Europe’s airlines don’t want handouts. They simply want their money back.

That was the message from a panel on balancing sustainability, financial stability and fuel efficiency at the Sustainable Aviation Futures Congress in Amsterdam, where SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam brought together airline, technology and policy voices to see how the industry might be able to close the gap between SAF ambition and SAF action.

The most direct challenge came from Ourania Georgoutsakou, Managing Director of Airlines for Europe (A4E), the trade body representing 60 major European airline groups and roughly 80% of the continent’s air traffic.

Her proposed fix is simple: redirect national ETS revenue back into SAF offtakes and allow airlines to deduct their SAF costs from their ETS bill via extending SAF allowances.

“Imagine if airlines could reclaim all their ETS contributions back in SAF allowances,” she told the panel. Airlines could then sign offtake agreements that go beyond existing mandates, stimulating exactly the kind of demand signal that SAF producers say they need before scaling production.

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Georgoutsakou emphasised that we don’t need new money, we simply need to use the money that’s already in the system but currently disappearing into general government coffers. She was equally forceful on book-and-claim, the mechanism that allows airlines to claim the environmental benefits of SAF purchases regardless of where the physical fuel is uplifted.

Right now, airlines pay a SAF premium at airports where no SAF exists. “I pay that premium for the SAF, not for the geography that you just happen to be flying to,” she argued. Book-and-claim removes that geographical barrier, and she stressed that we needed to make book-and-claim work now. “It’s meant for today, not tomorrow,” she said. “In five years’ time, hopefully we have a functional market” where it’s no longer needed.

All of this leads to what she called the sector’s persistent chicken-and-egg problem: airlines won’t commit at today’s prices, producers won’t invest without demand certainty, and the whole system stalls.

The demand signal that’s actually working

Meanwhile, even as the policy plumbing is still being built, Lufthansa Group offered evidence that passenger demand for greener options is real and growing.

Claudia Huegel, the group’s Senior Director and Head of ESG Rating and Reporting, outlined the progress of Lufthansa’s “green fares”, a fare option available at booking where passengers pay a small premium that funds a combination of SAF purchases and climate projects.

The fares now see a 5% uptake rate, with “four million passengers choosing a more sustainable fare”, said Huegel, mentioning that the number is steadily increasing.

“Be patient,” Huegel advised. The success of Lufthansa’s project didn’t happen overnight. The group started with a pilot in Scandinavian markets in summer 2022, rolled the product out across European routes in February 2023, and extended it to intercontinental flights in 2024. Lufthansa’s Green products, which also include SAF bulk deals, are now available across leisure, corporate and cargo segments.

She was candid, too, about the naming challenge. Lufthansa still calls them “green fares,” but regulators have pushed for more granular disclosure, with the fare now carrying an explanation that it represents a contribution to future CO2 savings through a combination of SAF and climate projects, not a guarantee that SAF is on that specific flight. It’s a compromise between consumer clarity and marketing reality, but one that underlines how much regulatory pressure surrounds even the language of sustainability.

This prompted Nigam to frame the discussion further: the industry doesn’t just need sustainable aviation fuel. It needs sovereign aviation fuel, produced where the mandates apply.

Fleet renewal still the biggest lever

Both Huegel and Wizz Air’s Owain Jones emphasised that SAF, while essential, is not the only decarbonisation pathway airlines are pursuing today. For Lufthansa Group, fleet renewal remains the most significant lever through to 2030.

“Lower emissions is lower cost,” as Huegel put it, backed by €4.6 billion in aircraft investment last year and over 230 new aircraft on order. For Wizz Air, the shift to an all-A321neo fleet by the end of 2028 will deliver both cost efficiency and emissions reduction, alongside early-stage investments, for example in sewage to SAF company Firefly Green Fuels.

Digital solutions and greater harmonisation across the value chain, she argued, would make it far easier for airlines, particularly smaller carriers without dedicated sustainability teams, to manage their obligations and scale their SAF procurement.

Our take

The conversation in Amsterdam pointed to an industry that is clear-eyed about the gap between political ambition and the financial mechanisms needed to deliver on it. The money exists, the demand signals are emerging, and the policy tools are understood.

All the ingredients are on the counter. What we now have to do is actually cook the dish.

And while much of this debate centres on Brussels, aviation is a global business. If RefuelEU is driving mandates in Europe while production scales in North America, Brazil and China, the conditions for a functional SAF market need to be global too.

The argument from airlines is that the longer governments leave those ingredients sitting there, the harder it becomes to convince anyone that the meal is ever coming.

• From a diesel car to a refinery: Founder Vinesh Sinha began in 2006 by blending used cooking oil (UCO) in a second-hand diesel car. By 2010 he had a small biodiesel plant; by 2013 he was supplying feedstock to some of largest renewable fuels refineries in the region.

• The “Uber for waste”: His company, FatHopes has built a digital supply-chain platform encompassing vendor, driver, consumer and “Ranger” apps, tracking every litre of UCO from stall to ship. COVID-19 lockdowns drove digital adoption from 35% to 100% overnight.

• Why traceability matters for aviation: That digital infrastructure was built for operational efficiency, but it gives buyers the low-latency chain-of-custody data needed to satisfy EU and UK sustainability criteria.

• The big bet: A 300,000-tonne-per-annum SAF refinery in Port Klang, Malaysia, budgeted at $500 million. Pre-FEED completes June 2026; FID is targeted for mid-2027; commercial production is slated for H2 2030.

• The financing gap: Equity is already secured, but debt financing must close before FID. Memoranda of understanding cover roughly 70% of offtake; definitive agreements are being held until FEED firms up the cost structure.

• Malaysia as “Singapore 2.0”: Sinha argues Malaysia offers the trade stability of Singapore at a lower cost, with predictable export policies and zero levy on finished product. That is why Chinese and Middle Eastern producers are increasingly choosing it as a regional SAF hub.

The hobby that started it all

Every founder has an origin story. Malaysian entrepreneur Vinesh Sinha’s begins in 2006, when his father gave him a second-hand diesel car.

“I started experimenting on used cooking oil in that car,” Sinha recalls. “I subsidised my own fuel bill by running one part used cooking oil, one part diesel.” At the time, he notes, “the word biodiesel was not even a thing yet, especially in this part of the world.”

The economics were almost implausibly attractive: restaurants were paying him to take their waste oil away. “It was just revenue on all fronts,” he says.

The aviation connection came in 2008, when Virgin Atlantic flew a Boeing 747 partially powered by biofuel derived from coconut and babassu oil. In Malaysia, Richard Branson was already a household name, in part, thanks to his famous Formula 1 bet with AirAsia’s Tony Fernandes.

Branson had wagered that his Virgin Racing team would beat Fernandes’s Lotus team at the 2010 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He lost, and so in May 2013 paid up by serving as an AirAsia flight attendant on a Perth-to-Kuala Lumpur route, complete with full makeup, and a red skirt. “Virgin was not a foreign name to us,” Sinha explains. That 2008 biofuel flight planted a seed: could the same waste oil one day power aircraft?

The pivot that wasn’t the end

In 2013, the price of crude oil collapsed. As a result, the domestic biodiesel market evaporated. “Scaling the biorefinery didn’t make much sense to us, we were strapped on capital,” he says.

That led to a pivot, but one which served as a learning opportunity. As renewable fuel projects were being developed in neighbouring Singapore, demand emerged for waste-based feedstocks, and a major fuel producer offered to take his feedstock. Sinha obliged, and for the next few years FatHopes Energy focused on pure feedstock aggregation.

Sinha spent the next ten years solving that problem.

Why the app ecosystem matters

Today, FatHopes is more of a tech company disguised as a waste haulier than just a collector, with Sinha’s team having built a digital ecosystem that tracks every molecule of used cooking oil from a roadside stall in Penang to a refinery in Rotterdam.

The system includes apps for vendors (restaurants), drivers (with AI-powered route optimisation), household consumers, and “Rangers” — digital aggregators for housing estates — all feeding into an enterprise dashboard.

Initially, the adoption of this digital ecosystem was sluggish. Then, on 16 March 2020, COVID-19 lockdowns hit Malaysia. “All of the points of origin called us up and said, ‘Can we go paperless, cashless, contactless?’” Overnight, the digital penetration jumped from 35% to 100%. “Owners could sit at home and manage their UCO disposal remotely,” Sinha says.

Sinha’s system was built for operational efficiency, but the byproduct is total transparency. “For us to be efficient, we need to know where it is,” he says. FatHopes now has an important commercial asset, which gives offtakers the provenance data they need to satisfy EU and UK sustainability criteria.

The platform is also expanding beyond cooking oil into batteries and other waste streams. Sinha’s thesis is that any material that can become a fuel feedstock should follow the same traceable process flow.

The refinery: Port Klang, 300,000 tonnes, and the debt question

After fifteen years in feedstock, FatHopes is now planning what it hopes will be one of Southeast Asia’s most advanced SAF refineries. The project, a partnership with UAE-based Bin Zayed International Group, is located in Port Klang’s free trade zone.

The numbers are substantial: 300,000 tonnes per annum of SAF capacity, requiring roughly 330,000 tonnes of feedstock, on a $500 million budget.

The offtakes are already well progressed: memoranda of understanding cover approximately 70% of the plant’s capacity, and definitive agreements are being negotiated. Sinha is deliberately holding off on finalising those terms until FEED (front-end engineering design) delivers a firmer view on capex and opex.

The technology partner shortlist is down to three names (Sinha did not specify them publicly, but the company has previously disclosed a feasibility collaboration with Topsoe). Two EPC contractors are currently competing through the pre-FEED phase, with one expected to carry the project forward.

The economics however are straightforward: feedstock accounts for roughly two-thirds of HEFA production cost, and European UCO prices have risen above $1,300 per tonne. An IRENA study found that HEFA consistently shows the lowest capital expenditure of all SAF pathways in Malaysia, benefiting from the country’s existing oleochemical refining experience.

Palm oil, traceability, and the “palm stigma”

No conversation about Malaysian biofuels avoids palm oil. Sinha does not duck the question, but he does challenge the blanket assumption that all palm-derived feedstocks are equal. He describes the “palm stigma” as cyclical: “You have a big push against it, fuel prices increase, everyone goes quiet, and then the cycle comes back.”

POME and UCO are listed in the EU’s Annex IX Part A as advanced feedstocks, exempt from the palm phase-out. PFAD sits in Part B as a recognised residue. Academic life-cycle studies show PFAD-derived fuels achieving up to 84% GHG reductions when treated as a refining byproduct, because the upstream cultivation emissions are allocated to the main product and not the waste stream.

FatHopes’ position is one of total disclosure. The company provides full supply-chain data to counterparties before trade confirmation and lets the buyer decide what meets their sustainability threshold. This recognises that certification standards vary between Asia, Europe, and the United States. His digital infrastructure is designed to satisfy whichever standard a customer requires, from chain-of-custody to the plantation gate, to self-declaration, to ISCC mass-balance audit.

The regional context: Malaysia as “Singapore 2.0”

Sinha told us that Malaysia’s policy environment is warming. The National Energy Transition Roadmap sets a 1% SAF blending aspiration by 2027, scaling to 47% by 2050. A SAF Task Force, chaired by the Civil Aviation Authority of Malaysia and Malaysia Aviation Group, is advising the government on mandates, incentives, and cost implications.

Sinha is cautious about calling this a done deal. “There is no visibility yet” on whether the mechanism will be an incentive or a penalty, he says. But there is a clear direction of travel, and when Malaysia chaired ASEAN last year, there were active discussions about a unified regional mandate led by Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Singapore, for its part, already has a mandate from 2027 (delayed because of the upheaval in the Gulf), with a passenger levy to fund procurement. Thailand has targets of 1% by 2026. Indonesia has mandated 1% for international flights from 2027. The region is moving and mandates are coming.

The China question

FatHopes is not the only player eyeing Malaysia.

EcoCeres, the Hong Kong-founded renewable fuels unicorn backed by Towngas and Bain Capital, inaugurated a 420,000-tonne-per-annum SAF and HVO plant in Pasir Gudang, Johor, in January 2026, making it Malaysia’s first operational SAF facility and the second-largest SAF producer globally. According to Sinha, Chinese producers are increasingly building “+1” refineries outside China to hedge against anti-dumping investigations in Europe and the UK.

Sinha is sanguine about the competition. FatHopes has never sourced a Chinese molecule — “organic, not deliberate,” he says — and he views the influx of Chinese capital as complementary.

“Malaysia is going to eventually be responsible for significant volume,” he argues. “Whether that is feedstock from outside coming in, being refined and exported as finished product, or regional and domestic feedstock being used.”

Malaysia operates on predictable, annual budget cycles. Raw materials face levies, but finished product exports are duty-free. That stability, he believes, is why foreign refiners are choosing Malaysia over other Southeast Asian locations.

Our take

FatHopes Energy is a case study in patient capital and incremental innovation. From a single diesel car in 2006 to a digital waste empire and, potentially, a 300,000-tonne refinery by 2030, Vinesh Sinha has followed the feedstock.

The FatHopes story reinforces that many of the SAF production centres are not where they were yesterday. They will be where the waste is cheapest, the policy is stable, and entrepreneurs are willing to spend the time getting it right in commercialising it.

Most conversations about sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) begin and end with who’s buying it: which European airlines face ReFuelEU mandates, which US carriers are signing offtake agreements, where the blending terminals are.

Far fewer people are asking the harder question: where should this fuel actually be produced? And who captures the value when it is?

Elvis Ebikade sits at an unusual intersection. He grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, did his PhD in catalysis and biomass conversion at the University of Delaware, spent time at Boston Consulting Group, and then nearly two years inside Southwest Airlines’ SAF procurement team, where he negotiated offtake deals and saw first-hand how airlines decide what to buy and at what price. He’s now Director of Strategic Market Development at Bioleum Corporation, a US-based company developing a lignocellulosic platform that converts woody biomass into SAF, renewable diesel, and other fuels.

Here are the key highlights of the conversation:

• Why the Global South should produce SAF, not just export feedstocks (7:31)

• From climate solution to energy security: reframing the SAF narrative (17:56)

• Bioleum’s Farm-to-Fuel platform (24:20)

• The blending issue: why today’s SAF still depends on fossil jet fuel (26:49)

• What makes a SAF project truly bankable? (32:30)

• The danger of building businesses around permanent subsidies (37:01)

• The mindset shift that could accelerate the energy transition (39:56)

Keep reading for a detailed overview of the episode.

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The production geography argument

Ebikade is a passionate advocate for reframing the Global South from raw material supplier to fuel producer. The current model, he argues, makes little sense. He points to a story we reported recently: that the feedstock for Kenya Airways’ first SAF flight in 2023 originated in Kenya, was shipped to Italy for processing, and came back as SAF at 6-7x times the cost of conventional jet fuel.

Ebikade draws a parallel with Nigeria’s own crude oil history. For decades, Nigeria exported crude and reimported refined products at a premium. The Dangote Refinery, now operational with a capacity of 650,000 barrels per day, built with Nigerian capital and execution, has begun to change that equation.

