Sustainable Aviation Fuel: Now and Tomorrow

Sustainable Aviation Fuel is now in routine daily use by hundreds, if not thousands of companies and organizations worldwide – including airlines, business aircraft fleet operators, and many private aviation and special-mission users. But how can production be increased to make it more readily available...?

The aviation industry globally sees SAF as one of the two most important ways in which it can massively reduce the climate-forcing effects it creates. (The other is to reduce as much as possible the formation of persistent contrails by aircraft flying at certain altitudes, and in climatic conditions, which encourage the creation of contrails.)

Gurhan Andac, GE Aerospace’s Fuels Technical Leader, says SAF is important to the entire aviation industry because of the renewable nature of the materials from which it is made and the processes by which it is produced.

Together, those factors can serve to reduce SAF’s ‘life cycle’ emissions of climate-forcing carbon greenhouse gases – particularly CO2 – by up to an estimated 85% compared with emissions from jet fuel conventionally refined from crude oil.

In that context, the term ‘life cycle’ refers to:

• The cumulative total of the carbon emissions created by harvesting or collecting the base material to be refined into jet fuel;
• The carbon emitted in generating the power needed to produce the fuel;
• The carbon emissions produced by the manufacturing process for the fuel;
• The carbon emissions which are created by the transportation, storage and uptake of the fuel into aircraft fuel tanks; and
• The carbon emissions created when the fuel is burned in, and exhausted from, a turbine-powered aircraft to propel the aircraft.

Demand by aircraft operators for SAF continues to grow daily. But so great is that demand that Kennedy Ricci, President and CEO of 4AIR, a company which serves as a consultancy on aviation environmental matters and develops environmental-sustainability programs for aircraft operators, says “we are starting to see a shortfall of SAF emerging”.

SAF’s First Major Challenge

Despite its strong start, SAF is as yet an insignificant source of fuel for turbine aircraft engines. Blends of up to 50% SAF with conventional jet fuel have already been qualified for routine operational use in many parts of the world. However, the aviation industry’s goal is for its aircraft to eventually use 100% unblended SAF as a fuel.

But SAF production amounts are currently so limited that “we are nowhere near using the currently allowed blending limit of 50% SAF on a day-to-day basis, let alone 100% SAF,” says Michael Sargeant, Vice President Americas for Finland-headquartered refiner Neste’s Renewable Aviation business unit.

So “ramping-up SAF production is the major challenge we face as current production is still limited,” Sargeant says. 

"Global SAF usage is currently less than 0.1% of total global jet fuel consumption, so we have a long way to go to leverage the benefits of SAF at scale,” he adds. “We are laying the foundation of the future already and sending a strong signal into the market that will help to ramp up SAF awareness and production.”

The road forward for SAF is so long that Andac reckons if SAF can achieve a 5% share of the total jet fuel in the short-term it would be a good achievement…

What changes are likely to come for SAF production and what is the scale of the challenge SAF producers face? Find out the answers to these, and more questions. Click the button below to continue reading in the AvBuyer December digital edition…