The following is a transcript of an interview with SKY Renewables Founder and CEO Simon Yim, and ABC Capricornia’s Claudia Sullivan.

Claudia Sullivan 0:00
Claudia Sullivan with you for the rural report this morning. As demand for sustainable aviation fuel, also known as SAF grows, businesses are looking to Queensland as a source for the fuel. SKY Renewables is one company hoping to source feedstocks from both rotational crops and agricultural waste to make bioethanol, the essential ingredient to make SAF. Chief Executive, Simon Yim, has been in talks with sugar cane farmers in Burdekin for years. He’s now pitching a new winter rotation crop, sugar beet, to producers in Queensland’s Central Highlands, with eight already signed on. I spoke to him earlier.

Simon Yim 0:40
We have some pretty good discussions with growers there and the growers in the Emerald they are at a much larger scale. We have got eight of them to sign up to work with us exclusively to grow sugar beet as a winter rotational crop alongside cotton. And we’re going to extract the sugar juice from the sugar beet, and this is probably the best, simplest and lowest carbon intensity feedstock to make bioethanol. And bioethanol is an ingredient to make sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which is extremely in short supply globally, while governments are setting up mandates from Europe to Asia to have airlines fill up a certain percentage of SAF the fuel tank, starting now and incrementally going into the 2030s

Claudia Sullivan 1:34
So sugar beet is not exactly a common crop in Australia. Why have you gone for that crop choice?

Simon Yim 1:40
Sugar beet has actually been been tested and and there were some trials going back to the last 15-20, years. I think the reason why it didn’t take off was not because there is no good use to it. Is the fact that you don’t really have an infrastructure. You don’t have sugar mills to crush the beet, and it’s very, very expensive and difficult set up a complete set of infrastructure. At that point in time, there is no market for it, whereas times have definitely changed. And right now, what’s being considered waste just a few years ago has become valuable, because using waste to make bio energy is the name of the game.

Claudia Sullivan 2:16
What about the conditions needed for the crop? Are you concerned at all about that?

Simon Yim 2:20
Beet is a very water conservative crop, you know, if compared with sugar cane, it only uses half the water. And whatever is available in the Fairbairn Dam is certainly enough for our growth area. And we are talking about 12-13,000 hectares of land in the core Emerald area, which is the most convenient spot for for getting water, and the sugar beet itself is 80% water. So when we were to process it we can recycle and recycle to not waste even a drop of water in the process.

Claudia Sullivan 2:51
You mentioned before as well, about the desire in politics in Australia for some renewable energy, whether that is is biofuel. Are you concerned at all that the Australian opposition party, the Liberal Party, is changing its stance around that?

Simon Yim 3:06
SAF is a global need. For example, Qantas has committed to 10% SAF in their tanks, starting in 2030. European airlines, if they want to land the plane or take off the plane from Europe, it has to be 2% now going into 6% in 2030, and 70% – seven zero per cent – by 2050. It’s a result of concerns about climate change. But it’s not really a direct climate change initiative on the part of governments. It’s just a global initiative, and there is no other way to move that many people that quickly, that far, other than air travel. And if you think about a tank of jet fuel in the plane that carries 300 people, the energy intensity of that tank is immense, and there is only one thing that can replace them, and it’s SAF. So there is no other way about it and airlines, they recognise that fully.

Claudia Sullivan 4:02
We’ve been speaking a lot, I guess, about the bigger the bigger scheme of things. What about at the scale of the producers? What is required of them?

Simon Yim 4:11
So we work backwards from how much money we can if we can get from selling SAF, and work all the way back to how much per ton we can pay to growers. We are not seeking to displace cotton, which is primary crop in Emerald. We are seeking to do an extra crop, a rotational crop, which today they are growing chickpeas, which is not high value. And based on our model, I think we can pay growers on a per ton basis at a price that is even higher than cotton. So all of a sudden, not only do you make marginally more income, you actually more than doubling your income by growing a high value winter crop alongside cotton in the summer. And that means it’s not really hard to persuade growers to at least give it a try. Then obviously, you know this is not something you can change overnight. It’s going to take trials after trial, and and improvement of best practices,

Claudia Sullivan 5:02
Chief executive and founder of biofuel company, SKY Renewables, Simon Yim, ending that report.

20 November 2025