Africa has the largest amount of arable land of any continent, abundant oil crop feedstocks for the HEFA pathway, agricultural residues suitable for alcohol-to-jet, woody biomass for gasification and pyrolysis routes, and solar resources for future e-fuel production. The feedstock diversity, Ebikade argues, creates resilience that single-pathway regions cannot match.

Beyond sustainability: the energy security argument

One of the more striking arguments in this conversation is Ebikade’s contention that renewable fuels are shifting from a sustainability narrative to an energy security one. Countries with abundant feedstocks now have a form of energy sovereignty they never had when dependent on crude oil imports.

That reframe, he suggests, changes who sits at the table: it brings in finance ministries, trade departments, and agricultural policymakers alongside the sustainability teams that have traditionally led these conversations.

The blend wall and why aromatics matter

On the technology side, Ebikade is equally direct. Most SAF produced today is paraffinic, meaning it lacks the aromatic hydrocarbons that conventional jet fuel contains.

Bioleum’s platform addresses this by converting lignin, a structural component of plants that makes up roughly 30% of biomass, into aromatic-rich fuel blendstocks. Combined with its cellulose-to-ethanol pathway and its acquisition of Hexas Biomass (whose high-yield energy crops can grow on marginal land), the company aims to produce a fully formulated, drop-in fuel that mirrors the composition of conventional jet.

What makes a SAF project bankable

Perhaps the most practical section of our conversation concerns what separates a real SAF project from a promising spreadsheet. Ebikade identifies four essentials:

1. Secured feedstock

2. Credible offtake

3. A credible construction and engineering partner, and

4. A technology pathway with a credible path to cost parity

On that final point, without a path to parity, he notes, you’re asking lenders to underwrite a perpetual subsidy, and they won’t.

He’s particularly sharp on the gap between modelled economics and operational reality. A project may show attractive numbers in a financial model, but if the feedstock hasn’t been qualified under the relevant regulatory framework, if chain of custody and traceability data don’t exist, or if impurities in the biomass kill the conversion process, the project fails on execution, not on technology.

Our take

Ebikade makes a compelling case that the geography of SAF production and SAF consumption will not be the same, and that the Global South has structural advantages that the industry has been slow to recognise.

The energy security reframe is particularly noteworthy: it offers a rationale for SAF investment that doesn’t depend on climate policy alone, which matters in a political environment where climate framing has become counterproductive in some key markets.

The structural barriers remain real: capital access, certification infrastructure, political risk, and the challenge of building supply chains from scratch in markets where fuel logistics are already constrained. But the direction of travel Ebikade describes, where feedstock abundance, lower costs, and renewable energy potential converge, deserves more serious attention than it currently receives.

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• US company Commonwealth Fusion Systems has formally applied to connect a 400MW fusion plant to the US grid, with Google and Eni already signed as buyers. Its commercial reactor design was just independently validated in a peer-reviewed study.

• In a single week in June: Focused Energy raised $240m for a fusion plant at a former German nuclear site, Xcimer Energy activated the largest privately owned laser on Earth, and a UK-US consortium formed to build commercial fusion in Britain.

• Fusion can deliver high-temperature process heat (600–1,000°C) directly, without converting to electricity first. That could significantly improve the efficiency and cost of producing synthetic jet fuel.

• The UK, EU, and US have all published fusion strategies backed by billions in public funding. The UK’s STEP prototype plant is targeted for the 2040s in Nottinghamshire.

• The countries that build fusion infrastructure first will likely produce the cheapest synthetic jet fuel. Europe’s SAF mandate requires 70% sustainable fuel by 2050, with a 35% sub-mandate for e-fuels that can only be made with vast quantities of clean power.

• Any technology that promises abundant, cheap, always-on electricity is, by definition, an aviation technology. Airlines and fuel producers need to start paying attention.

Jenny Cane started her career the way most fusion researchers do: running experiments, keeping the plasma stable, wondering if anyone would ever plug the thing into a wall socket. Then “suddenly we went past that,” she said at the SXSW London Festival last week. “We started hiring more and more engineers, and we started working on the engineering that we were going to need to actually design power plants. Suddenly I’m designing something that is literally there to put electricity on the grid.”

Cane is now senior lead engineer at Proxima Fusion, Europe’s fastest-growing fusion company. The transition she described, from research project to commercial infrastructure, is happening across the sector faster than almost anyone predicted. And for an industry that in Europe will be legally required to burn synthetic jet fuel which commands a high green premium, the energy source that could make it affordable is no longer a theoretical proposition. It is actually under construction.

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Announcements turn into grid applications

Consider what has happened since our March piece, ‘From Fission to Fusion.’

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the best-funded private fusion company on Earth, announced in late April that its Massachusetts demonstration reactor is 75% complete, with first plasma expected in 2027. More significantly, CFS has formally applied to connect a 400MW plant in Virginia to the PJM grid, which serves 65 million people. Google and Eni are already contracted to buy the power.

Then, in a single week in early June: Focused Energy raised $240 million to build a fusion facility at the former Biblis nuclear site in Germany. Xcimer Energy activated a 38-metre laser, the largest privately owned laser on Earth, as a step toward a commercial plant by the mid-2030s. And a UK-US consortium including Type One Energy, Tokamak Energy, and Aecom formed to develop commercial fusion in Britain.

Investment is surging alongside construction. The EU’s Fusion Observatory reported over $13 billion raised between 2020 and 2025, up from under $2 billion in the preceding period. The German state of Bavaria has pledged €400 million to Proxima Fusion. The US Department of Energy has committed $135 million for the next 18 months. The old joke that fusion is always 30 years away has been replaced by something more interesting: a race to see which country gets there first.

The heat insight and why it matters for aviation

At SXSW London, Cane said something fundamental to the aviation story. Fusion reactors, she explained, can deliver high-temperature process heat directly — 600 to 1,000 degrees Celsius — without converting to electricity first.

Here is why that matters: Making synthetic jet fuel via power-to-liquids is extraordinarily energy-hungry. You need electricity to split water into hydrogen. You need to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. And then you need to combine them under high heat and pressure to produce a liquid fuel that works in existing engines. Every step consumes energy. The more efficient you can make the process, the closer you get to a fuel price that airlines can absorb without passing crippling costs to passengers.

In our March piece on Equilibrion and Rolls-Royce collaborating on Small Modular Reactors (SMR), we noted that one advantage of small modular fission reactors is that they produce both electricity and process heat, feeding the fuel synthesis process more efficiently.

Cane’s point extends that same logic to fusion, at potentially much higher temperatures, and with an energy source whose fuel supply is measured in billions of years rather than decades. A future fusion reactor sited near a SAF facility could provide everything the process needs from a single installation: the electricity, the heat, the reliability. No other clean energy source currently offers that combination.

Nick Sykes, director of robotics at the UK Atomic Energy Authority, put the energy density in terms anyone can grasp. Take two large bottles of deuterium, which is the form of hydrogen used in fusion, extracted from ordinary seawater. Those two bottles would produce the same energy as filling an entire convention centre, the whole complex, with coal.

And so, for aviation, that energy density has a very specific significance. Replacing the world’s aviation fuel supply with power-to-liquids would require more clean energy than many countries currently produce in total. Any technology that promises abundant, cheap, always-on electricity is, by definition, an aviation technology.

The government race to be first

Our March piece was largely a story about private companies and venture capital. Since then, governments have arrived with serious money and specific plans.

The UK published a fusion strategy in March pledging £2.5 billion in public investment by 2030. Its flagship project is STEP, the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production, a government-backed prototype to be built in Nottinghamshire and targeted for the 2040s.

At SXSW London, Sykes described what STEP means for the area: “Transforming a region that was hugely dependent on mining, where there was a coal power station, into a new technology that is going to be a solution to energy for mankind.” Building a fusion plant on a former coalfield is the energy transition made visible.

Germany is going about it differently. Multiple private fusion companies have spun out of the country’s research institutions and are competing internationally. Cane, whose employer Proxima Fusion emerged from the Max Planck Institute in Munich, said Berlin’s updated strategy now explicitly targets hosting the world’s first commercial pilot plant.

The European Commission announced €222 million for fusion in March through a new public-private partnership. The US Department of Energy published a roadmap targeting commercial fusion on the grid by the mid-2030s. A genuine international race is taking shape.

The “30 years away” joke is dead

Cane addressed the old scepticism directly, namely the old joke that nuclear fusion is only ever 30 years away:

The steps are visible. CFS’s reactor design was independently validated in a peer-reviewed study in the ‘Journal of Plasma Physics’, confirming its ability to handle 150-million-degree plasma and generate 1.1GW of fusion power for 400MW of net electricity.

Records are being broken routinely, at JET in the UK, at the National Ignition Facility in the US, at facilities in China and France. And AI is accelerating the engineering: Proxima’s entire reactor design depends on AI-optimised magnet shapes so intricate that only machine learning can navigate the design space.

What to do with this

Commercial fusion power is still most credibly projected for the 2040s. The engineering challenges ahead are immense, but momentum is accelerating. Billions of euros, dollars and pounds are flowing into the sector from investors who now believe this is real. Prototypes are being built. Grid applications are being filed while the physics is being validated.

For an industry that will be legally required to burn highly expensive synthetic fuel, an energy source that could make it affordable has moved from the edge of the frame to the centre.

The lesson for aviation? Plan for fission today, especially the Small Modular Reactors that could be sited near SAF plants or airports. But start planning for fusion too, which could well arrive several years before the 2050 net zero target date.

Industry Updates

• We must demonstrate progress is being made towards achieving climate goals, says ICAO chief - GreenAir News

ICAO has called for immediate global action to accelerate progress towards net zero by 2050, announcing enhanced cooperation with IATA on tracking sustainable aviation fuel deployment.

• Why geopolitics has strengthened the case for sustainable aviation fuels - World Economic Forum

The Iran war has exposed critical vulnerabilities in global jet fuel supply chains, strengthening the strategic case for scaling sustainable aviation fuels as a tool for energy security.

• Why a resilient sustainability management system is essential for airlines - IATA

Sustainability management has evolved from voluntary reporting to mandatory audit-ready compliance, with ESG frameworks now essential for airlines to manage financial and reputational risks.

• Infighting, court battles could put long-hyped air taxi breakthrough in jeopardy - CNBC

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Gatwick Airport has invested £1 million in two nature-based carbon removal projects, transforming degraded farmland into habitats that will offset residual emissions through the next decade.

Infrastructure and operational efficiencies

• Northeast Philadelphia Airport could soon run on 100% solar power - MSN

Philadelphia has approved a 1.5-megawatt solar farm to fully power Northeast Philadelphia Airport, with the city purchasing energy for 25 years at a set rate.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)

• KLM and SkyNRG begin construction of Netherlands’ first dedicated SAF production facility - FTE

KLM has marked the start of construction on the Netherlands’ first dedicated SAF facility, committing to purchase 75,000 tonnes annually from the plant beginning in 2028.

• Liquid Sun: Turning CO2 into clean aviation fuel - Renewable Matter

Liquid Sun has developed a low-temperature electrolysis technology that converts biogenic CO2 and hydrogen into eSAF, with a pilot plant now operating in Finland.

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KBR has been selected to license its PureSAF technology for a new Latvian facility expected to become the largest SAF and eSAF production plant in Northern Europe.

• ENOC Group and Allied Biofuels sign MOU to advance SAF supply cooperation - Biodiesel Magazine

ENOC has signed an MOU with Allied Biofuels to explore the offtake and distribution of SAF from a new Uzbek production facility across regional and international markets.

• How PySAF is turning bio-crude into sustainable aviation fuel - Innovation News Network

PySAF has developed a proprietary fractionation process that unlocks fast pyrolysis bio-crude as a scalable SAF feedstock, with the technology now at TRL5.

• Japan steps up efforts on cooking oil in race for sustainable aviation fuel​​ - Reuters

Japan has stepped up collection of used cooking oil for SAF production, though domestic supplies will meet only a quarter of the 2030 target even if fully captured.

• Dangote Refinery emerges as the world’s biggest jet fuel exporter, set to spend $10bn on expansion - THISDAYLIVE

Dangote has become the world’s largest single exporter of aviation fuel, shifting to max jet mode after the Iran war while planning a $10 billion expansion.

• Syntholene prepares to start operations of its geothermal eSAF demo facility - GreenAir News

Syntholene is completing construction of a geothermally-integrated eSAF demonstration facility in Iceland, with Icelandair expressing interest in a 20,000-tonne annual offtake.

• Axens and Green Sky Capital launch Africa’s first sustainable aviation fuel plant in Egypt - ChemAnalyst

Axens has partnered with Green Sky Capital to build Egypt’s first commercial-scale SAF plant, using HEFA technology to produce 200,000 tonnes annually from used cooking oil.

New technology: Electric and Hydrogen

• World-first: 100% hydrogen-powered jet engine gains full power in test - Interesting Engineering

Rolls-Royce has successfully tested a jet engine at full take-off power using 100% hydrogen, with safety expertise from the UK’s Health and Safety Executive proving critical.

• GE Aerospace completes ground test of megawatt-class hybrid electric engine system - GE Aerospace

GE Aerospace has completed ground testing of a megawatt-class hybrid electric powertrain, simulating full flight phases before planned flight tests under NASA’s EPFD project.

• Germany launches €2Bn support package for hydrogen-based sustainable aviation fuel - Fuel Cells Works

Germany has launched a public consultation on a €2 billion funding mechanism for eSAF, using a double auction model to accelerate market ramp-up of renewable kerosene.

• Full-scale Honda eVTOL demonstrator completes first flight - Aviation International News

Honda has completed the first flight of its full-scale eVTOL technology demonstrator, with a 90-second hover test marking the transition to full-scale validation.

• A £188 million UK Aerospace consortium bet on putting hydrogen flights in the sky by 2030 - Auto Nocion

The UK’s Hydrogen in Aviation Alliance has announced £188 million of member investments into hydrogen R&D, targeting small commercial hydrogen flights by 2030.

Industry Updates

• Lufthansa Passengers Offset 710,000 Tonnes of CO2 Through Climate Program - ESG Today

Lufthansa has expanded its climate protection portfolio to 14 projects, doubling the share of permanent carbon removal schemes as passenger contributions rose 20% in 2025.

• Bombardier Meets Five-year Sustainability Targets - Aviation International News

Bombardier has achieved its three foundational sustainability targets for 2025, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25% while completing a successful company turnaround.

• Gatwick Airport partners with Wildlife Trusts on £1m carbon removal initiative - Passenger Terminal Today

Gatwick Airport has invested £1 million in two nature-based carbon removal projects, transforming degraded farmland into habitats that will offset residual emissions through the next decade.

• Sustainable aviation fuel likely to miss 2030 U.S. target - Earth.com

A Washington State University study has concluded that the US is unlikely to meet its 2030 SAF production target of 3 billion gallons, citing feedstock shortages and project delays.

