Sustainable Aviation Fuel: Fact From Fiction

Report Overview

This latest entry in our Fact from Fiction series addresses aspects of sustainability in travel and tackles the topic of sustainable aviation fuel. It has been the subject of both urgent innovation and fierce debate, particularly in the past year, with ambitious adoption targets demanded of the industry and questions around its scalability, feasibility, verifiably positive environmental impact, and potential effects on food supply, among other concerns.

Aviation is a notoriously “hard-to-abate” sector when it comes to carbon emissions and this places airlines in a precarious position. While electric vehicles and renewable energy innovations have propelled other actors forward on their decarbonization journeys, aviation is at severe risk of falling behind, and falling behind fast. In light of this, it is understandable that regulators and industry stakeholders have seized upon sustainable aviation fuel as a magic bullet for carbon neutrality, but there are a myriad of factors to consider before we can reasonably declare it as the most viable pathway.

There are strong views on all sides of the various debates and the myriad of issues combined with the pressure on airlines to decarbonize creates a lot of noise in the system, making it hard to discern the facts from agenda-driven opinions. This report turns an impartial and critical eye to this contentious topic and attempts to chart a path forward for the industry and its stakeholders

What You'll Learn From This Report

• What sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is and the technologies it encompasses — their advantages and disadvantages.

• Why it is a contentious topic, the complexities of the debate around its efficacy, and the challenges of scaling it.

• The economic opportunities and risks of scaling.

• The dynamics of the global market including market size, the state of public funding, and the role of offtake agreements.

• The shortcomings and risks and why some of its most ardent critics are opposed to it.

• The alternative and/or complementary pathways that could take the pressure off SAF as a flawed panacea for decarbonization.

• The current challenges with funding and the financial implications of new regulations for usage.

• The state of incentive vs. mandate-based approaches to public policy in different geographies and their implications.

• Innovative new funding models intended to take financial pressure off airlines through creative investment partnership structures and where they have been implemented.