Two more terminals gain sustainable aviation fuel certification as the 2027 mandate approaches

PT Pertamina Patra Niaga has extended International Sustainability and Carbon Certification, known as ISCC, to two further facilities, bringing its certified network for sustainable aviation fuel to five locations. The certification was issued on 8 August 2026 and is valid for one year.

The five certified sites are Aviation Fuel Terminal Soekarno Hatta, Aviation Fuel Terminal Halim Perdanakusuma, Aviation Fuel Terminal Ngurah Rai, Aviation Fuel Terminal Juanda, and Integrated Terminal Surabaya. The two added in 2026 are Juanda and Integrated Terminal Surabaya.

Integrated Terminal Surabaya carries a distinction worth noting. It is the first Integrated Terminal in the Pertamina Patra Niaga network to hold ISCC certification, which extends the sustainability standard beyond dedicated aviation fuel terminals and into the wider supply chain.

Certification is the product as much as the fuel

The instinct is to treat certification as paperwork attached to a physical commodity. For sustainable aviation fuel it is closer to the opposite.

Sustainable aviation fuel is chemically interchangeable with conventional jet fuel once blended. An airline cannot verify by inspection that what entered its wing was produced from waste feedstock rather than crude. What makes the fuel worth a premium, and what allows an airline to count it against an emissions obligation, is a documented chain of custody running from feedstock collection through refining, storage and uplift.

ISCC provides exactly that. It covers traceability and chain of custody management against international standards. Without it, molecules produced sustainably at a refinery lose their status somewhere between the refinery gate and the aircraft.

For sustainable aviation fuel, the certificate is not administration wrapped around the product. It is the part of the product an airline is actually buying.

This is why extending certification from three terminals to five matters more than the physical volumes involved. Each newly certified terminal is a point at which the sustainability claim survives the journey rather than being extinguished.

Alimuddin Baso, Corporate Marketing Director at Pertamina Patra Niaga, framed the expansion in terms of coverage and supply chain readiness allowing the company to serve airlines more closely, and connected it to the growth of the national SAF ecosystem.

Where the fuel comes from

The supply side of this chain begins in domestic kitchens and restaurants.

Pertamina collects used cooking oil through UCollect Box units placed at fuel stations, LPG outlets, hospitals, company offices and partner locations, with depositors paid roughly Rp4,000 to Rp5,000 per litre into a registered electronic wallet through the MyPertamina application. The machine measures the volume deposited and the payment transfers directly.

That feedstock is processed at the green refinery at Cilacap in Central Java, which produces around 27,000 kilolitres of sustainable aviation fuel a year. The resulting fuel already has customers. Pelita Air operates Jakarta to Bali services on it. Cathay Pacific has purchased it for routes including Jakarta to Hong Kong.

Agung Wicaksono, Director of Business Transformation and Sustainability at Pertamina, has spoken about the fuel's reliability from direct experience, having flown a two hour Pelita Air service running on it.

The international sale deserves emphasis. A foreign carrier buying Indonesian sustainable aviation fuel for an international route means the product is competing on quality and certification against established global suppliers, not merely satisfying a domestic requirement.

The chain is also notable for running entirely on assets that already existed. The Cilacap refinery was already operating. The aviation fuel terminals already served the same airports. The fuel station network where UCollect Boxes sit is already visited by millions of people daily. What was added is a new feedstock at one end, certification along the path, and collection machines at the other. The same pattern appears in biomethane entering the gas grid and in bottoming units at producing geothermal fields, which is new capacity obtained without building an entirely new system.

Why the timing points at 2027

Indonesia's sustainable aviation fuel mandate takes effect in 2027. Certification of this kind takes time to obtain, applies to specific physical locations, and expires annually.

Building the certified terminal network now, rather than in the year the mandate begins, is the difference between a requirement that can be met on schedule and one that arrives with the fuel available but no compliant route to the aircraft. Surabaya's inclusion also broadens the geography beyond Jakarta and Bali, opening the possibility of voluntary purchases by airlines operating in East Java before any obligation applies.

The annual expiry is worth holding onto as well. Unlike a terminal, which is built once, certification has to be renewed and re audited every year at every site. That makes the certified network an ongoing operational commitment rather than a completed project, and it means the count of certified locations can fall as well as rise. A mandate that depends on this network needs the renewal burden to be manageable at the scale it eventually reaches.

Sirkularium's read for government and public institutions

Three observations follow.

The first concerns the circular economy structure on display. Used cooking oil is a waste stream with genuine disposal harm, since improperly discarded oil damages drainage and water systems. Paying households and food businesses for it converts a disposal problem into a feedstock supply and creates collection, transport and logistics work along the way. The households supplying it receive a payment rather than a disposal cost. This is one of the cleaner examples of circularity operating without subsidy, and it is worth studying as a template for other dispersed waste streams.

The second concerns infrastructure that is certified rather than built. The constraint being addressed here was not refining capacity or terminal capacity, both of which already existed. It was the absence of verified chain of custody at the points where fuel changes hands. Public institutions assessing readiness for any standard linked to provenance, whether in aviation fuel, biomethane or traded carbon, should treat certification coverage as infrastructure in its own right and plan for it on a similar timeline.

The third concerns the supply of feedstock as the eventual limit. Cilacap's current output is 27,000 kilolitres a year against a mandate that will apply across the national fleet. Scaling will depend on how much used cooking oil can be gathered, which is a collection logistics question distributed across millions of households and food businesses. Local governments hold the relevant relationships with markets, food vendors and neighbourhood administrations, and are well placed to extend collection coverage beyond the cities where UCollect points currently sit.

What to watch next is the blending percentage the 2027 mandate sets, whether certification extends to terminals outside Java and Bali, and whether collection volumes keep pace with refining capacity as it expands.