• Cirium’s airline emissions efficiency annual rankings highlight importance of younger fleets – GreenAir News

Scoot has been named the world’s most emissions-efficient airline in Cirium’s annual ranking, with a CO2 per available seat kilometre of just 51 grams.

• When Will Emissions From Air Travel Start to Fall? - The New York Times

Global air travel has so far avoided severe disruption from the Iran war, as oil exporters stepped up production and travellers proved willing to pay higher ticket prices.

Infrastructure and operational efficiencies

• TaxiBot electric towing deployed at Amsterdam Schiphol for more efficient and sustainable ground operations - Passenger Terminal Today

In collaboration with easyJet, airport and industry partners, Menzies Aviation has deployed TaxiBot electric towing technology at Amsterdam Schiphol, saving an average of 95kg of fuel per flight during ground operations.

• Malaysia Aviation Group reports emissions reductions fleet modernisation progress and expanded sustainability initiatives - International Airport Review

Malaysia Aviation Group has reported that fuel efficiency programmes reduced CO2 emissions by over 103,000 tonnes in 2025, alongside fleet modernisation efforts.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)

• Acelen Renewables Secures $1.5 Billion to Build Billion-Liter SAF Project in Brazil - ESG Today

Acelen Renewables has secured $1.5 billion to build a Brazilian biorefinery producing 1 billion litres of SAF and renewable diesel annually from macaúba palm oil.

• Loganair signs 15-year SAF offtake agreement with ClimaHtech Green Flight - Biomass Magazine

Loganair has signed a 15-year SAF offtake agreement with ClimaHtech Green Flight, supporting decentralised production using waste biomass near regional UK routes.

• Mexico Launches SAF Feasibility Study with ICAO Support - Mexico Business

Mexico has launched a national SAF feasibility study under ICAO’s ACT-SAF programme, forming a working group to address production capacity and regulatory challenges.

• JAL and ANA Release Second Joint Report on Sustainable Aviation Fuel - JAL Group

Japan Airlines and ANA have warned that without increased SAF production within five years, the aviation industry will fail to meet its 2050 net-zero emissions target.

• SkyNRG’s Swedish eSAF joint venture awarded €21 million state funding – GreenAir News

Project SkyKraft has been awarded €21 million by the Swedish Energy Agency to develop an eSAF facility producing 130,000 tonnes annually from renewable electricity.

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New technology: Electric and Hydrogen

• UK aerospace partners pledge £188m investment in hydrogen-powered aviation – GreenAir News

The Hydrogen in Aviation Alliance has announced £188 million of combined industry investment into hydrogen-powered aviation R&D across the UK.

• Eve completes hover & low-speed flights block, advancing eVTOL toward transition flight testing - Vertical Mag

Eve Air Mobility has completed hover and low-speed flight tests of its eVTOL engineering prototype, logging 59 flights before progressing toward transition testing.

• Electra Unveils Plan to Reshape Regional Travel With Hybrid-Electric Aircraft - Flying Mag

Electra has released a market outlook claiming its EL9 Ultra Short could replace car journeys on 2,600 US routes, saving passengers over an hour per trip.

• AeroDelft completes first hydrogen aircraft taxi test at operational Dutch airport - Aerospace Testing International

AeroDelft has conducted the first taxi tests of a hydrogen-powered aircraft at a Dutch operational airport, using gaseous hydrogen before progressing to liquid fuel.

• AutoFlight V5000 Matrix Concludes ‘Heterogeneous Three-Aircraft Formation’ Flight, Officially Kicks Off Airworthiness Certification - Yahoo

AutoFlight has successfully demonstrated a three-aircraft formation flight using its V5000 Matrix and two V2000-series eVTOL vehicles, validating coordinated operations.

• FAA selects Pivotal for eVTOL integration pilot program - Aerospace Manufacturing and Design

Pivotal has joined the Multistate Collaborative eIPP led by PennDOT, supporting the integration of light eVTOL aircraft into communities across 18 US states.

• Volocopter introduces new electric ultralight multicopter - Pilot

Volocopter has introduced the VoloXPro electric ultralight multicopter, targeting European flight training schools and the electric air taxi market for certification by year end.

Aether Fuels is a young company with a unique origin. Madigan did not arrive at sustainable fuels through a long career in energy; he started with a blank sheet of paper, chose the problem first, and built the technology around it. That problem is now one of the most pressing in aviation decarbonisation. The dominant SAF pathway today is approaching a feedstock ceiling, because of which Aether is betting instead on the waste carbon the world already produces — biogas, agricultural and wood waste, industrial off-gases, and eventually CO2 itself, should hydrogen economics improve — to address this gap.

Here are the key highlights of the conversation:

• How an electrical engineer ended up founding a SAF company (2:49)

• Four years from blank sheet to commercial plant (12:14)

• The road to commercial production by 2028 (16:29)

• What Singapore offers as an ecosystem for tough tech (24:40)

• Turning waste carbon into jet fuel: the Aurora process (31:01)

• Progress on airline offtake agreements (45:40)

• The single biggest constraint on scaling (58:20)

• Rapid Fire! (1:04:08)

Keep reading for a detailed overview of the episode.

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Why moving beyond the HEFA ceiling matters

Almost all of the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) that airlines can actually buy today is made through a single process. The HEFA route takes waste fats, oils and greases, most commonly used cooking oil, and hydrotreats them into a drop-in fuel. Even though it works well, its limitation is mathematical: there is only so much waste fat in the world, and those feedstocks are already in demand for other fuels.

That is the constraint Aether Fuels was built to address. Madigan puts the timeline plainly: “People generally say that by the time we get to 2030 and the next tranche of mandates kick in, that the current HEFA technology will not be able to keep up with the global demand.”

Waste carbon feedstocks such as CO2, biogas and biomass are abundant, but they look nothing like a jet fuel molecule; making fuel from them means synthesising it almost from scratch, which demands far more complex and expensive plants.

Aether’s argument is that this capital cost problem is solvable, and that solving it is precisely what unlocks SAF at the volumes aviation needs. It is also a contrarian bet: Aether chose to back feedstocks it judged abundant and affordable rather than wait, as many e-fuels companies have, on cheap hydrogen.

Five ways Aether Fuels is rethinking how SAF gets made

1. Starting with the problem, not the technology

Madigan’s career began far from energy. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering, and his first company, Kateeva, was an OLED display manufacturing company. When he decided in 2020 to move into climate technology, he resisted the temptation to begin with a favourite idea.

Instead, he spent close to eighteen months with incubators and investors, generating and discarding problems to solve, before settling on drop-in sustainable fuels for industries that cannot electrify. Aviation and ocean shipping fitted those constraints precisely: both are large emitters, both depend on liquid fuels, and neither can simply plug into a battery.

Only then did Madigan go looking for a technology to match it, spending close to a year studying research institutes and rival approaches before licensing the foundational process from GTI Energy near Chicago.

For a founder entering an unfamiliar field, that discipline doubled as a credibility test he had to pass with deep domain experts before they would entertain him.

2. Making a contrarian bet against cheap hydrogen

The most consequential decision Aether made early on was about what not to chase. In 2022, the highest-profile companies in synthetic fuels were building their plans around CO2 combined with hydrogen, and many were investing heavily in electrolysers. Aether looked at the same roadmaps and reached a different conclusion.

As he explains: “We actually loved the idea of e-fuel and CO2 plus hydrogen, but we just couldn’t get comfortable that the cheap hydrogen would be available.”

So Aether built its strategy around biogas, biomass and industrial off-gases, while keeping its technology capable of handling CO2 and hydrogen should the economics improve. Madigan calls this being feedstock flexible. At the time it was an unpopular stance; he argues that more companies are beginning to appreciate the value of feedstock flexibility, as the abundance and affordability of waste carbon becomes harder to ignore.

3. Its Aurora technology attacks capital cost head-on

Converting waste carbon into jet fuel is chemically demanding. Unlike used cooking oil, which already resembles a fuel molecule, a feedstock such as CO2 must be stripped of its oxygen and rebuilt into fuel. That synthesis requires complex plants, and complexity is expensive; the result, Madigan says, is an industry-wide problem of low-value feedstock paired with very high capital cost.

An electrified reactor, which uses electricity rather than burning feedstock to generate heat, improves yield relative to feedstock input by roughly 20%. At the back end, novel catalysts remove costly separation and hydrogen-recycle steps, cutting the upgrading section’s cost by roughly half again.

Taken together, these innovations are designed to reduce capital cost and raise yield at the same time. That combination is what makes smaller, waste-fed plants commercially viable, and, in Madigan’s view, potentially undercut HEFA over time.

4. Choosing Singapore as the place to scale tough tech

Aether’s first commercial plant, Project Beacon, will not be built in the United States, where its pilot and demonstration lines are situated. It will be in Singapore, and the choice reveals a great deal about how Madigan thinks about scaling hardware.

Building a commercial facility means securing infrastructure, utilities, partners and policy support all at once. In Singapore, Aether found a partner in Aster, which had recently bought a world-scale refinery previously run by Shell and had spare space within it. The deal moved quickly; Madigan says it took only about ten weeks from the first serious meeting to a yes. Helping it along were Aether’s existing ties to Temasek, the Singapore sovereign wealth fund behind its anchor investor, Xora.

“If you build the relationship and partnership there and demonstrate your commitment to Singapore, they support you,” he says. The result is Project Beacon, a 2,000-tonne-per-year plant due to begin operating in 2028, and a model Madigan believes other countries trying to seed tough tech industries could study.

5. Refusing to sign offtakes for plants that do not exist

For a pre-revenue company, signing offtake agreements with airlines is tempting, since it signals demand and reassures investors. Aether has largely declined to do so, and Madigan is candid that investors have pushed back.

Aether has two public memoranda of understanding, with JetBlue and Singapore Airlines, and has opened conversations with around ten airlines; it intends to hold serious offtake discussions only once it can bring concrete, costed projects to the table.

Madigan says the airlines themselves appear to appreciate the restraint. It also points to what he sees as the real long-term bottleneck. That caution reflects the realities of scaling physical infrastructure. Madigan notes that Aether spent roughly four years moving from concept to a one-barrel-per-day demonstration plant in North Carolina, a pace he argues is actually fast for industrial hardware. “Hardware takes a long time,” he says, contrasting the timelines of fuels infrastructure with software startups.

The constraint on scaling, in his view, is not the chemistry; it is moving projects through engineering and financing to a final investment decision, a process where, by his estimate, many projects ultimately fail simply because they cannot attract enough interest to get funded.

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Industry Updates

• Report: Sustainable aviation fuel has benefits beyond just environmental - AIN

Rising oil prices have highlighted that sustainable aviation fuel offers energy security as well as environmental benefits, though feedstocks for cheaper HEFA production will soon prove insufficient.

• Sweden proposes national action plan for sustainable aviation and maritime fuels - White & Case

A Swedish inquiry has concluded that EU production capacity cannot meet mandated SAF targets, recommending investment support and a national risk-sharing mechanism to boost domestic output.

• Dubai, London Heathrow and Los Angeles airports produce three times more emissions than the city of Paris - Sustainability Online

Three major airports have been found to produce three times more emissions than Paris annually, with 100 airports responsible for two-thirds of global passenger flight CO2.

• Wizz Air reveals alarming gaps in passenger awareness as aviation’s net zero race enters critical phase - Travel and Tour World

A Wizz Air survey has revealed that most travellers remain unaware of sustainable aviation fuel, while overestimating aviation’s emissions share by nearly eight times.

• Boeing buys 20,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal as aviation faces net-zero pressure - Carbon Credits

Boeing has secured 20,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal through a new agreement with Supercritical, following a rigorous 118-point evaluation that reflects a broader shift toward higher-quality voluntary carbon credits.

Infrastructure and operational efficiencies

• Menzies Aviation hits 25% electric ground support equipment target - Passenger Terminal Today

Menzies Aviation has achieved its global target of 25% electric ground support equipment following a $200m investment, with European operations now leading the transition.

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Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)

• Germany commits €350 million to sustainable aviation fuel project - AIN

Germany has awarded €350 million to build a power-to-liquid eSAF facility in Schwedt, which will produce 30,000 tonnes annually and meet a quarter of the country’s blending obligation.

• LanzaTech chooses Ghent for Europe’s first commercial alcohol-to-jet fuel facility - Yahoo

LanzaTech has selected North Sea Port in Ghent for Europe’s first commercial-scale alcohol-to-jet SAF plant, with front-end engineering and design work largely complete.

• Aether Fuels and FlyORO sign SAF supply-chain MOU - Fuel Cells Works

FlyORO and Aether Fuels have signed an MOU to explore SAF supply-chain collaboration in Singapore, pairing next-generation production with modular blending technology.

• DHL signs 10-Year sustainable aviation fuel supply deal with Dubai-based SAF One - ESG Today

DHL Express has signed a ten-year agreement for 250,000 metric tonnes of SAF from Bahrain, marking the logistics giant’s first offtake deal in the Middle East.

• Vietnam’s BSR, Germany’s GIZ to develop SAF pilot plant using power-to-liquid tech - S&P Global

Vietnam has moved into synthetic fuel production for the first time, with Binh Son Refinery signing a deal to develop a power-to-liquid pilot plant for e-SAF and green methanol.

• SWISS signs with methanol-to-SAF developer Metafuels in drive to access synthetic aviation fuels - GreenAir News

SWISS has partnered with Zurich-based Metafuels to bring synthetic SAF to market, securing early access to fuels produced from green methanol via the aerobrew process.

New technology: Electric and Hydrogen

• Archer becomes first eVTOL company to clear FAA Phase 3 - Yahoo

Archer has become the first eVTOL company to close Phase 3 of the FAA’s type certification process for Midnight, with US commercial operations expected to begin this year.

• BETA Technologies reports progress on electric aircraft certification - WCAX

BETA Technologies has reported a $3.9 billion aircraft backlog after securing seven of eight FAA programmes, while surpassing 85,000 hours of engine testing.

• Tohoku Air Service signs LOI for SkyDrive eVTOL - Vertical Mag

SkyDrive has signed its first agreement with a Japanese helicopter operator, with Tohoku Air Service committing to purchase one eVTOL aircraft for delivery in 2028.

• Hyundai partners with Korea Aerospace Industries (KAI) to reactivate Supernal - AeroTime

Supernal has resumed work on its eVTOL programme after striking a partnership with Korea Aerospace Industries, reversing its September 2025 suspension of the project.

• AIRO unveils autonomous hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft at XPONENTIAL 2026 - UST

AIRO Group has unveiled a full-scale autonomous hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft, with first flight expected by the end of 2026 and commercial deployment targeted for 2027.

• Canadian firm claims ‘world first’ hydrogen-powered helicopter flight - Gasworld

Unither Bioélectronique has claimed the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell-powered helicopter flight, using a modified Robinson R44 to complete a full airport traffic circuit.

• DARPA demonstrates experimental hybrid-electric propulsion UAV - Janes

DARPA has announced the first flight of its experimental hybrid-electric XRQ-73 unmanned aerial vehicle, conducted at Edwards Air Force Base in April 2026.

