• 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.

• 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.

• 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.”

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.

• 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.

• Airport electricity demand could increase two to fivefold by 2050 as the sector electrifies ground operations, charges future electric aircraft, and supports SAF production, but a deep-pocketed competitor is already buying up much of the energy aviation will need.

• AI data centres are consuming energy on a staggering scale. A single next-gen facility can draw up to 1.2 gigawatts - equivalent to 750k-900k homes - and data centres already consume 21% of Ireland’s entire electricity supply. US grid interconnection now takes nearly five years; GE gas turbine lead times have stretched to seven years.

• Boom Supersonic’s pivot to selling 1.21GW of gas turbines to a data centre developer, with a $1.25 billion backlog, illustrates where energy investment is flowing.

• But there is an upside. The same technologies that data centres are driving to scale, such as next-gen geothermal, flow batteries, small nuclear, direct air capture, are exactly what aviation needs. Tech investment could bring costs down for everyone.

• Aviation cannot outbid big tech, but it can ride the cost curves. That means airports investing in on-site storage and microgrids, and SAF producers tracking energy technology trajectories as closely as feedstock prices.

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Airport electricity demand is heading in one direction. As the sector electrifies ground support equipment, installs charging infrastructure for future electric aircraft, and draws more heavily on clean power for terminal operations, studies forecast that airport power demand could double by 2030 and increase as much as fivefold by 2050.

Every pathway to decarbonising flight depends on abundant, affordable clean energy. Sustainable aviation fuel production, whether from waste feedstocks, power-to-liquids, or hydrogen, requires some degree of power. The hydrogen that underpins synthetic e-fuels needs either cheap renewable power for electrolysis or geological sources that are still being proven. Then we get to Direct Air Capture (DAC), an important tool for addressing residual emissions that is energy-intensive by design.

So, where will all this clean energy come from? That question took on new urgency at SXSW 2026 in Austin, where a panel on data centre sustainability made clear that aviation is not the only sector with an enormous and growing appetite for clean power, and certainly not the one with the deepest pockets.

A voracious energy appetite

The panel, “Dirty Data: The Hidden Climate Cost of Our Digital Lives,” brought together executives from geothermal startup Sage Geosystems, water technology firm Gradiant, flow battery developer XL Batteries, and green building standards body BREEAM. Even though none of them mentioned aviation once, everything they discussed has direct implications for airports, airlines, and fuel producers.

The panel started by outlining the colossal scale of data centre energy consumption:

Acoording to Jason Peart, COO of Sage Geosystems, a single next-generation AI data centre can consume up to 1.2 gigawatts of power. That is equivalent to a town of around 750k-900k homes. In terms of water consumption, the panel noted that a 100-megawatt facility uses as much water daily as 6,500 households.

Data centre power consumption is projected to reach 10-15% of the US grid by 2030. In Ireland, data centres already consume 21% of the country’s entire metered electricity supply, up from just 5% in 2015, according to figures from Ireland’s Central Statistics Office.

Moreover, data centres have now overtaken all urban dwellings as electricity consumers, and the International Energy Agency projects they could account for nearly a third of Irish electricity consumption by the end of this year.

Breana Wheeler, US Director of Operations at BREEAM, framed the tension as follows:

Communities are already responding. Wheeler noted that roughly $64 billion in data centre development projects have been halted by local opposition.

An infrastructure bottleneck aviation cannot ignore

Tom Sisto, CEO of XL Batteries, laid out a series of infrastructure constraints. The current lead time for a GE gas turbine, he told the audience, is now seven years. Grid interconnection queues stretch to seven to twelve years, depending on the region.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s data confirms this: In the US, the median time for an energy project to move from interconnection request to commercial operation has grown from under two years in 2008 to nearly five years today. More than 2,300 gigawatts of generation and storage capacity are actively waiting for grid connection — nearly double the entire US installed generating fleet. Google has reportedly faced potential grid connection delays of up to 12 years for new data centres.

That has led data centres and big tech to bring their own power, adopt new technologies and island themselves off from electricity grids, “They’ve hit the wall and cannot continue status quo,” he said. “They have to try new technologies, they have to get creative.”

