With business aviation’s focus on improving its environmental credentials, the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is one of the key strategies the industry is relying on to reach net zero by 2050. On Wednesday at EBACE, a panel discussion dedicated to the topic featured experts from Air bp, Signature Aviation, World Fuel Services, and VistaJet. They explored the entire SAF ecosystem from feedstocks to mandates.
A year ago, the European Parliament and European Council reached an agreement on the ReFuelEU proposal that calls for the scaling up of the use of blended SAF starting next year. “It is a fuel supplier mandate to provide a 2% blend—beginning in 2025—of the aviation fuel that is consumed in Europe [having] a SAF component, and that ramps up through 2050 to 70%,” Keith Sawyer, Avfuel’s manager of alternative fuels told AIN. But the exact qualifying blend ratio had yet to be determined, he added.
A similar proposal in the UK also starting early next year would set a 10% blend requirement by 2030, with a SAF usage mandate to begin in 2025 as well. Mandates on SAF use are currently in the books in Norway, Sweden, and France.
Worldwide SAF production currently equates to less than 1% of jet fuel consumption, with the vast majority of all SAF produced coming via the HEFA production pathway—synthetic paraffinic kerosene derived from used cooking oils, fats, and greases. Although it is considered a first-generation SAF, some worry that there is simply not enough HEFA feedstock available.
“You have a number of players out there that are still going to be increasing the production of HEFA SAF from fats, oils, and greases, but we think that is nowhere what it’s going to take,” stated Avfuel executive v-p C.R. Sincock. “Can that take us from the sub 1% level that we are at today to 5%,10%? Possibly, but I don’t think anybody would tell you that it’s going to take us up to 50% or even close to that.”
Daniel Coetzer, CEO of Titan Fuels International, noted slow growth in the European SAF market, which—like the rest of the world’s SAF industry—is HEFA-based. “A lot of these refineries are getting financed and subsidized by the governments to upgrade and produce SAF, but still I think we are at the same level that we were a couple of years ago. We still don’t have a very good [feedstock] to make this stuff from,” he said.
“You ask people what they use to produce the SAF and they come up with old cooking oil and stuff like that; there is just not enough. We’re all going to be overweight from eating all those french fries.”
Luckily, other technologies and production pathways are ramping up to take advantage of different feedstocks. Among the second-generation SAF production pathways set to come online is alcohol-to-jet, which uses feedstocks such as ethanol created from crops such as corn or soy.
“It’s a bit fraught politically in terms of what people want to consider as renewable, and that’s something that every country is going to take a different opinion on,” Sincock told AIN. “Everybody is going to have a different view on that in the sense of does it compete with the food chain…how much water does it consume, et cetera.” As an example, in the U.S., only 2% of the corn crop is used for human consumption.
Honeywell recently announced improvements to its Unicracking technology, which uses the Fischer-Tropsch process, to enable the processing of a wider range of biomass feedstocks, including forestry residues into SAF. According to the company, more than 50 sites globally have licensed its SAF technologies, with those refineries projected to exceed a combined capacity of more than 500,000 barrels of SAF per day when fully operational.
Further down the road is power-to-liquid, which uses electricity to produce SAF from hydrogen and carbon dioxide. “I tend to feel like it is the ultimate solution because it is completely scalable, nobody is ever going run out of carbon dioxide, and we’re probably not going to run out of water, and we’re probably not going to run out of electricity, although of course electricity that is used has to be renewable, otherwise it’s like plugging your Tesla into a coal-fired power plant,” said Sincock
He added that while most agree that solar, wind, hydro-, or thermal-generated electricity are renewable, nuclear energy remains an area of discussion. "I think that it's just going to take a variety of different approaches and it's going to depend on what every country has in terms of its political environment, in terms of what they consider renewable, the natural resources available, the power generation available, and then of course the regulatory regimes."
“There’s a total of 59 renewable refineries on the books, either conversion (brownfield) or new (greenfield) refineries by Total, Repsol, SkyNRG in the Netherlands, ENI in Italy,” noted Sawyer. “You’ve got a raft of projects, not only in the EU but in the UK as well, so it's going to be interesting to see where it all goes, but clearly the mandates will be phased in.”
While the product has been flowing, Coetzer has still encountered problems sourcing it in Europe. “I had a customer who wanted to buy some bulk [SAF], a couple of containers, and it’s just not there,” he told AIN, noting that conventional fossil-based jet fuel has had a long head start. “SAF is still new—it just arrived on the market; a couple of years ago, the word didn’t even exist.”
Coetzer questions the timing of the mandates and whether the producers will have the capacity to meet them. “I think everybody hopes they can be reached, but the technology is just not there,” he stated. “I don’t think the industry was consulted enough when this was done and put in place. Even if they were consulted, the advice was not taken seriously. Some legislators want to push this too fast and you must first walk before you can run. They are trying to run before they can walk and they are going to fall over.”
Presently, approval for SAF usage only extends to up to 50% blends with conventional jet-A at present, due to the aromatic compounds present in petroleum that enable the seals in legacy aircraft fuel systems to properly function. In its neat, unblended form, SAF can provide up to 80% life cycle carbon dioxide reductions compared to fully petroleum-based jet fuel.
That reduction margin remains a tantalizing glimpse of the fuel’s potential benefits, and testing by airframers such as Gulfstream and Embraer has proven that their new aircraft can operate on neat SAF. But until such approval is given and production rises to make the distribution of pure SAF a viable possibility, such levels of CO2 reduction will remain just a future possibility.
Blended SAF is presently available at approximately 30 airports in Europe, and the regulations coming in place will favor the larger ones. “Fuel suppliers are required to supply this fuel and give priority to airports of 800,000 or more passengers a year, so those legally will be the first supply points,” Sawyer explained.
“As you know, business aviation isn’t very welcome at Schiphol or at Frankfurt, but very welcome in Munich and Vienna and so forth so we’re just going to have to see these mandates profile to the airports that are really important to Avfuel and our customers, which is places like Paris Le Bourget and so on.”
With Paris hosting the Summer Olympics this July, the company announced this week at EBACE that it will now be providing permanent supplies of SAF at three French airports: Paris Le Bourget (LFPB), Bordeaux-Mérignac (LFBD), and Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne (LFLC). Produced in France from used cooking oil at a 30% blend, the SAF offers a 2.5-tonne reduction in carbon emissions per 4,000-liter load.
European operators are becoming more savvy about SAF, according to Noel Siggery, AEG Fuels' senior director of general aviation sales and supply for Europe. “I think there has been a transition over the last few years from 'What is SAF?' to 'We understand what SAF is, now where is it coming from, what are the sustainability impacts, and does it meet EU ETS requirements?'"
Among its customers, AEG—which distributes fuel in North America but functions largely as a fuel marketer in Europe—is experiencing limited but growing demand for SAF. “Many more of the larger type general aviation operators are tendering with an element of SAF as part of their procurement process,” Siggery told AIN. “Some of the operators that do want to take SAF actually want the product at a higher blend, and they actually want that pumped onto their aircraft.”
To satisfy those demands—and despite the fact that, as a drop in fuel, SAF is fully miscible with conventional jet-A—some European business airports are keeping their SAF supplies segregated from their jet-A supplies.
“I think the real challenge going forward is not, 'Will there be enough SAF to reach these mandates?' but 'Where will it be located, and will we be able to get into a position where SAF will be readily available across all regions and sustainably transported?'” said Siggery. “The larger airports will have an element of physical product, and then some of the regional or larger GA airports will have physical product. From a logistical point of view, the challenge is getting it to these second, third-tier airports.”