• World’s largest solar-powered aircraft crashes after losing power - Popular Science

The groundbreaking Solar Impulse 2 solar-powered plane has crashed into the Gulf of Mexico during an autonomous test flight, bringing an untimely end to the inspirational aircraft.

Abra Group is the parent company of Avianca, the largest airline in Colombia and Central America, and GOL, one of Brazil’s leading carriers. Across those operations, Whittaker is trying to reconcile two competing pressures: expanding air connectivity in a region that still depends heavily on aviation infrastructure, while reducing the emissions associated with that growth.

Here are the key highlights of the conversation:

• Why Latin America cannot follow Europe’s sustainability playbook (6:50)

• Fleet renewal and operational efficiency (10:01)

• Building sustainability governance across Avianca and GOL (12:59)

• A cross-border compliance book-and-claim mechanism (18:21)

• Brazil’s SAF mandate: 1% in 2026, rising to 10% by 2037 (29:05)

• Revenue certainty mechanisms and double-auction systems (32:31)

• Educating stakeholders on Latin America’s unique constraints (35:28)

• Agriculture, soil health and systems-level thinking (42:36)

• Rapid Fire! (45:06)

Keep reading for a detailed overview of the episode.

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Why Latin America’s aviation challenge is fundamentally different

The conversation around sustainable aviation tends to be dominated by European mandates, American tax incentives, and markets where passengers can afford to factor sustainability into their travelling costs. Latin America approaches the challenge from a very different starting point, and Whittaker is candid about why.

Aviation in Latin America is an essential infrastructure. In many cases, flying is the only practical way to connect cities, economies and communities as there’s no rail alternative, and the roads don’t always exist either.

For example, Avianca connects Medellín and Bogotá on a 35-minute flight. The road alternative runs through high-altitude mountain terrain prone to landslides. GOL connects São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro along a corridor where, as Whittaker puts it, “you would need to build a tunnel twice the length of a Eurostar” to create a rail alternative underground.

This makes the cost consequences of decarbonisation as much a social and political question as a commercial one. With nearly 56% of Latin American flights operating through congested airports, Whittaker says there are still significant efficiency gains available through collaboration with governments and air traffic control authorities. But on SAF, the economics remain difficult: the fuel can still cost two to three times as much as conventional jet fuel, while abatement costs sit at roughly $400 to $500 per tonne of CO2.

At those levels, the cost of compliance could fall heavily on passengers who are already highly price-sensitive. Abra’s focus instead is on financing mechanisms that distribute the cost more equitably and reflect the development realities of the countries involved.

Four takeaways from the conversation

1. Balancing growth with sustainability

For Abra, credibility on long-term climate commitments starts with operational performance. Avianca was recognised by Cirium as a world leader in reducing emissions intensity while growing: between 2019 and 2024, the airline expanded by more than 18% while cutting its emissions intensity by nearly 20%.

Abra also holds the largest aircraft order book in the Latin American region over the next five years, and fleet modernisation is expected to remain the company’s primary source of emissions reductions in the near term.

2. A cross-border compliance book-and-claim model for SAF

Abra has proposed a novel cross-border SAF compliance book-and-claim mechanism, built around Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which the airline group also presented at COP30.

The problem it seeks to address is structural: Brazil has the potential to produce high-quality SAF from sugarcane-derived feedstocks with stronger production economics than many developed markets, but domestic demand alone may not be sufficient to support large-scale investment. Japan, meanwhile, needs SAF to meet its own decarbonisation requirements but faces tighter domestic production constraints.

Abra has partnered with Sumitomo Corporation do Brasil to implement the book-and-claim mechanism. Under the proposed mechanism, Sumitomo will produce SAF which can be used on domestic routes. Japanese entities could then purchase the associated SAF certificates through the Article 6 framework. In effect, Japan would absorb the green premium that would otherwise fall on Brazilian passengers.

The structure also helps create a bankable demand that SAF projects need to reach final investment decision, says Whittaker. She believes this model could support SAF scale-up not just in Brazil, but potentially across other emerging markets as well.

3. Why Europe’s SAF playbook cannot simply be replicated in Latin America

Brazil’s SAF mandate begins with a 1% emissions reduction requirement in 2026 and gradually increases to 10% by 2037. The policy is intended to stimulate a domestic SAF industry by leveraging the country’s biofuels and ethanol ecosystem.

While Brazil’s SAF policy is aimed at building domestic production that could eventually supply both local airlines and international markets, Whittaker argues that without stronger financial support mechanisms, the immediate cost of scaling that industry could fall on domestic travellers.

Abra’s response is to focus on financing structures that reduce the immediate burden on airlines and passengers during the industry’s early years. One proposal under discussion is a multilateral revenue certainty mechanism for Brazil, inspired in part by the UK’s revenue certainty model. The idea is to distribute the early-stage cost across producers, government, airlines and multilateral institutions while giving SAF developers enough long-term certainty to secure financing.

Whittaker also points to the potential role of double-auction systems now emerging in Europe. Under that structure, governments would take on the long-term contractual risk needed to support SAF production, while airlines would purchase fuel over shorter operating horizons.

Whittaker argues that Latin America’s transition towards SAF needs to be fundamentally different from Europe’s. Policies have to account for the region’s lower purchasing power, different infrastructure constraints and aviation systems that still depend heavily on affordable connectivity.

4. Looking beyond carbon intensity

One of the more nuanced parts of Whittaker’s argument is that SAF policy cannot be judged on carbon accounting alone. Feedstock decisions also intersect with water availability, land use, biodiversity and agricultural systems that are already under pressure. That is particularly relevant for Brazil’s sugarcane-based SAF ambitions.

Whittaker argues that sustainability standards and certification frameworks need to account for broader system-level impacts rather than focusing narrowly on emissions reductions at the individual project level.

“We need to be extremely careful and conscious that the solutions we’re bringing are net positive in all dimensions,” she says.

Central to Abra’s strategy is the belief that aviation decarbonisation in Latin America cannot be viewed in isolation from the region’s wider economic and environmental realities. The issue is not only how to reduce aviation emissions, but also how those reductions are achieved, who pays for them and the consequential trade-offs that emerge elsewhere in the system.

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Our new book Sustainability in the Air: Volume Two is now available for purchase on Amazon. Learn more about the startups, strategists, and sceptics working to close the gap between growth and green ambition.

‘Sustainability in the Air’ is the world’s leading podcast dedicated to sustainable aviation. Through in-depth conversations with top aviation leaders, we break through the clutter and provide a clear roadmap for a net-zero future.

• Peter Waweru’s company Mobimart spent years supplying Kenyan oilseeds to Italian energy major Eni, which refined them into SAF in Sicily before shipping the finished fuel back to Kenya at six times the cost. When Kenya Airways asked Eni to build a SAF plant in Kenya instead, Eni declined. So the airline turned to Waweru instead.

• That’s the origin of Bleriot Group, which is now developing Kenya’s first domestic SAF production capability using the HEFA pathway, with Kenya Airways as its anchor customer.

• Waweru’s feedstock strategy is built around farmer economics. It includes the African spider plant, cotton seed, and croton from existing forests.

• Instead of a $500 million conventional refinery, Bleriot is developing small units costing $5 million each, producing 10 tonnes of SAF per day. The target is 10 units by 2030. The technology has also attracted interest from smaller European airlines that can’t access SAF through existing supply chains.

• Bleriot will start with biodiesel for road transport, where the economics are already compelling, then scale into SAF. This mirrors the route Brazil used to build its biofuels industry over five decades.

• The technology and feedstock is in hand, a bigger challenge will be to fund large-scale energy agriculture on arid and semi-arid land, which requires development finance that commercial capital alone won’t provide.

For several years, Peter Waweru’s company Mobimart International did what many African commodity businesses do. It aggregated oilseeds across Kenya’s arid counties, crushed them at facilities in Kwale, and shipped the crude vegetable oil to Europe for refining.

The principal buyer was Eni, the Italian energy major, which sent the oil to its biorefinery in Gela, Sicily. There, among other products, it was converted into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

Some of that was shipped back to Kenya.

In 2023, when Kenya Airways operated its first SAF-powered long-haul flight, the first by any African carrier, the fuel had been refined by Eni in Italy. But the feedstocks came from Kenya. By the time the finished product returned to Nairobi, the cost represented a six fold premium over standard Jet A.

It was, as Wakina Mutembei of Kenya Airways later described at the SAF Investor London conference, one of the absurdities of the current SAF market.

This led to a conversation between Peter Waweru and the airline.

Before coming to Waweru, Eni had been asked the same question. Could they build a local SAF plant in Kenya?

Waweru says the energy giant declined. “They would never build that.”

The reason is structural, and is based on a business model designed to move raw materials in one direction: from countries like Kenya to the company’s multi-billion dollar European refining infrastructure. (Note: Eni’s Kenyan biofuel operations have also recently faced scrutiny over its smallholder farming programme, though the company says it complies with EU laws.)

What followed was the formation of Bleriot Group, with Waweru as Group Chairman providing the feedstock expertise, land access, and government relationships, and Serguei Poppeleer as CEO bringing the fuel production and chemical engineering capability.

The ambition was to build Kenya’s, and potentially Africa’s, first domestically produced end to end SAF supply chain.

The feedstock: designed around farmer economics

Instead of the conversion technology, Waweru’s SAF model starts with the farmer. His view is that unless smallholders on arid Kenyan land see immediate returns, no refinery technology will create a sustainable supply chain.

As a result, his feedstock portfolio is sequenced by how quickly different crops generate returns:

1. African spider plant: food first, fuel second

The shortest-cycle crop in Bleriot’s portfolio rarely features in global SAF discussions.

African spider plant (Cleome gynandra), indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, is widely eaten as a leafy vegetable. The edible leaves can be harvested within weeks, giving the farmer early food and income. The seeds, which mature later once the pods have dried, contain 17-19% oil. That’s modest by oilseed standards, but the food comes first and the fuel feedstock is a by-product. That then builds into a wider feedstock strategy.

2. Cotton seed: the industrial-scale play

Waweru’s longer-term top pick for SAF feedstock at volume is cotton seed. Kenya’s cotton industry once operated at significant capacity but today functions at roughly 10% of its 1970s levels.

The infrastructure such as gins, cooperatives, extension programmes, still exists in skeletal form. Kenyan President William Ruto is already pushing for a cotton revival. And the economics have a structural advantage: the oilseed component represents approximately 60% of the cotton boll, and in Kenya, cotton seed oil is not edible. Before biofuels, there was simply no market for it.

3. Croton: the carbon play

Then there is croton, a species that already exists in Kenyan forests whose seeds can be collected without new planting. Its role in Waweru’s model is about carbon sequestration as well as oil supply.

And the food-versus-fuel safeguards?

Waweru emphasises crops that serve both food and fuel purposes simultaneously (e.g. African spider plant), as well as a heavy reliance on arid and semi-arid land where there is no competition with food production. In addition, he points to species like castor that rehabilitate degraded former mining land by detoxifying the soil until it can revert to agricultural use. He further proposes a policy principle whereby no more than 10% of any individual farmer’s land should be allocated to fuel crops.

Small modular reactors: $5 million versus $500 million

The conversion technology itself centres on what Waweru calls small modular reactors (SMR)*.

*Note: he does not mean this in the nuclear energy sense where the term ‘SMR’ is commonly used, but in compact HEFA processing units capable of producing up to 10 metric tonnes of SAF per day.

A single SMR unit will cost approximately $5 million. Compare this to a conventional SAF refinery (Waweru cited Topsoe’s plant in Rotterdam as an example) which runs to $2 billion. Even a more modest facility requires $500 million or more.

His target is initially 10 units by 2030, producing a combined 100 metric tonnes per day or roughly 36,500 tonnes per year. Bleriot has identified two potential manufacturers, one in China and one in South Africa, and is working to bring the first units to deployment.

Units can be sited near airport fuel infrastructure, reducing the need for a SAF blending and pipeline network that Kenya currently lacks entirely. Or they can be placed near feedstock production areas, minimising the logistics cost of transporting raw materials. The decision, Waweru says, will be situational.

Waweru even sees a technological export opportunity. Smaller European airlines, he argues, are struggling to access SAF through the existing supply chains, which are dominated by partnerships between major refiners (Topsoe, Neste) and oil marketing companies supplying the continent’s larger carriers. Regional airlines face mandates but have a narrower route to compliance.

So his proposition is as follows: Use African-developed feedstock, processed through modular technology, deployed at or near the airports where smaller carriers need it.

Road transport first, then aviation: the Brazilian model

Kenya’s new petroleum legislation is expected to mandate a 20% biodiesel blend for road transport. The economics make sense: diesel in Kenya currently costs 206 Kenyan shillings per litre (~$1.60), while the cost of producing biodiesel is around 140 shillings (~$1.08), leaving a margin of approximately 65 shillings (~$0.50) per litre.

“It’s tempting, it’s juicy,” Waweru says. “So we grab the low-hanging fruit first, because we have energy deficiency and energy insecurity in road transport. And it’s for real.”

The feedstock for biodiesel and SAF is the same. Only the processing differs, with biodiesel using the fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) route, while SAF requires the additional step of hydroprocessing via the HEFA pathway. Road transport builds the farmer supply chains, stabilises Bleriot’s revenue, and creates the feedstock volumes that make the jump to SAF economically viable.

This is in fact the model Brazil has been using.

Brazil is the world’s second-largest ethanol producer and third-largest biodiesel producer, built over decades of supportive policy and a vast agricultural sector. Its road transport biofuels industry, which is anchored by sugarcane ethanol and soybean biodiesel, created the feedstock supply chains, farmer participation, and processing infrastructure that are now being leveraged for aviation fuel.

Brazil’s Fuel of the Future law, enacted in 2024, established progressive SAF mandates starting at a 1% emissions reduction, rising to 10% by 2037. According to BloombergNEF, announced projects could bring Brazil’s SAF production capacity to roughly 700 million litres by 2030. Critically, the two most promising Brazilian SAF pathways, HEFA from soybean oil and alcohol-to-jet (AtJ) from sugarcane ethanol, are both built on feedstock supply chains that existed at industrial scale because of the road transport market.

A B10 biodiesel mandate in Kenya, Waweru estimates, would require nearly one million acres of dedicated biofuel crop production, creating eight to ten million jobs across farming, logistics, and processing. At that scale, feedstock prices fall, supply chains mature, and SAF production becomes commercially viable rather than aspirational.

AFRY reports that HEFA SAF production in Brazil could be 10% cheaper than in Central Europe, driven by large quantities of soybean production and its lower land and labour costs. Kenya’s numbers are smaller and its infrastructure more nascent. But the model of abundant land and feedstock is the same.

Why bio-SAF, not e-fuels

One pathway Waweru rules out is power-to-liquid e-fuels, for economic and social reasons.

He is not the only African SAF developer to reach this conclusion. In our recent feature on Sunbird Group’s cassava-to-SAF project in Ethiopia, founder Richard Bennett made a similar argument in choosing the AtJ pathway partly because the agricultural model creates thousands of smallholder farming livelihoods.