These, however, are the same renewable electricity resources, the same grid capacity, the same battery storage, geothermal and nuclear technologies that aviation needs in its quest to decarbonise. Big tech is now pursuing them, having the advantage of deeper pockets and faster timelines.

For SAF producers and airport operators trying to secure long-term clean energy contracts, this is the competitive landscape they are now entering.

From supersonic aircraft to data centre gas turbines

Perhaps nothing illustrates where the money is flowing better than Boom Supersonic’s recent pivot.

The company, originally founded to build a supersonic airliner, announced in December 2025 that it would sell 1.21 gigawatts of natural gas turbines to AI data centre developer Crusoe. Boom’s “Superpower” turbine, a 42-megawatt unit based on jet-engine technology, already has a reported backlog exceeding $1.25 billion.

As the ICCT’s Dan Rutherford observed, this represents a company that has moved from aircraft manufacturer to engine OEM, to AI data centre energy provider. All while its end-of-2026 deadline to begin producing aircraft at its North Carolina factory approaches, along with the 1,750 jobs promised in exchange for $200 million in state incentives.

Could a rising tide lift aviation’s boats?

But rather than framing big tech’s renewable energy grab as purely a threat, there is a more nuanced reading.

That’s because, in addition to consuming clean energy, big tech is also bankrolling the next generation of it, much of which is directly relevant to aviation.

To take one example, nuclear energy, which, as we outlined in a recent article, could provide a route to cheaper synthetic fuels.

Google has signed a 500-megawatt SMR deal with Kairos Power, with the first reactor targeted for 2030. Amazon has backed 5 gigawatts of X-energy SMR projects and invested $500 million in the company’s reactor design and fuel fabrication. Microsoft has signed a 20-year deal to restart the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor in the US, delivering over 800 megawatts of clean baseload power. Meta has issued a request for proposals seeking 1-4 gigawatts of new nuclear generation.

The pattern holds for batteries, too. XL Batteries, one of the SXSW panellists, is commercialising long-duration organic flow battery storage that avoids lithium entirely. Data centres need it for grid stability; airports need it for exactly the same reason, as the Heathrow substation fire in March 2025 made clear.

Then there is waste heat. Breana Wheeler described how AI data centres generate massive amounts of it. A recent paper from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy explored co-locating data centres with direct air capture facilities, using waste heat to power the CO2 regeneration that DAC requires. Given that DAC is essential both as a CO2 source for synthetic aviation fuels and for addressing residual emissions, pairing it with data centre infrastructure is an idea worth considering.

Overall, tens of billions of dollars are flowing into technologies that our January 2026 report identified as critical to aviation’s decarbonisation over the 2030s. If data centre demand drives those costs down the same curve that solar followed, airports and e-fuel producers stand to benefit.

What this means for aviation

Aviation cannot outbid big tech for clean energy. But it can position itself to ride the cost curves that tech investment is creating. That means airports thinking seriously about on-site energy storage and microgrids. It means SAF producers tracking geothermal, nuclear, and battery cost trajectories as closely as they track feedstock prices. And it means the industry engaging with the data centre energy buildout as a strategic factor in its own decarbonisation planning.

I personally attended the forum, and what follows are the key insights from a day of frank, wide-ranging conversation spanning the European Union’s (EU) aviation strategy, the stubborn gap between innovation and commercialisation, infrastructure investment, sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), and what it will actually take to keep Europe at the front of global aviation over the next decade and beyond.

The EU’s role in strengthening aviation leadership

In a fireside chat that focused on Europe’s position in a rapidly evolving aviation landscape, Magda Kopczyńska, Director-General for Mobility and Transport at the European Commission (EC), reaffirmed Europe’s leadership in aviation, underscoring the region’s continued strength in aviation innovation.

On funding, Kopczyńska pointed to a proposal for two financial instruments aimed at better supporting innovation and scaling. These could sit within the next Horizon Europe program or the European Competitiveness Fund, with the Commission still working through how the two would coexist. The objective, she said, is to accompany companies “from the idea to the full market deployment”. She also pointed to the upcoming publication of a new EU aviation strategy spanning the entire ecosystem: infrastructure, airports, airlines and manufacturers. A formal “call for evidence” is due shortly.

