DHL Express Italy tests Eni SAF for 28 flights from Milan Malpensa Airport

DHL Express Italy, a leader in the express air-courier sector, SEA Group, which manages Milan Malpensa and Milan Linate airports, and Eni have signed an agreement to test Eni Biojet—a 20 percent blend of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) produced exclusively from animal fat and used cooking oil—on 28 flights departing from Malpensa airport.

DHL Express will be the first express air courier in Italy to use SAF for its flights.

The company activated as many as 91 projects in 2022 through various initiatives across Italy that involve environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) themes, and is now closing the year with another major achievement, less than two years after the DPDHL Group launched its first test in San Francisco in 2020.

“Milan Malpensa airport has already implemented a number of best practices in the areas of security, sustainability and efficiency, and is once again the starting point for this historic transitional phase,” Eni stated.

Inaugurated in March 2021, the DHL Express Hub at Malpensa has more than 1,100 employees with an average age of around 30 years, mostly from the surrounding areas, and handles an average of 70 percent of the tonnage transported between all Italian airports, with international outweighing domestic transport.

Malpensa is the fourth-largest transport hub in Europe and a strategic international hub that has seen 87 percent growth since 2020, from 30 to 56 flights a day.

By the end of 2022, 28 flights departing from Malpensa will be powered by SAF produced by Eni in its Livorno refinery in Italy, in partnership with Eni’s biorefinery in Gela, Italy, whose plants process waste raw materials, animal fat, recycled vegetable oils and oils from crops that do not compete with the food-supply chain.

“I am very happy that we can close this year with yet another sustainability initiative, a theme that is among the first when I draw the company’s strategic line and one that I experience first-hand in my private life,” said DHL Express Italy CEO Nazzarena Franco. “A little more than a month ago we held an environmental and social event in the center of Milan (Run for Inclusion) and today we proudly lead the launch of SAF for our flights from Malpensa. This is made possible thanks to the collaboration with SEA, our long-standing partner with whom we share the same values, and of course Eni, who worked with our teams to carry out this test. I want this to be the first step towards an even more sustainable future and I hope that the companies watching us will be inspired and also want to explore innovations that support the environment.”

Stefano Ballista, Eni’s director of sustainable mobility, added, “Eni Biojet is one of the flagship products in our decarbonization offering. Thanks to the investment in technologies we have developed over the last decade, we are able to produce a biogenic kerosene that can be blended up to 20 percent, compared to the 2 percent sustainable fuel quota mandatory as of 2025. We successfully tested Eni Biojet to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Monza racetrack, with fuel produced in Livorno in partnership with the Gela biorefinery. We have designed two plants specifically for the production of SAF in the Eni biorefineries in Venice and Gela, and from 2024 they will bring to the market the necessary amounts to meet the requirements of EU regulations.”

SEA Milan Airports CEO Armando Brunini said, “This partnership with Eni and DHL, the first company at Malpensa to use SAF, is an important step towards the decarbonization of the air-transport sector, a priority goal for our industry. It will be a long and complex process that requires the synergy of all the actors involved to generate concrete actions, as the agreement signed today demonstrates. SEA has long since started to establish strategic partnerships and invest in technologies and projects to speed up the transition towards a more sustainable future for air transport. I am convinced that our sector should lead the ecological transition, and, given concrete and measurable results, deserves a supportive and incentivizing policy framework.”