E-fuels may well be the right answer for the Gulf states, where cheap solar energy, port infrastructure, and smaller populations make capital-intensive, low-employment industrial projects viable.

But African developers are working with abundant land, feedstock, and large rural populations that need agricultural employment. A biofuel supply chain built around smallholder agriculture creates economic participation at scale.

The road ahead

Bleriot is currently at the bench and laboratory stage. Through partnerships with the University of Nairobi and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, the company has developed proprietary HEFA processing IP and produced SAF tested to ASTM D7566 standards.

SAF produced by Bleriot was used to fuel Kenya Airways demonstration flights in October 2025, including four return services from Nairobi to Paris, Amsterdam, London, and Cape Town using a 2% SAF blend.

Now comes the jump to commercial production. A second-generation reactor is now under development, and Bleriot has identified SMR manufacturers. Securing the necessary capital will require support from development finance institutions, as Waweru argues that commercial investors alone are unlikely to absorb the combined agricultural and technology risks at this stage.

While the financing question is real, the broader picture looks more encouraging:

• A supportive government: The policy environment is moving in the right direction. Kenya’s technical committee on SAF comprising the Civil Aviation Authority, Kenya Pipeline Company, and producers including Bleriot, is actively working toward a blending mandate. Waweru sits on that committee. The backdrop is a government that understands what domestic biofuel production could mean for energy security and employment.

• Physical fuel, not certificates: Waweru sees himself as building a fuel and not a certificates business. Unlike other producers, the strategy does not rest on book-and-claim. Instead, Bleriot will produce the SAF, supply it to Kenya Airways, and let them on-sell to partners, in particular drawing on their SkyTeam relationships.

• A model that scales: Looking at the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), countries like Ethiopia and Mozambique could contribute feedstock to centralised processing in Kenya. But the SMR technology is designed to be deployed anywhere. If a $5 million modular unit can produce 10 tonnes of SAF per day from locally grown oilseeds, there is no reason it couldn’t operate at an airport in Addis Ababa, Maputo, or Dar es Salaam just as well as in Nairobi.

Whether Bleriot reaches 100 tonnes per day by 2030 remains to be seen. But the logic that Africa should process its own feedstock rather than export it, is becoming harder to argue against.

Industry Updates

• Oil crisis could boost struggling sustainable aviation fuel industry - Climate Change News

Rocketing oil prices due to the Strait of Hormuz closure have narrowed the cost gap for sustainable aviation fuel, potentially boosting demand for greener alternatives despite ongoing supply challenges.

• EU releases NEATS platform to track aviation’s full climate impact - Open Access

An upgraded EU tracking system has been launched to monitor aviation’s non-CO2 effects, such as contrails, alongside carbon emissions, streamlining reporting for airlines and supporting climate policy.

• European aviation non-CO2 research report highlights uncertainties and knowledge gaps - GreenAir News

A new expert report has highlighted significant scientific uncertainties around non-CO2 aviation effects, warning that mitigation strategies remain complex due to knowledge gaps and trade-offs.

• EU court set to rule on business aviation’s sustainability status - AIN

Business aviation has challenged its exclusion from the EU’s green investment taxonomy, arguing the Commission’s reasoning is discriminatory and threatens decarbonisation funding for the sector.

• United bet $1 billion on air taxis, now Scott Kirby says they should not fly near major airports - View from the Wing

United Airlines has reversed its support for eVTOL air taxis at crowded hubs following a fatal collision, though political shifts and safety concerns appear more influential than airspace congestion figures.

• Scandinavian Airlines warns Europe risks future fuel shock without e‑SAF drive - AeroTime

SAS has warned that Europe is heading for a structural e-SAF shortage as mandates loom, risking higher fares and energy vulnerability without immediate investment in production facilities.

Infrastructure and operational efficiencies

• El Paso Airport completes major solar canopies for sustainability - KTSM

El Paso Airport has completed two major solar canopy projects, generating 2.9 megawatts of power to offset 22% of its annual electricity use without relying on local taxes.

• New building dedicated to aircraft and ground vehicle electrification opens in Endicott - BAE Systems

BAE Systems has opened a major expansion of its New York campus to develop high-voltage energy storage for hybrid and electric aircraft, boosting manufacturing capacity for cleaner propulsion.

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Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)

• Captura wins supplier deal for eSAF plant in France using ocean-captured CO2 - Carbon Herald

A California-based company has been selected to supply ocean-captured CO2 for a French e-SAF plant, which will produce 75,000 tonnes of fuel annually with an 90% emission reduction.

• Clean Planet’s non-recyclable plastics to SAF pilot facility opens in the UK - GreenAir News

A first-of-its-kind UK pilot facility has opened in Kent, converting non-recyclable waste plastics into sustainable aviation fuel using a patented process that cuts lifecycle emissions by over 70%.

• Hong Kong and Dongguan launch HK$10 billion sustainable aviation fuel project - Macao News

Hong Kong and Dongguan have partnered on a HK$10 billion biofuel base to produce 450,000 tonnes of SAF annually from waste cooking oil, strengthening the Greater Bay Area’s green aviation chain.

• Sasol achieves sustainability certification for renewable diesel, SAF - Biodiesel Magazine

Sasol has achieved Africa’s first ISCC+ certification for SAF and renewable diesel production at its Natref refinery, marking a major shift from ambition to delivery in sustainable fuels.

• International collaboration formed to develop ethanol and SAF project in Uzbekistan - GreenAir News

An international consortium has signed a deal to build Uzbekistan’s first ethanol-to-SAF plant, converting industrial off-gases into 80,000 tons of fuel per year using LanzaTech’s technology.

• Qatar backs sustainable jet fuel project in Egypt - Yahoo

QNB Group has agreed to finance an Egyptian SAF plant capable of producing 200,000 tonnes of biofuel annually, with Shell committed to buying its entire output once operational.

• GPS Renewables launches India’s first ethanol-to-jet SAF project - Manufacturing Today

GPS Renewables has been awarded the contract for India’s first ethanol-to-jet SAF plant at NTPC Green Energy Limited’s Green Hydrogen Hub, which is designed to produce 1,800 tonnes per year using Lummus Technology’s licensed process.

New technology: Electric and Hydrogen

• Hydrogen aircraft to enter service by 2030 - Fuel Cells Works

H2Fly’s co-founder has predicted that hydrogen-electric propulsion systems of up to 500 kilowatts could enter production by 2030, though financial market stability remains critical for investment.

• Joby flies electric air taxi from JFK to Manhattan in seven minutes as FAA certification nears - TNW

Joby Aviation has completed New York City’s first point-to-point eVTOL demonstration flights, flying from JFK to Midtown in seven minutes, though the economics of air taxi travel remain unproven.

• easyJet and Rolls-Royce successfully test hydrogen powered aircraft engine - AvioRadar

easyJet and Rolls-Royce have successfully tested a modern aircraft engine running on 100% hydrogen at full take-off power, marking a significant step towards zero-emission narrowbody propulsion.

• Hydrogen Utopia unveils Fortress Fuel project launch - Fuel Cells Works

Hydrogen Utopia International has launched Project Fortress Fuel to convert waste plastic into military-grade JP-8 fuel at forward bases, reducing reliance on vulnerable supply chains.

• AltoVolo gets a prototype of its spicy high-performance eVTOL in the air - New Atlas

AltoVolo has flown a scaled prototype of its Sigma eVTOL, which now seats two and aims for a 500-mile range, with open rotors replacing ducted fans.

• Sustaera has developed a Direct Air Capture (DAC) system that uses direct electrical heating rather than steam to release captured CO2.

• The company claims this approach can achieve three to five times lower capital costs than existing DAC technologies, with 90%+ heating efficiency compared to roughly 40% for conventional thermal systems.

• Combined with a sorbent material that costs less than $10 per kilogram (compared to thousands of dollars per kilogram for competitors), CTO Cory Sanderson says the company sees a credible path to sub-$100 per tonne carbon removal by the early 2030s.

• Sustaera plans to build a commercial pilot in North America next year, with Stripe and Shopify as early credit buyers.

• For aviation, Sustaera positions itself as a potential CO2 feedstock provider for synthetic jet fuel production, and as a source of DAC-backed carbon removal credits that offer the permanence and measurability that traditional offsets have failed to deliver

North Carolina-based Sustaera has developed a Direct Air Capture (DAC) system that it says can remove CO2 from the atmosphere at three to five times lower capital cost than existing technologies.

If those numbers hold at scale, Sustaera believes it has a path to sub-$100 per tonne carbon removal, the threshold widely regarded as the point where DAC becomes commercially viable. The company is backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the US Department of Energy, and the XPRIZE for Carbon Removal, and has existing credit contracts with Stripe and Shopify.

This comes as the wider DAC industry is under scrutiny for its cost projections. But in an interview with Sustainability in the Air, CTO and co-founder Cory Sanderson made the case that Sustaera’s advantage comes not from a single lab breakthrough, but from an engineering approach shaped by his 12 years building industrial-scale gas separation plants at carbon capture company Air Products.

“You need to go and find the market and the problem first and then develop the product and the solution that goes for that,” Sanderson said. “That’s the approach that we took.”

The electric jacket

Most solid sorbent DAC systems use steam heat to release captured CO2 from the sorbent material.

“This is almost like putting a jacket around you that has a little electric heater, and that’s just heating you,” Sanderson explained. “You’re not heating the whole home.”

In technical terms, Sustaera’s sorbent and its electrical heating element are in close contact. Power goes in, the sorbent heats up almost instantaneously, CO2 is released, and the system swings back. The surrounding gas barely rises in temperature.

Sustaera claims this approach achieves heating efficiency of 90%+ compared to around 40% for conventional thermal systems.

An important distinction: that 90% figure refers specifically to the conversion of electricity to heat at the sorbent, not to total system energy consumption per tonne of CO2.

A cheaper sorbent

The material that actually grabs CO2 from the air is often the most expensive component in a DAC system. Sustaera uses an amino acid salt, a different class of sorbent from what others in the industry employ.

The amino acid salt has the amine group that attracts CO2 at low concentrations, but it is tethered to a different chemical group that gives it greater durability, meaning it can withstand more heating cycles before degrading.

“We can get years’ worth of our sorbent in operation before we recommend refurbishing it,” Sanderson said. Refurbishment is a simple washing and recoating process using widely available materials.

The $100 question

The sub-$100 per tonne figure has been the DAC industry’s stated goal for years. Few companies in this sector have detailed a credible path to get there.

Sanderson believes Sustaera’s combination of lower capital costs, from combining the adsorption and desorption systems into a single unit, and lower operating costs from electric heating puts the company on that path.

Sanderson’s timeline is to reach sub-$100 per tonne within five years, at a scale of 50,000 to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 removal, achievable after building and iterating on a few modular units.

The behind-the-meter play

One of the more interesting elements of Sustaera’s strategy is how it plans to access cheap power.

Because the system is all-electric and can start up in minutes, it does not need baseload power. It can run on intermittent renewable energy, solar, wind, or a combination, connecting directly behind the meter at a generation site.

In the US and globally, there are massive queues for renewable energy projects waiting for grid interconnection. Those projects generate power but cannot yet sell it to the grid.

The modular design makes this work. A facility contains multiple separation units that can be turned on individually. If only a fraction of the available power is flowing, only a fraction of the units run. There is no penalty for stopping and starting.

What it means for aviation

Sustaera’s first market will be permanent carbon removal through sequestration, working with technology-agnostic project developers like Deep Sky. The company already has carbon removal credit contracts with Stripe and Shopify, and plans to build a commercial pilot in North America with operations beginning in 2027.

“We are a feedstock provider,” Sanderson said. “Anyone that’s interested, we’re happy to have those conversations.”

DAC-backed credits also offer airlines something traditional offsets have failed to deliver: permanence and measurability. Sanderson acknowledged that DAC credits will initially cost more than forestry-based offsets. But he argued the certainty is worth the premium.

“DAC is a known, measurable thing that we will be able to show and prove,” he said. “This is exactly how much was taken out.”

What to watch

Two things to watch as the company moves toward its commercial pilot.

• First, the total system energy figure. The 90%+ heating efficiency is meaningful but measures only one part of the process.

• Second, the sub-$100 pathway depends on cheap renewable power, sorbent durability over years of operation, and the modular units performing as expected in real-world conditions.

Sanderson’s industrial background, Sustaera’s engineering-first approach, and the behind-the-meter model are worth taking seriously. But the question, as always is whether the projections survive contact with reality.

The 2027 pilot will be the first genuine test.

• Ethiopia has banned petrol and diesel car imports, registered over 115,000 EVs, and is bringing Africa’s largest hydropower dam online. Now it wants to apply the same energy independence logic to aviation fuel.

• UK developer Sunbird Group, which has spent 13 years building bioenergy projects in Africa, has signed an MOU with Ethiopian government partners to produce bioethanol and then SAF via the Alcohol-to-Jet (AtJ) pathway.

• The feedstock is cassava, an industrial crop in Ethiopia that doesn’t compete with food production and works for smallholder farmers, creating thousands of rural jobs rather than a handful of plant positions.

• Sunbird’s CEO Richard Bennett estimates AtJ-produced SAF from Ethiopian cassava could undercut current HEFA prices.

• The key question is how SAF produced in Africa reaches airlines that need it. One route is export. Or, book-and-claim, where the fuel is used locally and the environmental certificates are sold to European airlines facing mandates.

As a low-income nation in the Horn of Africa, recovering from a civil conflict that ended in late 2022, with a GDP per capita of around $1,200, Ethiopia doesn’t seem like the kind of country that would feature in a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) roadmap.

But once you look at what the country actually has to offer, a different picture emerges.

First of all, Ethiopia is weaning itself off imported fossil fuels and concentrating on energy security. The import of new petrol and diesel vehicles has been banned, and over 115,000 electric vehicles are registered. At the same time, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa’s largest hydropower project, is coming online, delivering surplus renewable electricity.

The government has also been laying groundwork in road transport. Since 2008, Ethiopia has pursued an ethanol blending policy, which involves mixing home-grown ethanol into petrol to replace costly imports.

What started as a cautious E5 blend (5% ethanol) has been stepped up toward E10 and eventually E20 (10% and 20% ethanol respectively). The idea is straightforward: use Ethiopia’s existing sugar industry and, increasingly, cassava to produce domestic fuel rather than spending scarce foreign currency on imported gasoline.

Now a UK-based developer with extensive experience of working in Africa, Sunbird, wants to apply the same principle to aviation by taking an agricultural crop, fermenting it to alcohol and turning that alcohol into SAF.

Ethiopian Airlines, the largest carrier on the continent, is a consortium partner. The country’s sovereign wealth fund, Ethiopian Investment Holdings, is participating. The World Bank conducted a feasibility study in 2024 that specifically identified the AtJ pathway as the optimal SAF technology for the country. And the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) has published a national biofuel strategy.

That’s where Richard Bennett comes in.