The conversation closed on sustainability. Kopczyńska also emphasised the importance of staying the course on sustainability, pointing to the Sustainable Transport Investment Plan published in November 2025, as a way to boost investment in SAF. She also framed energy independence as an underlying concern for Europe: “This is the dependency that Europe really cannot afford to have for a long time.”

Competitiveness in aviation: policy driver or industry outcome?

The fireside chat was followed by a panel discussion that brought in four additional voices: Rémi Maillard, Executive Vice-President Engineering for Commercial Aircraft and Head of Technology at Airbus; Dorothea von Boxberg, CEO of Brussels Airlines; Christian Kunsch, CEO of Hamburg Airport; and Ivor van Dartel, CEO of Væridion, a European startup developing fully electric regional aircraft.

The gap between invention and commercialisation

When the wider panel convened, van Dartel offered the sharpest diagnosis of why mastering the “Magic Three” is harder than any policy document suggests. The issue, he argued, is not a lack of innovation, but an inability to translate it into commercial success. “Europe invents, America commercialises and China builds,” he said. “We need to commercialise more and we need to build more.”

He also highlighted the scale of the opportunity, particularly in short-haul travel: Europe has nearly 229 million passengers flying on routes below 500 kilometres, compared with just 80 million in the United States.

His argument was ultimately about how innovation is brought to market. Governments, he suggested, need to play a more active role in early demand creation. Drawing on examples from outside aviation, he cited Norway’s electrification of buses and ferries, where public institutions placed the first orders, helping to de-risk investment and unlock private capital.

He also pointed to a deeper structural issue in Europe’s financial system. “Half of the money on the NASDAQ is coming from European investors,” he said, arguing that without a more integrated European capital market, Europe risks continuing to build companies that ultimately grow elsewhere.

Operational gains now; transformational change later

von Boxberg offered a more immediate perspective on decarbonisation. For airlines, she explained, the quick wins sit almost entirely in day-to-day operations: single-engine taxiing, weight reduction wherever it can realistically be found, and aerodynamic improvements that can be applied to existing aircraft. At Brussels Airlines, this approach led to measures like optimising potable water loads by carrying only what is required for each flight rather than adhering to standard fill levels. While individually modest, these steps are practical and add up over time, she said.

She also highlighted the constraints shaping airline decision-making. European carriers, she argued, operate within a regulatory framework that can place them at a disadvantage relative to airlines outside the EU, underscoring the need for a more level playing field to remain competitive.

In terms of investment, von Boxberg was clear that fleet renewal remains the most dependable lever. Newer aircraft reduce fuel burn, affecting both emissions and costs. At the same time, she highlighted the challenge of slow technology cycles: aircraft entering service in the next decade will remain in operation for decades afterwards, emphasising the need to bring forward the next generation more quickly.

Sustainability is the purpose, not the constraint

Maillard pushed back against the framing of sustainability and competitiveness as inherently at odds. At Airbus, he said, the two are fundamentally linked. “Our purpose is to pioneer sustainable aerospace,” he said, emphasising that improving efficiency is central to both environmental performance and business outcomes. Fuel, he noted, remains a primary cost driver for airlines, so reducing consumption strengthens competitiveness while lowering emissions.

He also underlined the scale of change underway. The industry is approaching a new wave of technological disruption, spanning electrification and hybridisation, alongside advances in aerodynamics, materials and industrial systems. The question, in his view, is not whether these shifts will happen, but who will capture their value.

“I think it’s a very defining moment for the aviation industry if we take the right course now,” he said. “That’s the urgency… to take the right decision now that will define our aerospace industry for the coming decades.”

Infrastructure must be built for uncertainty

Hamburg Airport’s Kunsch focused on the realities of long-term infrastructure planning in a period of rapid technological change. Traditional assumptions no longer hold, he argued. Infrastructure designed to last for decades risks becoming outdated far sooner, as new propulsion systems and operating models emerge. “We cannot invest anymore in something that will last for 60 years,” he said, describing a shift towards a more modular approach: smaller, incremental investments that can be adapted as technology matures. While this may increase overall costs, it reduces the risk of locking capital into assets that may need to be replaced within five to ten years.

His broader view was that uncertainty must not become an excuse for inaction. Investment decisions will have to be made with incomplete information, and then revisited as conditions change.

