BEIJING -- The Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China and US aerospace giant Boeing will work together to refine used cooking oil into aviation biofuel.

The two companies jointly opened an aviation energy conservation and emissions reduction technology center on Thursday in Beijing, Friday's China Securities Journal reported.

The center's first research project will focus on refining leftover cooking oil, often described in China as "gutter oil," into aviation biofuel, the newspaper reported.

China's Qingdao Fresh Bio-energy Technology Development Co Ltd said in March this year that 20 tonnes of oil it refined from leftover cooking oil will be exported to the Netherlands to be further processed into aviation fuel by SkyNRG, a biofuel supplier from the Netherlands.

SkyNRG made another deal in July, in which it purchased 10,000 tons of refined gutter oil from Shanghai Lvming Environmental Protection Technology Co. The first batch of 2,000 tons of refined gutter oil has been delivered, the newspaper reported.

China is expected to use 12 million tons of aviation biofuel by 2020, accounting for 30 percent of the country's total use of jet fuel, according to Li Jian, deputy director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China. The country consumes 22.5 million tons of cooking oil annually.