Thirteen years building bioenergy in Africa

Richard Bennett is the founder and CEO of Sunbird Group. He’s been doing this across Africa for 13 years, which makes him one of the longest-standing operators in an African bioenergy space that people in the aviation industry are only now discovering.

His path to Africa was accidental. Working in tech and cleantech, Bennett had partnered with China New Energy, one of the largest developers of renewable fuel technology in Southeast Asia, with around 200 plants. When they tried to take that technology into Africa, they hit a fundamental problem.

“What we found when we got there is, unlike in Southeast Asia, there’s no agricultural feedstock supply chains actually in place,” Bennett says. “That then gave birth to Sunbird. In order to sell plants and develop projects, we needed to look at fully integrated feedstock-to-liquid-fuel projects, the whole value chain.”

Today, Sunbird operates a sugarcane-to-bioethanol project in Sierra Leone, acquired from Swiss oil company Addax Norix. The asset includes a 22,000-hectare agricultural estate, a 60-million-litre bioethanol distillery, and a 32 MW biomass power plant. In Zambia, the company has developed a cassava-to-ethanol project designed to supply 20% of the country’s transport fuel through an E20 blend, with a 10,000-hectare estate and a 120-million-litre biorefinery.

The model Bennett has built around these real, operational assets is now being applied to Ethiopia, at a significantly larger scale.

The Ethiopia project

An MOU was signed in October 2025, with the initial partnership involving Sunbird and the Ethiopian Mining Corporation, a state-owned enterprise that provides industrial expertise and infrastructure. Bennett says the broader consortium also involves key government ministries, Ethiopian Airlines, and Ethiopian Investment Holdings, the sovereign wealth fund.

Bennett describes the Ethiopian government as “really future-minded around the green economy. They understand the problem. They’re a fuel importer, they’ve got great underutilised agricultural land resources, and a population they aim to move beyond subsistence farming. Agri-energy is a very good proposition for them.”

The project is phased deliberately:

• Phase one targets 60-70 million litres of bioethanol, with a two-year timeline to first production.

• Phase two upgrades to SAF via the alcohol-to-jet pathway, two to three years after that.

This matters when it comes to project financing. A phased approach where the first investment generates revenue from bioethanol, which is an established commodity, before the second phase requires the larger capital commitment for SAF conversion, is a fundamentally different risk profile from a single-stage direct-to-SAF megaproject.

The feedstock that’s hardly talked about

The core feedstock is cassava, a starchy root crop grown across the tropics. Though in much of Africa it’s a food staple, in Ethiopia itself it’s classified as an industrial crop as it isn’t part of the national diet. That means scaling up cassava production for fuel doesn’t compete with food security, which has been a criticism of previous African biofuel ventures.

And unlike sugarcane, which rewards scale and typically requires plantation-style agriculture, cassava is a smallholder crop.

Bennett explains why that matters: “When you’re growing cassava, as opposed to something like sugarcane or maize, it really lends itself to the small community outgrower programmes. If you’re a one-family plot where you have a couple of hectares, you can put one hectare to use growing for us.”

That produces a model where thousands of smallholder farmers grow feedstock and earn income, without being displaced from their land or absorbed into a plantation. In Zambia, Sunbird’s programme is designed to create over 20,000 economic opportunities for small-scale farmers. The Ethiopia project would operate on a similar basis.

1. It creates broad-based rural employment rather than a few hundred plant jobs.

2. It avoids the food-versus-fuel conflict.

3. It builds agricultural supply chains in regions that need them.

4. And it generates multiple revenue streams: the ethanol itself, high-protein animal feed from processing co-products (relevant because both Ethiopia and Zambia are targeting significant expansion of their cattle herds), renewable electricity from biomass waste, and clean cooking fuel.

Bennett frames the broader pitch to development lenders as this: “This is not a biofuel project that’s going to attract loads of negative press. This is a genuine agri-energy platform that’s got multiple outputs: the fuel, the food systems going alongside it, renewable power. You’ve created a cluster, a development effect for what’s going on around the projects as well.”

The price advantage

Bennett estimates that ATJ-produced fuel from Ethiopian cassava would currently price at around 2.5 times the cost of conventional jet fuel, before the latest round of Gulf tensions pushed fossil fuel prices higher still.

But if African ATJ can deliver at the lower end of the SAF cost spectrum, how does that fuel reach the airlines that need it?

Bennett sees three routes:

1. First, domestic political will, where the Ethiopian government pays a premium because the project creates agricultural jobs and reduces fuel import dependence. Ethiopian Airlines would then voluntarily uplift SAF.

2. Second, physical export to Europe. The shipping route from Ethiopia through the Suez Canal to Southern Europe is well established.

3. Third, and potentially most transformative: book-and-claim.

Under this mechanism, the physical fuel is used in Ethiopia at Ethiopian Airlines’ Addis Ababa hub, while the environmental attributes are sold as certificates to European or UK airlines facing blending mandates. If a carrier in Frankfurt can meet its mandate obligation by purchasing a certificate from SAF produced in Addis Ababa, and that SAF costs less to produce than European alternatives, then the mandates themselves become the market that connects African production to European demand.

The Spohr question revisited

In 2023, Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr argued that SAF production would inevitably migrate away from Europe, in the same way that Jet A is currently imported into the continent. But his bet was on e-fuels from green hydrogen, not agriculture.

For Africa, Bennett argues the agricultural pathway is the one that actually works: it creates thousands of livelihoods rather than a few hundred plant jobs, it produces bioethanol as a fallback product with real domestic demand if SAF offtake is slow, and it can be built in two years with proven technology.

“Just have regional ethanol production, and then have one super SAF plant that takes all the bioethanol and upscales it to SAF closer to the airport,” he explains. “It becomes more of a regional collaboration rather than a single company trying to develop a project.”

Bennett sees the model as replicable across Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya. “The strategy for Sunbird is really to get one or two projects up and running, and then use that as an investment platform to attract wider investment into the African industry.”

The honest risks

Ethiopia is not a straightforward operating environment. The Tigray conflict ended only in late 2022. The sugar sector reform that’s supposed to free up processing capacity has been slow.

And Bennett himself describes a cautionary tale in unintended consequences:

When the Ethiopian government imposed tariffs on imported alcohol, the country’s sugar companies pivoted. As he puts it: “The sugar companies were all producing ethanol for the transport industry. And then they went and put a very big import tariff on importing alcohol. So suddenly all the sugar companies started selling it as a beverage, rather than as fuel.” The result was less ethanol reaching the fuel market, creating the very deficit Sunbird is now trying to fill.

Then there is the question of mandates. Ethiopia has an E10/E20 policy on paper, but policy and enforcement are different things. Government priorities can shift.

Finally, book-and-claim, while conceptually powerful, is not yet operational for African-produced SAF. The regulatory frameworks in the EU and UK are still being finalised, meaning this route to market for now remains hypothetical.

Why this matters beyond Africa

The assumption until now has been that that SAF production will concentrate near demand: European refineries serving European mandates, US facilities serving US tax credits.

But the economics point in a different direction. Feedstock costs, labour costs, energy costs, and construction costs are all significantly lower across the Global South than in Europe or North America.

Will it work? That depends on execution, on whether the international regulatory architecture evolves and most crucially, financing. But the components are there. And it’s another example of how the future geography of SAF production could end up looking different from what the industry currently expects.

easyJet launched its net zero roadmap in 2022 and has spent the subsequent years focused on its execution. Operating within what Ranasinghe describes as the most tightly environmentally regulated aviation market in the world, the airline is under pressure to act while continuing to grow.

Ranasinghe reflects on the airline’s progress to date, from fleet renewal and operational efficiencies to the realities of scaling sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The conversation also explores easyJet’s role in advancing hydrogen propulsion with Rolls-Royce, its partnership with JetZero, and the emerging challenge of tackling non-CO2 impacts such as contrails.

easyJet last joined the podcast in 2023, where we explored the foundations of the airline’s net zero roadmap. That conversation provides useful context for how the strategy has progressed. You can revisit it here:

Here are the key highlights of the conversation:

• From strategy to execution: what a sustainability function actually does (2:30)

• Why airlines cannot wait: regulation, markets, and licence to operate (10:21)

• How easyJet built its net zero roadmap from the ground up (12:27)

• Why airspace modernisation is lagging, and where inefficiencies actually sit (20:22)

• Balancing growth and emissions: what “decoupling” looks like in practice (22:11)

• SAF reality check: supply constraints and structural challenges (24:28)

• Hydrogen engine breakthrough with Rolls-Royce (37:19)

• JetZero and the blended wing body opportunity (39:19)

• Contrails and non-CO2: from science to operational reality (41:18)

• Rapid Fire! (56:43)

Keep reading for a detailed overview of the episode.

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From roadmap to reality: easyJet’s next phase

The aviation industry has spent much of the past decade setting targets, building roadmaps and defining pathways to net zero. easyJet is a case study in what comes next: the considerably harder work of turning those plans into operational reality.

For Ranasinghe, the change is structural. Sustainability is no longer confined to reporting or compliance. It has become a core strategic function embedded across the business, and is critical for the airline’s long-term viability. “easyJet is 30 years old. For easyJet to be around for another 30 years, we need to understand how to drive this [sustainability] transition and play a part in it,” says Ranasinghe.

At the centre of this transition is what he describes as the industry’s defining challenge:

For an airline operating across Europe, the world’s most tightly regulated aviation environment, the question is not whether to act, but how to do so without putting itself at a competitive disadvantage against carriers facing less regulatory pressure.

5 takeaways from the conversation

1. How easyJet actually built its roadmap

easyJet’s net zero roadmap was established in 2022, but Ranasinghe emphasises that it is not a static document. Instead, it is actively maintained and evolves over time, with the strategy refined each year to reflect updated assumptions, particularly around fleet deliveries and growth.

Rather than starting from an SBTi-prescribed pathway and working backwards, easyJet built its roadmap from the ground up. This meant modelling fleet retirement profiles, operational efficiency gains and realistic timelines for airspace modernisation. The SBTi pathway was then overlaid as what Ranasinghe describes as a “translator”, converting temperature targets into a metric the business can act on: “If you say you need to keep your temperature profile on a well-below-two-degrees pathway, that’s Dutch to me. The value of the SBTi pathway is that it translates that temperature requirement into a language we can understand, namely CO2 intensity.”

Ensuring that this starting point was credible mattered. Before publishing the roadmap, easyJet conducted 26 rounds of external review, engaging NGOs, scientists, policymakers, industry bodies and technical partners. The aim was to test the assumptions rigorously before committing to them publicly.

2. Fleet renewal and operational efficiency are the strongest near-term levers

easyJet’s net zero roadmap is structured across three critical areas:

• Reduce emissions where possible. This pillar covers the areas most within the airline’s direct control, including fleet renewal, operational efficiency, and airspace modernisation.

• Replace fossil fuels over time. This focuses on transitioning away from fossil fuels through SAF and, in the longer term, hydrogen.

• Remove residual emissions that cannot be eliminated, through carbon removal technologies.

Fleet renewal is where the most immediate gains are being realised. Much of this comes down to gauge. Replacing the A319s with A320neo and A321neo aircraft improves carbon intensity without requiring any change in fuel. As Ranasinghe notes, the A319 and A321neo have broadly similar absolute fuel burn, but the latter carries 79 additional passengers. The result is a materially lower emissions intensity per seat.

Operational efficiency is also outperforming initial projections, driven largely by flight operations, states Ranasinghe. These are gains within the airline’s direct control, and they are being delivered faster than originally anticipated.

Airspace modernisation, by contrast, is proving slower to unlock. The airline continues to work towards a 10% efficiency improvement by 2035, but progress has not matched the pace assumed in its roadmap. Rather than relying on system-wide reform, easyJet has analysed its own network in detail to identify specific inefficiencies and hotspots, from high-density airport profiles to indirect routings. The aim is to work directly with airports and air navigation service providers (ANSPs) to address these hotspots incrementally.

3. Why SAF markets are not yet working for airlines

easyJet operates with a fully outsourced fuelling model. The airline pays a fuel supplier to deliver compliant fuel into the aircraft, with sourcing and blending handled upstream in the supply chain. That model works for meeting mandated SAF volumes, but it limits the airline’s ability to participate directly in long-term offtake agreements independently, particularly given it does not control the infrastructure needed to blend, distribute or refuel SAF once it leaves the production site.

Ranasinghe also points to a misalignment in how the SAF market currently functions. Unlike aircraft procurement, where launch customers often benefit from lower pricing, SAF markets create the possibility of a first-mover disadvantage. As production scales and costs fall, later entrants may gain access to cheaper supply. As he puts it:

To support the development of long-term supply of SAF, easyJet has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ATOBA Energy, in partnership with World Fuel Services. The model positions ATOBA as an aggregator, offering access to a diversified pool of SAF supply with indexed pricing, rather than requiring airlines to commit to a single long-term source.

A separate approach is reflected in the airline’s partnership with Airbus. On routes such as Bristol to Toulouse, Airbus funds the purchase of physical SAF, with the emissions benefit split between the two: easyJet accounts for scope 1 reductions, while Airbus claims scope 3.

4. Hydrogen and blended wing body: the long-term bets

Alongside near-term operational measures, easyJet is investing in technologies beyond its current fleet horizon. These partnerships focus on shaping the future of aviation rather than delivering immediate impact.

easyJet’s collaboration with Rolls-Royce is aimed at a specific milestone: proving that a fully hydrogen-powered gas turbine engine could generate more than 30,000 pounds of thrust without fossil fuel. That is the level required for narrow-body commercial operations. Recently, the companies announced the successful testing of a modified Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 aircraft engine, at NASA’s Stennis Space Center. This marks a significant step in proving the viability of hydrogen in aviation.

easyJet has also partnered with US-based start up JetZero, which is developing an ultra-efficient blended-wing-body (BWB) aircraft. The design targets a 50% aerodynamic efficiency saving compared to a Boeing 767. easyJet is also part of an airline working group supporting the development of an operating model for the BWB aircraft, including how it could fit within a low-cost network.

5. Contrails cannot be solved without fixing airspace

Ranasinghe believes contrails are an important issue for the industry to address, and one where there is an opportunity to act proactively. At a global level, he notes, there is no real debate that contrails contribute to warming.

A relatively small share of flights drives a disproportionate share of the impact: around 5% of flights are responsible for roughly 80% of contrail-related warming, as they pass through ice-supersaturated regions (ISSRs) where persistent contrails form.

In principle, the solution is straightforward: avoid those regions by flying above, below or around them. In practice, the challenge is far more complex: it depends on predictive models that are accurate enough to identify ISSRs in advance and reliable enough to be integrated into flight planning and operations.

Crucially, he describes contrails as a system-level issue rather than something individual airlines can solve on their own. The impact of contrails is linked to specific blocks of airspace at particular moments in time, affecting all aircraft passing through them. That means any meaningful solution has to involve ANSPs, not just changes to individual flight paths. In his view, this ties contrail avoidance directly to airspace reform, and the two need to be pursued together, not in parallel silos.