On SAF, Kunsch was direct about the gap between ambition and delivery. He pointed to the disconnect between regulatory signals and industrial readiness: while policy frameworks are in place, the funding required to scale production has not followed at the necessary pace. In Germany, he noted, budgets had been identified but remain insufficient to enable a meaningful ramp-up of industrial capacity. The result is a growing mismatch between targets and supply. “If I set the framework and if I set the directions, then I also need to provide the funding. Otherwise it’s not going to happen,” he said.

The panel closed without easy answers, which is perhaps the most honest outcome for a challenge of this scale. Europe’s aviation sector has clear strengths in research, manufacturing and sustainability ambition; the task now is to translate that into commercial scale and financial momentum.

Wakina Mutembei, who leads sustainability and innovation at Kenya Airways, opened with a story that captured the absurdity of SAF’s current geography. When the airline operated its first SAF-powered long-haul flight in 2023 (the first by any African carrier), the fuel had been refined in Italy. But the feedstocks used in it had actually originated in Kenya.

That circular journey, feedstocks leaving Africa only to return as expensive fuel, framed the entire discussion on a panel exploring how developing regions could shift from being raw material suppliers to SAF producers in their own right.

The feedstock map

Each panelist brought a different regional picture, but the common thread was abundance.

In Kenya, it is used cooking oil and animal fats. Mutembei noted that Kenya Airways has been working with local producers and the Kenyan government to develop incentives for SAF production and for airlines to uplift SAF from Nairobi. The airline won three awards at the SkyTeam Aviation Challenge for its sustainability initiatives, including best approach to scaling SAF, built around a partnership to establish Kenya’s first SAF production plant using feedstock cultivated on degraded mining land in Kwale County.

Meanwhile, in Cameroon, Marvin Tabi of WESAF Energy Solutions is developing a sugarcane-to-ethanol project on a 322-hectare site, with SAF as the highest-value end market. His approach is deliberately unglamorous: proven feedstocks, proven conversion pathways, with ICAO now funding a national feasibility study that could outline the pathway for further projects. “We’re not doing anything out of the blue,” Tabi said. “Sugarcane, agricultural waste, forestry waste, [these are] things we’ve got in abundance.”

Commenting on the work Tabi is doing in Cameroon, Nigam said “I love your almost boring approach. Boring feedstock, boring pathways. We just want to be part of the ecosystem, and that’s actually good because it reduces the risk. It de-risks the entire process.”

Gibson noted that Pakistan is “very, very favourable for used cooking oil generation,” though the quality can be challenging. “It’s almost like crude oil when you see it coming out of some of these restaurants.”

In the Gulf, Sami Kamel of Dutco Group outlined a different proposition centred on e-SAF. The region’s competitive advantage lies in some of the world’s cheapest renewable energy, which translates into green hydrogen at $3 to $3.50 per kilogram.

Combined with available CO2 sources and deep-water port infrastructure, Kamel argued that the Gulf offers “sweet spots” for large-scale e-SAF production targeting the EU and UK markets. Dutco is developing three projects: an e-SAF plant in Oman leveraging a 1-million-tonne green ammonia project, a bio-SAF facility using molasses from a Dubai sugar refinery, and a potential synthetic ethanol import operation from Brazil.

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Book-and-claim as the great equaliser

The most strategically significant part of the discussion centred on how book-and-claim certification could transform the economics of SAF production in developing regions.

Mutembei made the following argument:

Mutembei said that the overall opportunity was three-fold: “One, to retain our feedstocks. Two, to create employment. And three, to produce SAF that is cheaper for the European and UK markets.”

De-risking in harder markets

The panel was realistic about the obstacles. Building SAF production capacity in developing regions is fundamentally different from doing so in Europe or the US, and each speaker highlighted a different dimension of the challenge.

His approach is to start small, demonstrate execution, build the supply chain piece by piece, and then scale. “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.”

Kamel described a different model: getting feedstock suppliers and offtakers to take equity positions in the project itself. In Dutco’s molasses-to-SAF project in Dubai, the sugar refinery owners are taking a minority stake.

