport decarbonisation measures, not as a standalone national SAF strategy or target.

CCUS Gets a Mention Too

Under a section on climate change response, the plan calls for advancing carbon capture, utilisation and storage technology development and demonstration projects, alongside broader commitments to carbon peaking, expanding the national carbon trading market to more sectors and participants, and developing a voluntary greenhouse gas emissions reduction trading market. As with SAF, this is a directional commitment rather than a funded, scoped programme with named capacity or timelines.

Reading a National Plan for Fuel-Specific Signal

Documents like this function as a mandate for ministries and provincial governments to translate into specific policy over the following five years, rather than an implementation plan in themselves. China's prior Five-Year Plans have followed this same pattern: the 14th Five-Year Plan for Renewable Energy Development, for instance, set a directional biogas target that provincial governments and NDRC subsequently converted into specific subsidy schemes and construction standards over the following years. On that precedent, the SAF and CCUS lines in this plan are more likely to be the trigger for ministry-level implementation documents over 2026-2028 than a static wishlist item.

A Domestic Industry Already Positioned to Benefit

China already has commercial-scale infrastructure that a national SAF and CCUS push could plausibly draw on.

• On SAF, Sinopec's Zhenhai refinery was China's first dedicated SAF plant, producing HEFA-based fuel from used cooking oil since 2022 with a 100,000 tonne annual design capacity, and by the end of 2024 total Chinese SAF capacity across producers including Zhenhai, Junheng, Haixin, EcoCeres and Jiaao had reached roughly 1.05 million tonnes. Beijing Shougang LanzaTech, the carbon-recycling joint venture that listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June, adds a distinct pathway: converting industrial waste gas into ethanol, a feedstock directly relevant to ethanol-to-jet SAF specifically.

• On CCUS, Sinopec's Qilu-Shengli Oilfield project, operational since 2022, was China's first megaton-scale carbon capture facility, capturing roughly one million tonnes of CO2 annually from a petrochemical plant and piping it to the Shengli oilfield for enhanced oil recovery, one of over 40 CCUS pilot projects reported operating nationally by 2022.

Whether this plan translates into direct policy support for any of these specific projects is not something the document itself commits to, but the domestic capability the plan could eventually draw on, across both SAF feedstock routes and CCUS, is not hypothetical.

Source: State Council of the People's Republic of China, 3 July 2026.