The transition to net zero in aviation will not be defined by a single breakthrough, but by how airlines manage competing constraints over time. easyJet’s roadmap offers a grounded view of that reality. Progress will depend as much on systems and markets as on technology.

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• Cameroon has been identified by ICAO as one of seven strategic gateway countries for SAF development in Africa, with a national feasibility study now underway.

• WESAF Energy Solutions is developing a vertically integrated sugarcane-to-ethanol project on 322 hectares, with SAF as its highest-value end market and a total capex of $38 million.

• The project includes captive solar power and bagasse cogeneration. This is essential in a region where the electricity grid doesn’t reach the site.

• A clean cooking programme using 5-10% of ethanol output, plus free surplus solar power for local schools and hospitals, could become a template for how SAF projects in Africa deliver local value to succeed.

• Central thesis: Cameroon’s position as the largest economy in the six-nation CEMAC bloc makes it a natural launchpad for regional SAF production. The key to realising that will be the successful execution of initiatives such as the WESAF sugarcane project.

At the SAF Investor London conference earlier this year, Wakina Mutembei of Kenya Airways told a story that captures one of the absurdities of the current SAF market. When the airline operated its first SAF-powered long-haul flight in 2023, the fuel had been refined in Italy. But the feedstocks used in it had actually originated in Kenya. The fuel was then shipped back and sold to Kenya Airways at seven times the cost of Jet A.

One of those developers is Marvin Tabi of WESAF Energy Solutions. He’s building a sugarcane-to-ethanol project in Cameroon, with SAF as its primary high-value market. In a conversation with Sustainability in the Air, Tabi laid out a vision that offers a window into what SAF development in Africa might actually look like over the coming decade.

From Aberdeen to the World Cup to Cameroon

Tabi originally studied oil and gas in Aberdeen, where his postgraduate project focused on decentralised energy systems for Africa and the developing world. He worked briefly in the oil industry, but the turning point came during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

“That’s when it really hit home,” he says. “All they were saying to me was, this is what you guys need to be doing in Africa.” Brazil’s ethanol industry, built on sugarcane and now deeply integrated into its transport infrastructure, offered a proof point. The feedstock was familiar. The technology was proven. The development impact was visible. It was, as Tabi puts it, “a no-brainer from there.”

He is Cameroonian, which explains the location. But there are strategic reasons too. Cameroon is the largest country as well as economy in the CEMAC bloc (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, Chad and the Central African Republic). The total population across all six countries is approaching 100 million. Cameroon sits five hours by air from both Dubai and mainland Europe. And, as Tabi puts it, its agricultural potential is significant.

The project: ethanol first, SAF next

“Everything grows out there,” he says. “Ridiculously fertile soils. I saw someone growing strawberries in Africa last year. I couldn’t believe it.”

The business model is layered, with ethanol production as the core; the goal is approximately 10 million gallons from the initial facility. Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is the highest-value product, and marine fuel is a secondary market. But Tabi’s starting point will be to prove the ethanol supply chain works, then upgrade to SAF once execution is demonstrated.

His target is to be operational by 2030, when mandates tighten. He believes this is realistic as the typical lead time on an ethanol refinery is around 24 months. Total capex is $38 million, covering both the power infrastructure and the ethanol refinery itself.

The ICAO connection

ICAO has identified Cameroon as one of seven strategic gateway countries for SAF development in Africa and is funding a national feasibility study. The feasibility study will identify feedstocks, assess technology options, and outline how to shape demand in a market that currently does not exist. This last point is key.

SAF in Africa doesn’t have an existing alternative fuels market to latch onto; one needs to be built from scratch. “Africa will have to re-engineer how you build demand,” he says. “Execution is key. Start with smaller volumes, prove you can do it, then scale.”

Power: the non-negotiable

Perhaps the most important practical insight from Tabi’s experience concerns electricity. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, you cannot assume the grid will support an industrial facility. In WESAF’s case, the grid simply doesn’t extend to their land.

The alternative, asking the public electricity body to extend it, is unappealing. “They’ll do it from the furthest location and charge you the most,” Tabi says. “And when they get round to doing it, it’ll be on their time.”

Instead, WESAF has designed a captive power system: 10 megawatts of solar, supplemented by cogeneration from sugarcane bagasse. This makes the facility energy-independent and insulates it from global energy price volatility. According to Tabi, “If you don’t install captive power, I wouldn’t do the project.”

Demonstrating success to the local community

This is also where WESAF’s model diverges from the typical SAF project structure.

Tabi plans to dedicate 5-10% of ethanol output to clean cooking fuel, displacing firewood and reducing deforestation. He says this is not corporate social responsibility but a way to demonstrate success and value to the community.

“It always feels like a con if you’ve got this industry in the country, and you’re producing a global product, but the average man doesn’t benefit from it. This is what has caused a lot of problems with the oil industry in a lot of African countries.”

Then there is surplus energy. Rather than attempting to sell electricity, which would create issues by competing with the energy provider, WESAF plans to install public charging points where locals can charge devices for a small fee.

For schools and hospitals, the power would be free. “I would just feel wrong to try and charge these public institutions,” Tabi says.

The economics work because SAF and ethanol revenue absorb the capex cost of the power infrastructure. The community benefits are built into the business model rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

Beyond Cameroon: the CEMAC opportunity

Tabi’s ambitions extend beyond a single site. Cameroon’s government has indicated willingness to provide further land concessions, and Tabi is looking to expand to 2,000-3,000 hectares across the country’s 10 regions with distributed feedstock production zones that all feed into central processing.

More significantly, he is in conversations with Equatorial Guinea, a neighbouring oil-rich country, about replicating the model there. The logic is that if SAF can be produced across multiple CEMAC countries, the opportunity to serve European airlines that fly into these destinations becomes substantial.

He cites a conversation with a large European leisure travel giant, whose procurement director told him directly that the airline would rather buy physical fuel than rely on book-and-claim certificates. Tabi believes that the preference for physical uplift, combined with the cost advantage of producing in Africa, suggests a genuine commercial opportunity if the production can be demonstrated.

The funding challenge

WESAF is a UK-based holding company with on-the-ground project companies, keeping financing within a jurisdiction that investors are comfortable with. Tabi is seeking $1.5 million for the clean cooking component (which also covers feed studies and early engineering) and an initial investment of around $25 million toward the total $38 million capex for power and the ethanol refinery.

But he is realistic about the challenges of raising capital for an African SAF project. Many investors are unfamiliar with the sector. Some ask questions that reveal how little they know about the continent. “People ask me, does sugarcane grow in Cameroon? I sometimes just want to say no,” he laughs.

The broader challenge affects every SAF project on the continent. AFRAA’s 2025 SAF Readiness Survey found that around 80% of African airlines have no access to SAF at their operational airports, and about 70% insist that SAF must be price-competitive with conventional jet fuel. Yet the same survey found that 92% of airlines are open to collaboration, and 84% are ready to join an AFRAA SAF Taskforce. The willingness is there. But not the infrastructure. Not yet, anyway.

The bigger picture

What Tabi is building is a proof-of-concept. If it works, it could be replicated across Central and West Africa, in countries with similar agricultural profiles and similar needs for economic development, energy access, and connection to global markets.

The potential is there. But will the global investment ecosystem recognise that the most cost-effective SAF production of the next decade may come from regions that most investors have barely considered, built by developers who know their markets intimately and are willing to start small?

As Tabi puts it: “We don’t want to pioneer, we don’t want to be the number one region everyone gets excited about. We just want to be in the game.”

Industry Updates

• India updates jet fuel regulations to allow for SAF blending - Ethanol Producer Magazine

The Indian government has amended its aviation fuel regulations to permit SAF blending, introducing targets of 1% by 2027, rising to 5% by 2030 for international flights.

• EU weighs more US jet fuel, cleaner aviation amid Iran war strains - Reuters

The European Union has promised guidance for airlines on managing fuel shortages caused by the Iran war, though no widespread cancellations have yet been reported.

• Delta reframes net-zero as an ‘aspiration,’ but denies axing 2030 SAF goal - ESG Dive

Delta Air Lines has reframed its 2050 net-zero target as an “aspiration” on its website, though a spokesperson insists it remains committed to 10% SAF usage by 2030.

• Carbonfuture signs multi-year agreement with Boeing to supply carbon removal credits - GreenAir News

Boeing has signed a multi-year agreement with Carbonfuture for at least 40,000 tonnes of carbon removals, sourced from biochar projects across the Global South.

Infrastructure and operational efficiencies

• How YVR, MUC, PIT and YEG are scaling sustainability through innovation, energy transition and collaboration - FTE

Airports including Vancouver, Munich, Pittsburgh and Edmonton have accelerated sustainability through partnerships, with YVR targeting net-zero emissions by 2030 and zero waste by 2040.

• ITA Airways to save fuel and reduce emissions in 2026 thanks to AI-powered tool - SITA

ITA Airways has used SITA’s AI-based climb optimisation to achieve substantial fuel savings, with over 7,100 tonnes of fuel and 22,100 tonnes of CO2 to be saved across 2025 and 2026.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)

• EPA approves RFS fuel pathway for Summit Next Gen - Biomass Magazine

The US EPA has approved Summit Next Gen’s fuel pathway to produce renewable diesel and SAF from undenatured sugarcane ethanol at its Texas facility.

• Shanghai Electric develops aviation fuel from waste oil, achieves global first - BioEnergy Times

Shanghai Electric has achieved a world-first by producing 100% SAF from waste oils and fats that can be used directly in aircraft engines without blending.

• Southern Energy Renewables and Axens sign MOU to advance SAF projects in Louisiana and beyond - Biomass Magazine

Southern Energy Renewables has signed an MOU with Axens to collaborate on SAF development, starting with a Louisiana biomass facility, while also creating an experimental digital token.

• South Africa’s Sasol aims for green jet fuel exports to EU - Reuters

Sasol has received German certification for its SAF produced from cooking oil, paving the way for exports to the European Union from South Africa.

• XCF Global and DevvStream combine capabilities to bring transferable 45Z clean fuel credits to market - Biomass Magazine

XCF Global and DevvStream have agreed to explore an integrated platform to generate, verify and market 45Z clean fuel production credits for SAF.

• DHL and IAG Cargo seal major multi-year SAF agreements - Biofuels International Magazine

DHL Group has expanded its SAF collaboration with IAG Cargo, enabling 240 million litres of SAF at Heathrow and reducing lifecycle emissions by 640,000 tonnes of CO2e.

New technology: Electric and Hydrogen

• World-first eVTOL transition flight for Vertical Aerospace - New Atlas

Vertical Aerospace has completed the world’s first full-scale piloted two-way eVTOL transition flight under civil aviation Design Organisation Approval oversight.

• Smartflyer and H55 advance electric aviation with first delivery of certifiable battery modules for the SFX1 aircraft - Yahoo

Smartflyer has received the first batch of Adagio battery modules from H55, enabling full system integration and testing for its SFX1 aircraft ahead of ground tests this summer.

• Positive Electron unveils updated design for all-electric E5 - FlightGlobal

Electron Aerospace has redesigned its all-electric E5 aircraft, removing the canard and switching to tractor propellers ahead of a prototype first flight targeted for 2027.

• Norway takes the next step as an international test arena with Bristow Group and Electra - Bristow

Bristow, Electra, Avinor and the Norwegian CAA have launched a second test project for zero-emission aviation, with hybrid-electric demonstrations planned from mid-2027.

• Can $400M keep Aura Aero’s hybrid-electric dreams alive? - Flying Magazine

Aura Aero has raised €50 million in Series A funding plus €120 million in subsidies, though first flight of its 19-seat hybrid-electric Era has slipped to “less than two years”.

• Dubai vertiport reaches technical completion ahead of air taxi launch - Passenger Terminal Today

A vertiport near Dubai International Airport has reached technical completion, with a planned capacity of 170,000 passengers annually and operations targeted before the end of 2026.

• The future of aviation? Why Rolls-Royce filed a patent for a hydrogen engine system - Simple Flying

Rolls-Royce has patented a new hydrogen combustion system that uses a small amount of fuel to pre-heat the rest, solving key challenges around ultra-cold liquid hydrogen storage.

• Vertical Aerospace secures $850 million financing package for Valo eVTOL - AeroTime

Vertical Aerospace has closed a financing package worth up to $850 million, providing fresh support for its Valo eVTOL program following a successful two-way transition flight.

Every year, we survey airline sustainability teams to take the pulse of where the industry actually stands. The result is our annual Sustainable Aviation Outlook report, one of the few publications grounded entirely in primary data from airlines, giving sustainability leaders an honest benchmark of industry efforts.

This Earth Day, we’re releasing the third edition of our Sustainable Aviation Outlook report, based on insights from 26 airlines across six continents.

What’s new in 2026

• A first look at how airlines are preparing for CORSIA Phase 1 compliance, and the challenges that remain

• Insights into the regulatory landscape shaping SAF, from ReFuelEU and UK mandates to regional policies

• How airlines actually plan to meet SAF requirements through 2030, from direct fuel purchases to Book and Claim, offsets, long-term agreements, and investment in production

• A new digital format, with the report also made available as a structured web experience for easier navigation

Access the full report

Five focus areas for airlines to accelerate sustainability progress

• Build CORSIA and SAF compliance infrastructure before Phase 2 extends offsetting requirements to all international flights in 2027.

• Secure diversified SAF supply through long-term offtake agreements, direct investment, and supply chain partnerships.

• Strengthen accountability by linking sustainability KPIs to executive compensation and operational targets.

• Communicate with precision to build stakeholder trust while meeting increasingly strict regulatory requirements for environmental claims.

• Collaborate at industry level on shared challenges, particularly SAF supply development and compliance standard-setting, where individual airline action has limited impact.

About the survey

SimpliFlying’s third annual Sustainable Aviation Outlook Survey was completed by 26 airlines, our largest and most geographically diverse cohort to date. Participating airlines include Emirates, All Nippon Airways, Finnair, Virgin Australia, Turkish Airlines, Lufthansa Group, and many more

The survey covered six dimensions: team structure, strategy and reporting, sustainability initiatives, sustainable aviation fuel, perception and communication, and budget and investment. Each dimension draws on three years of longitudinal data, to provide a status update and actionable recommendations for the year ahead.

Industry Updates

• Scheme launched to provide independent verification of SAF traceability in the UK – GreenAir News

The Zemo Partnership has launched a voluntary assurance scheme for SAF traceability in the UK, with Valero as the first approved supplier, enabling verified emissions claims under the UK ETS.

• UK ‘green’ jet fuel imports linked to illegal Amazon deforestation - Unearthed

A major SAF supplier to the UK has been sourcing Brazilian beef fat linked to illegal Amazon deforestation, revealing a critical traceability gap in the green fuel supply chain.

• Delta quietly removes its net-zero 2030 goal as airlines worldwide abandon climate promises - Los Angeles Times

Delta Air Lines has quietly removed its 10% SAF pledge by 2030 from its website, rephrasing its net-zero target as an “aspiration” rather than a goal.