In the green hydrogen projects, offtakers are also becoming equity partners. “When we’re signing the offtake agreement, it’s really with an equity partner in the project who will also market the final product,” he explained. The approach ties everyone’s incentives together, but it also highlights a structural gap: project lenders want ten- to fifteen-year offtake agreements, while most buyers are only willing to commit to five.

Gibson emphasised the importance of having all the pieces aligned from day one: feedstock, technology, offtake, and funding.

“Is this carbon colonialism?”

One of the most contentious moments came during the audience Q and As.

Using the conference online form, an anonymous questioner asked whether EU fuel suppliers charging high SAF premiums amounted to a tax on African airlines that had no say in designing the mandates.

According to Mutembei, “Of course it’s not fair.” But she reframed it by pointing out that the cost of producing SAF in Kenya is lower than in Europe, and that if book-and-claim is permitted, the mandate creates a market that African producers can serve at a competitive advantage.

The argument was echoed by Gibson, who pointed to capital cost efficiency as a fundamental advantage for projects in Africa and Southeast Asia. A HEFA plant built in Egypt or Kenya, with access to local feedstock, can achieve significantly lower capital costs per tonne than an equivalent European facility. “That’s a key area where Africa can compete,” he said.

What needs to happen

The panel closed with each speaker offering a three-year outlook. Mutembei pointed to Kenya’s 90% renewable energy grid as a foundation for future e-SAF production, alongside the nearer-term HEFA opportunity.

Kamel called for the EU to relax biogenic CO2 requirements, which currently constrain e-SAF projects in the Gulf, where fossil-derived CO2 from refineries and petrochemical plants is abundant. Tabi reiterated his theme of execution over ambition: prove the supply chain works at a small scale, then grow.

The feedstocks are there. The energy costs are lower. The capital costs can be lower. What is missing is the supply chain infrastructure, regulatory alignment (particularly on book-and-claim mandates), and investment flows to connect Global South production to Global North demand.

But across three panels on the first day of the conference, covering airline-backed venture capital, market intermediation, and public-market financial analysis, a more complex picture emerged.

Organising airline capital

Matt Ridley, oneworld’s director of sustainability and innovation, opened the three investment-focused sessions by explaining why airlines needed a fundamentally different approach to SAF funding.

“Airlines are much better at moving in a peloton,” Ridley said. “They’re much happier inside a herd.”

The solution was the oneworld Breakthrough Energy Ventures Fund, a dedicated SAF investment vehicle launched last year, in which Breakthrough Energy acts as general partner, making full-time investment decisions that airline executives could never commit to on a part-time basis. Seven of the eight airlines that joined had never made a fund investment before.

The fund is targeting $150-250 million and investing at Series A and B in technologies that could bring SAF costs down to parity with fossil fuel plus carbon price plus compliance costs.

Ridley was candid about why this matters: asking airline boardrooms to pay two to three times the price of conventional jet fuel is a losing proposition over the long term.

If Ridley addressed how capital is being organised at the top of the funnel, Natasha Mann, founder of Future Energy Global, described the plumbing being built in the middle. Mann is applying a similar aggregation model to SAF, matching long-term supplier offtakes with portfolios of airline and corporate buyers and managing delivery risk across both sides, much as a lessor manages aircraft placement risk.

The company delivered 35,000 tonnes of carbon abatement and captured roughly 2% of the voluntary market in its first active year.

Landmark deals included a first-of-its-kind intermediary arrangement with Microsoft for Scope 3 certificates from Asia, multi-year offtakes with Gevo and Montana Renewables, and a book-and-claim pilot involving JetBlue, DHL, Atlas Air, SAS, and others.

Mann was philosophical about the Trump disruption: “All we’ve done is we’ve taken a few keywords out and changed them with others, like impact. But there’s no slowing down this business.”

She noted that purchasing decisions are increasingly moving from chief sustainability officers to chief procurement officers, a positive sign that SAF is becoming embedded in business operations, but one that demands a sharper commercial narrative around local economic impact, energy independence, and supply chain resilience.

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The financial reality check

The third panel featured two financial analysts: Naisheng Cui from Barclays, who covers European energy majors, including Neste, and Adam Forsyth from Longspur Capital, who focuses on pre-production clean energy developers.

