A recovery in European jet fuel demand to pre-pandemic levels is years away, forcing regional refiners to continue blending the aviation fuel into diesel, and keeping a lid on their crude runs, consultancy FGE Energy said. FGE sees jet/kerosene demand in Europe at the end of 2022 reaching 75% of 2018-2019 levels only, meaning European refiners will continue to blend a large volume of jet into diesel to soak up the surplus. “Such blending tends to limit overall refinery crude throughput because maximum distillate hydrotreating capacity is reached at lower crude throughputs,” FGE says. Hydrotreating is a chemical process used in refining petroleum products to remove sulphur. “At this point, incremental crude runs would produce only naphtha, high sulphur gasoil and fuel oil – not […]