If all goes according to plan and no unforeseen eleventh-hour hiccups surface, the European Union will introduce legislation mandating the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) for flights within and departing the bloc. A deal on the ReFuelEU Aviation proposal, agreed upon at the end of April after lengthy and often tense negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, mandates that as of 2025, SAF must account for at least 2 percent of aviation fuels. This minimum increases every five years, to 6 percent in 2030, 20 percent in 2035, 34 percent in 2040, 42 percent in 2045, and 70 percent in 2050.
A specific proportion of the fuel mix—1.2 percent in 2030, 2 percent in 2032, 5 percent in 2035, and progressively reaching 35 percent in 2050—must consist of synthetic low-carbon aviation fuels such as e-fuels or e-SAF using power-to-liquid (PtL) technology.
Adina Valean, EU commissioner for transport, hailed the political agreement as “a turning point” for European aviation toward a pathway to decarbonization. “Shifting to sustainable aviation fuels will improve our energy security, while reducing reliance on fossil fuel imports,” said Valean. “[The new rules] will help make Europe a front-runner in the production of innovative clean fuels, globally. We estimate that the SAF market will create more than 200,000 additional jobs in the EU, mainly in the renewables sector.”
Darko Levicar, mobility policy director at Hydrogen Europe, added that binding mandates for the uptake of SAF deliver “long-term certainty” for fuel suppliers to establish a European supply chain for cleaner fuels. Airlines, however, appear less convinced. “While mandates for SAF use send a signal to producers and the market, without a comprehensive policy framework to incentivize cheaper production and more flexible rules of supply, mandates alone simply risk a huge increase in cost and a license to print money for fuel suppliers, while raising the price of mobility throughout the EU,” remarked International Air Transport Association (IATA) deputy director general, Conrad Clifford.
According to IATA estimates, fulfilling the ReFuelEU mandate would require slightly less than 1 million tonnes of SAF (around 1.25 billion liters) in 2025, for a total jet fuel uplift of slightly less than 50 million tonnes.
Whether SAF production capacity in the EU will cover the increasing mandate requirements remains unclear, however. “It is possible that SAF may be imported from other markets, but we do not know yet,” IATA told Paris Airshow News. Research indicates that producers plan about 59 new bio-refineries in Europe, with various dates to come online and no visibility of how much SAF will account for the output; typically, SAF represents 30 percent of output from a bio-refinery. “This is why incentives are needed to make sure that SAF can compete with biodiesel,” IATA stressed.
ReFuelEU is a key pillar of the EU’s Fit for 55 legislative package to reduce the bloc’s net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels and to achieve climate neutrality in 2050. The Commission projects that the ReFuelEU measure on its own will reduce aircraft CO2 emissions by around two-thirds by 2050 compared with a "no action" scenario.
Under the new rules, the share of SAF that the legislation requires producers to blend with fossil kerosene is binding throughout the EU and it disallows member states from setting higher or lower mandates, a decision welcomed by Airlines for Europe. “The single EU-wide mandate for SAF will prevent fragmentation of the EU’s single market for aviation through differing national targets in different member states,” the Brussels-based trade body of European airlines noted.
Bridging the Gap
The upcoming legislation puts the obligation to provide SAF with the fuel suppliers, and not with the airlines directly. As drafted, fuel suppliers must provide SAF at all EU airports that handle more than 1 million passengers annually, while airports must ensure the availability of fuel infrastructure “fit for SAF distribution.”
Data from airports trade body Airports Council International show that around 150 airports in the EU processed more than 1 million passengers in 2019. Currently, just 20 airports in Europe supply SAF, leaving a major gap to bridge in just 18 months.
“[It is] technically possible to have SAF at all airports” IATA asserts, though it concedes the challenge to meet the mandate requirements. Not all airports are connected to pipelines or have otherwise easy access to SAF, so bringing it to them would be inefficient. “At a minimum, it is essential that a book-and-claim system be established to create a flexible market for SAF across the EU,” Clifford maintained. The ReFuelEU provisional agreement requires the Commission to report by 2024 on the feasibility of a book-and-claim system for airlines to manage the supply of SAF in a flexible way across the EU.
In the meantime—and recognizing that SAF supply will be uneven across the bloc—negotiators of the EU institutions agreed to allow for a 10-year transition period during which fuel suppliers can provide the total amount of mandated SAF as a weighted average across the EU, rather than at each EU airport.
Still, IATA expressed concern that “if producers aren’t able to meet the mandate requirements, they will simply pass the price of the fine on to their customer, that is, the airlines.”