Forsyth set the tone by noting that what distinguishes SAF from other clean energy sectors is the existence of real, signed offtake contracts. “We still have companies coming to us with what I call the field of dreams fallacy. Build it and they will come. Well, no they won’t.”

Forsyth was equally blunt about the quality of some pre-contractual commitments. “LOI? Letter of imagination. MOU? Murmuring of unicorns.” The SAF sector, he said, has less of this problem than other parts of clean energy, which is a genuinely positive signal for investors.

On the demand side, Cui described fuel suppliers capturing significant margins as intermediaries rather than producers. He pointed to Shell, which took a €1.2 billion impairment on its 820,000-tonne SAF refinery in Rotterdam after shareholders pressured management to step back from production.

Instead, Shell has adopted what Cui called a “trading, not asset-backed” strategy: buying SAF cheaply from producers in Thailand and China, aggregating it, blending it with conventional jet fuel, and selling it to airlines at roughly three times the normal jet fuel premium. With only a handful of major fuel suppliers to choose from, airlines have limited room to shop around.

Forsyth highlighted the feedstock challenge facing the sector. The supply chain for biofuel-based SAF is fundamentally different from traditional oil refining. Neste sources from 600 suppliers across 60 countries, and hedging is extremely difficult when feedstock prices bear no correlation to the jet fuel price at which SAF is sold.

That demand for feedstock is very real was illustrated by one colourful example. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news,” Forsyth said, “but in the Highlands of Scotland, there have been 147 thefts of used cooking oil bins from the back of fish and chip shops.”

The thread connecting all three

Taken together, the three panels painted a picture of an industry at an inflection point. Production is scaling: 1.9 million tonnes in 2025 is real. But the financial architecture around it remains underdeveloped.

The common thread is that SAF cannot scale on goodwill or mandates alone. It needs functioning financial markets, with proper risk allocation, price discovery, and diverse sources of capital, to bridge the gap between where the industry is today and where it needs to be by 2030.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) is currently the only commercially available solution capable of delivering the required decarbonisation for the existing fleet. However, there remains a significant gap between ambition and reality.

Global SAF production reached just 1.9 million tons in 2025, covering only 0.6% of total jet fuel demand. Although this almost doubled 2024’s output, it fell short of the projected 2.1 million tons, highlighting the scale of the challenge ahead.

HEFA has enabled early SAF deployment, but it is now approaching structural constraints. Waste-oil feedstocks are finite, prices are rising, and sustainability criteria are tightening. At the same time, new SAF mandates in Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere are increasing competition for the same limited resources, further constraining effective supply.

At the other end of the spectrum, Power-to-Liquid (PtL) fuels offer long-term scalability. But they remain capital-intensive and energy-constrained, with large-scale commercial deployment still years away.

This new white paper examines AtJ as it exists today and what it could realistically contribute over the coming decade. In particular, it looks at how AtJ brings together:

1. Technological maturity (TRL 6-9) for rapid near-term deployment, leveraging existing global ethanol infrastructure.

2. Vast feedstock depth for long-term scaling, accessing diverse, non-competitive sources like corn, sugarcane, agricultural residues, and waste gases.

3. Superior decarbonisation potential, enabling net-negative carbon intensity through integration with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and regenerative agricultural practices.

4. Distributed supply chain development, which positions AtJ as a key driver for enhancing regional energy security and fostering economic prosperity across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific.

Access your free copy here

With appreciation to Gevo Inc for their technical insights. The analysis and conclusions presented are solely those of SimpliFlying.

Now in its fourth year, TAC 2025 brought together 22 participating airlines who completed more than 80 showcase flights — the highest number to date.

These gains came through operational enhancements, including route optimisation, maintenance improvements, weight reduction, and increased use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).

A total of 224 solutions and initiatives were submitted for consideration. Each entry was assessed against comprehensive technical criteria by aviation and sustainability experts from the Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR) and PA Consulting. Winners were selected by an independent jury of industry leaders, including Dirk Singer, Head of Sustainability at SimpliFlying, as well as representatives from ACI World, Air Transport Action Group, Cargolux Airlines, EUROCONTROL, Fiskars Group, and Copenhagen Airports.

Kenya Airways earned two major recognitions. The carrier won Most Impactful Solution for Catering by eliminating single-use plastic catering items network-wide, while Miriam Wangombe was named Game Changer of the Year for delivering significant waste reduction through initiatives ranging from upcycled textiles to farm-to-fork programs.