• Scoot, Qatar, and Ryanair top Cirium global airline emissions rankings in 2025 - Cirium

Scoot has been named the world’s most emissions-efficient airline by Cirium, with low-cost carriers dominating the top rankings due to younger fleets and higher seat density.

Infrastructure and operational efficiencies

• Noida International Airport revolutionises sustainability with cold roll forming technology - Science-Environment

Noida International Airport has installed over 6,000 furniture units made using cold roll forming technology, achieving 66% recyclability and setting a new benchmark for sustainable infrastructure.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)

• EU eSAF projects stall as price forecasts fall and rules in question - S&P Global

High capital costs and a steeply falling price curve have delayed investment decisions for dozens of eSAF projects, as early movers risk becoming uncompetitive within years.

• Boeing and Norsk e-Fuel expand efforts to advance e-fuels - Boeing

Boeing has expanded its collaboration with Norsk e-Fuel to accelerate synthetic aviation fuel production, aiming to strengthen Europe’s energy resilience and reduce fossil fuel dependency.

• Metafuels secures major Dutch government grant to support eSAF project – GreenAir News

Metafuels has secured a €1.92 million Dutch government grant to advance its eSAF project in Rotterdam, targeting commercial production from 2030 using its methanol-to-jet technology.

• eFuels SEA launches platform to develop eFuels projects across Southeast Asia using Infinium technology - Morningstar

eFuels SEA has launched in Singapore to develop electrofuel projects across Southeast Asia, licensing Infinium’s technology to convert carbon dioxide and renewable power into sustainable fuels.

• DSV collaborates with Microsoft, United Airlines and Phillips 66 to unlock 11 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel - DSV

DSV has collaborated with Microsoft, United Airlines and Phillips 66 to unlock 11 million gallons of SAF, demonstrating how coordinated long-term agreements can scale the market effectively.

• DHL joins top three global SAF purchasers as it triples use of SAF in 2025 – GreenAir News

DHL used 185 kilotonnes of SAF in 2025, nearly tripling its consumption from 2024, and has signed a new five-year agreement with IAG Cargo for 240 million litres at Heathrow.

• Wisconsin enacts landmark legislation to further SAF production - NBAA

Wisconsin has signed a bill creating a manufacturing zone for SAF from woody biomass, allocating up to $120 million in tax credits for production using locally sourced forestry residues.

• SABA selects Infinium and American Airlines for next-generation SAF procurement award – GreenAir News

The Sustainable Aviation Buyers Alliance has selected Infinium’s Project Atlas to supply SAF certificates, with a planned capacity of 100,000 tonnes per year targeting 95% emissions reduction.

• California Senate subcommittee hears testimony on proposed SAF tax credit - Biodiesel Magazine

California’s Senate budget subcommittee has heard testimony on Governor Newsom’s proposed SAF tax credit, worth $1 to $2 per gallon, despite opposition from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

• Petrobas picks Honeywell technology for SAF project in Brazil - Biofuels International Magazine

Petrobras has selected Honeywell’s ethanol-to-jet technology for a new SAF project at its REPLAN refinery in São Paulo, aiming to deliver up to 10,000 barrels per day.

New technology: Electric and Hydrogen

• Beyond Aero selects Luxaviation as launch operator for hydrogen-electric aircraft - Business Airport International

Beyond Aero has appointed Luxaviation Group as the launch operator for its six-passenger hydrogen-electric business aircraft, focusing on operational readiness and certification pathways.

• Elysian Aircraft modifies design of EX9 electric regional airliner - Aviation International News

Elysian Aircraft has reduced the number of electric motors on its E9X regional airliner concept from eight to six following its conceptual design review and scaled demonstrator flights.

• BETA reaches deal for electric aircraft in Hawaii - WCAX

Beta Technologies has reached a deal to sell 25 Alia electric aircraft to Surf Air, with an option for 75 more, starting operations in Hawaii to cut fuel costs and emissions.

• South Florida “flying car” manufacturer debuts latest concept - MSN

Doroni Aerospace has debuted its luxury personal eVTOL concept, designed to seat two passengers and reach 120mph, with testing planned for 2027 and a projected price of $450,000.

• Air Products scales U.S. green hydrogen network to support transportation and industrial end-users - Energies Media

Air Products has cancelled three U.S. hydrogen projects, including a SAF expansion in California, taking a $3.1 billion charge as it narrows its focus to scalable transport and industrial infrastructure.

Montana Renewables (MRL) is an unrestricted subsidiary of Calumet, which developed the business by converting a portion of its crude oil refinery in Great Falls, Montana. The facility now processes a range of feedstocks, including used cooking oil, agricultural waste and emerging crops, into SAF, renewable diesel and renewable hydrogen.

Here are the key highlights of the conversation:

• Montana Renewables’ origin and the retrofit model (2:48)

• Scaling from 30M to 300M gallons: what it actually involves (7:54)

• The policy landscape and why private capital has withdrawn (10:05)

• Feedstock agnosticism and the camelina case (22:16)

• Why the EU’s RFNBO mandate is “preposterous” (28:54)

• The case for fuelling general aviation first (38:30)

• The SAF industry in 2035 and beyond (45:16)

• Rapid Fire! (48:31)

Keep reading for a detailed overview of the episode.

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Why parallel refinery systems matter for scaling SAF production

Much of the current momentum around SAF production has focused on new, purpose-built plants. Montana Renewables took a different route. Instead of starting from scratch, it reconfigured part of an existing refinery, and adapted established infrastructure to process renewable feedstocks.

The capital case for this approach is obvious. A retrofit costs significantly less than a greenfield build: the site, civil works, safety systems and workforce are already in place. Moreover, if a large refinery converts entirely to renewable operations, the overall transportation fuel output can fall sharply, says Fleming.

MRL avoided that trade-off by operating two distinct businesses on the same site: a conventional refinery alongside a separate renewables line, supported by a shared workforce and common operating standards.

Fleming positions MRL’s approach as a model that could be applied wherever suitable refinery infrastructure already exists:

4 ways Montana Renewables is redefining SAF production

1. The retrofit model at commercial scale

Montana Renewables operates two distinct but co-located operations at its Great Falls site: a conventional crude oil refinery and a renewables facility.

The facility is currently permitted to process about 250 million gallons of renewable feedstock annually, with plans to expand that to roughly 300 million gallons. This increase requires only a modest uptick in overall throughput, with the more meaningful change coming from optimising the product mix, explains Fleming.

With nearly four years of operating experience, the company has also identified specific constraints and bottlenecks in its process. While MRL’s current economic SAF yield is around 50 million gallons per year, it expects to increase this output by reconfiguring the process to favour SAF, rather than materially increasing total input.

“Depending on market conditions and demand, we have the flexibility to tailor the output so that up to 90% of the feedstocks come back as SAF,” says Fleming.

2. Feedstock agnosticism

MRL can process a wide range of inputs: used cooking oil, conventional vegetable crops, agricultural waste and emerging cover crops. Fleming describes these feedstocks as largely interchangeable from an operator’s perspective. Each requires pre-treatment and careful handling through a sensitive catalytic process, but the choice between them is driven by economics rather than technical constraints. If a buyer specifies a particular feedstock, the company can accommodate it; the added constraint is simply reflected in the price.

“We don’t care what feedstock we put into the machine. All of these are essentially interchangeable to an operator like us.”

Fleming uses this to challenge a common concern in SAF debates: that scaling production will compete with food for land. His view is that agricultural productivity in North America has increased faster than food demand for decades, leaving more land available. In that context, he sees the food-versus-fuel framing as an oversimplification of a more dynamic system.

3. Why policy volatility is limiting capital for SAF

Fleming expresses concern around feedstock regulations. Supply chains, he argues, take years to adjust. Once a jurisdiction restricts which feedstocks can be used for specific applications, commercial operators, including growers, transporters, and producers, adjust their supply chains to work around those limits.

“You cannot over-constrain an industry that is still in an experimental phase by micromanaging which feedstocks are allowed for targeted applications.”

The result is that global supply still meets demand, but through longer and more costly routes. Feedstocks are re-routed across regions and end uses to comply with local rules, often through longer and less efficient pathways. That added complexity feeds directly into higher costs and weaker economics. This also affects investments significantly.

Fuel infrastructure requires capital commitments over decades, yet the regulatory frameworks governing SAF continue to evolve on much shorter timelines. Incentives such as US producer tax credits and Renewable Identification Number (RIN) markets, alongside parallel schemes in other regions, are all evolving, often without coordination.

“Without policy stability over a decade or more, investment will not extend beyond early-stage seed capital,” he explains. In practice, that leaves early-stage venture capital as the dominant source of funding, while large-scale projects struggle to secure financing.

4. Book-and-claim can materially reduce SAF costs

Fleming is a strong advocate for book-and-claim, framing it as a logistical solution rather than a purely accounting mechanism.

Today, SAF transactions are often constrained by requirements around traceability and physical linkage, which can result in fuel being transported over long distances to match specific buyers.

Book-and-claim separates the two. The fuel is delivered wherever it is most efficient to do so, while the associated emissions reduction is allocated to the buyer through a certificate.

“The difference is about a dollar per gallon in the finished fuel, if I can avoid transporting materials across the country by truck and rail, which is inefficient, and instead use pipelines, which are more efficient.” At scale, that cost differential becomes significant; a structural efficiency gain rather than a marginal improvement.

Overall, Montana renewables’ approach points to a pragmatic route for SAF scale: build on existing infrastructure, retain flexibility, and align policy with investment timelines. Without that stability, the industry risks slowing just as it begins to prove what is possible.

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‘Sustainability in the Air’ is the world’s leading podcast dedicated to sustainable aviation. Through in-depth conversations with top aviation leaders, we break through the clutter and provide a clear roadmap for a net-zero future.

• Uzbekistan’s $6 billion SAF mega-project could make Central Asia a world leading production hub, challenging US/Europe/Middle East dominance.

• The project is hybrid AtJ (sorghum/camelina ethanol) + e-SAF (biogenic CO2 + 2.4GW green H2) targeting 400k+ tonnes/year SAF.

• It is backed by Presidential Decree, while the country has cheap solar (300 sunny days) and low costs. However challenges include feedstock scale, water limits and double-landlocked logistics hurdles.

• Central thesis: Conventional SAF hotspots may not completely define future production; regions with cheaper inputs could reshape geography despite logistics.

• As mandates grow in demand markets, regions like Uzbekistan might outcompete proximity if transport premiums stay manageable.

When the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) industry maps out where large-scale production will happen, the names usually cited include places like Texas, Spain, the UAE and Chile.

One name you normally don’t hear mentioned is Uzbekistan.

Thats about to change, following the announcement of a $6 billion project, that, if realised, will become one of the world’s biggest SAF projects, with fuel produced at an industrial scale via both the alcohol-to-jet (AtJ) and eSAF pathways.

This comes as the country’s fundamentals suggest it has many of the ingredients needed to become a major SAF centre. Here’s why:

• First, there’s the solar potential. Uzbekistan averages 300 days of sunshine per year, with solar irradiation comparable to that in Spain. By the end of 2025, the country had installed 8 GW of renewable capacity, 31% of its total, and is targeting 25 GW of solar and wind by 2030.

• Second, land is abundant, and labour costs are lower than in Europe. And crucially, a region that spent decades watching cotton monoculture contribute to one of the world’s worst ecological disasters, the drying of the Aral Sea, is now actively looking for agricultural alternatives.

• That combination: Cheap renewable energy for green hydrogen, available agricultural land, low construction costs and strong political backing, forms the logic behind what would be one of the largest SAF schemes anywhere on earth.

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The project: AtJ meets e-Fuels

This month, Allied Biofuels, a Perth, Australia-headquartered developer, signed a binding Project Implementation Agreement with the regional government of Khorezm in northwestern Uzbekistan, backed by a Presidential Decree granting Special Economic Zone status with tax exemptions and customs incentives.

The total projected investment represents a colossal sum — $6.08 billion. Final investment decision is targeted for late 2026.

The facility’s design is a hybrid of two SAF pathways:

• The first is alcohol-to-jet. Using first-generation ethanol technology from India’s Praj Industries, the plant would convert locally grown feedstock, primarily sorghum, alongside camelina and agricultural residues, into approximately 293,000 tonnes per year of ethanol. That ethanol would then be converted into around 160,000 tonnes of SAF and 5,000 tonnes of green diesel annually.

• The second pathway, e-fuels, expands the scale dramatically. Biogenic CO2 captured during ethanol fermentation would be combined with green hydrogen, produced using up to 2.4 GW of Plug Power PEM electrolysers powered by 4.45 GW of dedicated renewable energy, to produce roughly 257,000 tonnes per year of electro-SAF (e-SAF).

The feedstock choices are worth noting. Sorghum is salt-tolerant and has been shown in research trials in Khorezm to perform well on marginal, salinised soils. This is exactly the kind of degraded land that cotton and wheat increasingly struggle on. Camelina, an oilseed native to Central Asia, is drought-tolerant and can grow on land unsuitable for food crops. Both choices avoid the food-versus-fuel conflict.

The questions

The fundamentals and numbers may be impressive. However, a project of this scale in a non-obvious geography does raise a number of questions.

First of all, the feedstock requirement, nearly 5,800 tonnes of biomass per day, is enormous, and no sorghum supply chain exists in Uzbekistan at anything close to this volume. Khorezm’s irrigated cropland covers around 270,000 hectares in a region where agriculture already consumes 90% of available water.

Building an entirely new feedstock ecosystem here is not trivial.

Then there is the logistics challenge. Uzbekistan is one of only two double-landlocked countries on earth. Every tonne of SAF produced would need to cross at least two national borders to reach a seaport, let alone the airports in Europe, the Middle East or Asia where mandates and / or demand exist.

The project also depends on 2.4 GW of electrolysers from Plug Power, a company that has faced well-documented financial headwinds, including a suspended Department of Energy loan programme and class action lawsuits. And the 4.45 GW of renewable energy the facility would require exceeds Uzbekistan’s total installed solar capacity as of early 2025.

The bigger picture

Whether or not this specific project reaches a final investment decision, the underlying thesis deserves attention.

The economics of SAF production are driven by factors such as renewable energy, feedstock, labour and construction costs, land costs and availability and in the case of e-fuels, green hydrogen. These can, in many cases, be sourced more cheaply in places like Central Asia, North Africa and parts of Latin America than in the established aviation markets of Europe and North America.

As a result, as a recent SAF Investor London panel chaired by SimpliFlying founder and CEO Shashank Nigam found, areas of the world including the so-called Global South represents an enormous, untapped SAF opportunity.

SAF mandates, however, are being set in established markets. If the cheapest production happens thousands of miles from where the fuel is needed, the question becomes whether the logistics cost of transporting fuel from low-cost production regions to high-demand markets is less than the input cost premium of producing closer to demand.

However, the fact that a $6 billion project with Presidential backing is being developed in Uzbekistan, suggests that the geography of SAF production could end up looking different from what the industry currently expects.