GREEN DREAMS PIVOT: Short‑term relief from Strait of Hormuz tension is great for Sasol’s fragile recovery story

One of the country’s most important companies is slowly dragging itself into the fresh air of dividends and unqualified audits. But there is still a way to go.

“Everyone wants it until they have to pay for it,” Sasol CFO Walt Bruns explained about the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) that Daily Maverick became a little obsessed with in Brazil.

While Sasol’s presentations highlight its technological capabilities in sustainable fuels, the CFO’s comments reveal a major strategic retreat. The key sustainable aviation fuel joint venture, Zaffra BV (a partnership with Topsoe), is being “operationally unwound”. Behind this unwinding is a hard commercial bottleneck: the aviation industry’s reluctance to fund green premiums.

“Zaffra BV was premised on the sustainable aviation fuel industry, especially her projects in the US, being advanced to final investment decision,” he says.

“That hasn’t happened as yet... We felt that when we looked out the window and at the time required before a project would get to the point that you make a financial investment decision, it would just take a long time. The sustainable aviation fuel makes sense intuitively, but it needs to make sense economically. We didn’t see enough industry offtake agreements being signed at a volume and a price that would justify building a new plant somewhere in Europe, in particular.”

Instead of building dedicated new greenfield SAF facilities abroad, Sasol is shifting to a defensive, asset-sweating strategy. It intends to leverage existing facilities at Natref and Secunda to produce SAF, aiming to market it independently while looking to potentially partner with firms in China or the Far East to license their feedstock-agnostic Fischer-Tropsch technology.

Sasol has positioned itself as a champion of the green hydrogen economy in South Africa, celebrating its proof-of-concept projects. However, Bruns admitted that these projects face the identical demand-side headwinds as SAF, coupled with a total lack of public infrastructure.

“We spent R16-billion over the last 10 years on environmental compliance programmes... We built a green hydrogen kind of proof of concept in Sasolburg, but people came, they said they wanted it, and then they’re not willing to pay the price.”

“We’re still working with the Northern Cape on it [Boegoebaai green hydrogen project]... The challenge for us just there is there’s just no infrastructure there,” he explained.

“You need green hydrogen to work, but if it has to fund a port, a whole rebuildout, infrastructure, all of that, the cost just becomes prohibitive. We think that green hydrogen will come, just not now.”

Sasol recorded R16.8-billion in non-cash impairments in FY26.