Other notable winners included Air Europa for AI-driven flight optimisation, Delta for scaling foam-based engine wash technology, and Virgin Atlantic for its cross-industry collaboration on wake energy retrieval, with a ‘flying geese’ style demonstration flight showcasing the potential for fuel savings.

TUI’s Tiger Team earned Team of the Year recognition for building coalitions both inside and outside the airline to deliver credible operational and waste outcomes with clear pathways to scale.

Patrick Roux, SkyTeam CEO, emphasised the importance of collective action: “Year after year, TAC continues to demonstrate the power of collective action in delivering meaningful progress.”

The Aviation Challenge continues to prove that when airlines collaborate and share knowledge, the industry can accelerate its transition toward more sustainable operations, one showcase flight at a time.

The full list of TAC 2025 participants included airlines from Aerolineas Argentinas to Virgin Atlantic, demonstrating the global reach of this collaborative initiative.

But ambition alone won’t decarbonise aviation. Decisions will. And as the latest workshop co-led by SimpliFlying and Boeing on the sidelines of the Dubai Airshow revealed, those decisions are far more complicated than the headlines suggest.

The session brought together airline leaders, airport executives, policymakers, and energy experts across the region for a live, data-driven modelling exercise. Using the Boeing Cascade Climate Impact Model, participants manipulated variables such as fleet age, renewable energy availability, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) uptake, passenger growth, and novel propulsion systems.

1. The growth paradox

Most participants assumed fuel choices would have the biggest influence on emissions outcomes. Yet, Cascade showed that traffic growth assumptions were just as consequential. In several group scenarios, even modest adjustments to projected demand enabled emissions reductions on par with those from ambitious SAF adoption.

As the aviation industry continues to grow, for a region like the Middle East, strong in global connectivity and passenger flows, Cascade was a reminder of the need to ensure low-emission pathways to continue growing responsibly. Tools such as optimised scheduling, improved connectivity planning, and long-term demand forecasting may become part of the toolkit, alongside renewable fuels and fleet modernisation.

2. SAF is the keystone and the bottleneck

The model confirmed what industry insiders already sense: SAF holds the greatest potential for emissions reductions through 2050, but bringing it to commercial scale is challenging.

For the first time in any Cascade session worldwide, Lower Carbon Aviation Fuel (LCAF), recently included in the app, became a flashpoint in Dubai:

• Some teams argued it is essential to meet the UAE’s 2030 SAF mandate.

• Others argued that LCAF delivered little emissions benefit by mid-century.

Read about our previous Cascade labs in Europe and the UK:

3. Hydrogen and electric aircraft: more signal than substance

While hydrogen and electric aircraft dominate conference stages, the region assigned minimal impact to both. Long-haul density, infrastructure timelines, and energy constraints make them marginal through 2050. Every team minimised the contribution of these levers, effectively treating them as secondary pathways in a long-haul, widebody context.

The takeaway: novel propulsion is a story about the 2060s, not the 2030s, and certainly not for the Middle East’s wide-body-dominated hubs.

4. Fleet renewal works but only as an enabler

Reducing aviation’s emissions always requires the right mix of strategies, selected per unique regional conditions. Scenarios developed at the workshop showed that even maximal renewal left an emissions gap to be filled with other strategies.

Operational levers such as advanced flight planning and next-gen aircraft consistently yielded meaningful emissions savings, often above 30%. The region is close to load-factor saturation, and further emission reductions require coordination, not just capital expenditure.

5. The elephant in the model: costs

Power-to-Liquid (PtL) fuels, clean electricity, and biomass compete across industries, and prices will determine whether scenarios survive political scrutiny.

As one attendee noted, “the model assumes infinite budget; the real world does not.” Ignoring cost helped the exercise move quickly but highlighted a looming reality: aviation decarbonisation only scales when the economics do.

What this means for the Middle East

The region now faces a strategic decision:

Dubai exposed three imperatives:

1. A regional roadmap for SAF scale-up, not fragmented national efforts;

2. Financing models for refinery build-out and energy-intensive PtL projects;

3. Growth-aligned planning as demand itself has become a climate lever.

The Middle East has the ingredients to lead. Whether it chooses to assemble them is now the defining question.

Next stop: Singapore!

The next Cascade Lab on the sidelines of the Singapore Airshow on February 6 will test a new equation centred on Asia-Pacific’s biomass and energy constraints. If Dubai was about possibility, Singapore will be about competition.

One thing is now clear: there is no single pathway to net-zero aviation. And the regions that move first will shape the markets everyone else depends on.

Special thanks to Boeing for their trust and collaboration and to every participant who brought curiosity, rigour, and insight to the sessions.

Back to basics

Hulst recently marked his 20th anniversary at Boeing. When asked about the company’s approach to innovation, he didn’t start with new technologies or futuristic concepts. He started with fundamentals.

Product development remains central to that approach. A key example is the Boeing 777X, a next-generation long-haul aircraft designed for better fuel efficiency and passenger experience. It remains the cornerstone of Boeing’s widebody lineup, and a recent order for 65 additional aircraft from Emirates signals continued airline confidence. “The big innovation continues to be the focus on the 777X,” he said.

Balancing growth with sustainability

Aviation is growing. Boeing predicts that the global fleet will expand from 29,000 aircraft today to over 49,000 by 2044. That scale brings questions about environmental impact, but Hulst frames the challenge differently.

Most of the over 44,000 aircraft that are expected to be delivered over the next two decades will replace older, less efficient models. “We are bringing products that are 20-30% more efficient than the aircraft they replace.”

From Hulst’s perspective, the discussion cannot be reduced to emissions alone. Aviation functions as critical infrastructure for global commerce, and efficiency gains serve multiple purposes. More efficient aircraft lower fuel burn and operating costs, which helps reduce emissions intensity; they also support more affordable air travel and extend connectivity to regions that remain underserved today.

Why the Middle East matters

Geography, Hulst argued, remains a decisive advantage. “You can’t invent geography,” he said. “The location of the Middle East will always be incredibly valuable to connect people and to connect trade.”

The concentration of passengers and freight moving through the region has helped airlines build dense networks, creating favourable conditions for operational efficiency and investment.

Scale, in Hulst’s view, is what ultimately underpins the region’s influence. When asked about the Middle East’s potential to lead on sustainability and innovation, his answer was unequivocal. “Whatever innovation happens here [in the Middle East] can actually scale.” Large fleets and high traffic volumes make it easier to justify investment in new technologies and processes, allowing initiatives tested in the region to be deployed elsewhere.

Keeping teams motivated

After two decades at Boeing, Hulst frames leadership less around slogans and more around perspective. Keeping teams engaged through periods of disruption and recovery, he stays focused on three priorities: a clear sense of purpose, a strong culture of collaboration, and confidence in aviation’s long-term growth. That broader perspective helps counter the pull of day-to-day pressures.

A single 737 can fly around a million miles a year, while a 787 may fly three or four million. “An aircraft that leaves the factory as a piece of metal or carbon becomes hugely important to the airline, to the passengers who fly it, and ultimately to the economy it serves.”

For Boeing, sustainability and growth move together. More efficient aircraft support more affordable air travel, expand global connectivity, and reduce emissions intensity across the fleet. For Hulst, this is a practical reality of aviation’s role in the world economy: an industry that grows by becoming more efficient, more reliable, and more accessible.

The multiple levers approach

At Airbus, Manhes oversees both sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR) — two areas increasingly seen as complementary in aviation’s decarbonisation effort. Internally, Airbus frames this challenge through what it refers to as a “lasagna chart”, a layered view of decarbonisation that combines multiple levers rather than relying on a single solution.

So why bring SAF and CDR together? “There’s a lot in common between SAF and CDRs,” he says. “In both cases, it’s a new industry trying to emerge, with new stakeholders and a strong need for regulation.”

Two paths to 100% SAF

Airbus has committed to making its aircraft 100% SAF-compatible by 2030. The company is pursuing two avenues to get there.

1. The first is drop-in fuel: a blend that works with existing aircraft without any modification to aircraft or infrastructure. “We are working on a fuel specification for the 100% drop-in SAF,” says Manhes. “We hope that the specification will be available in the next couple of years.”

2. The second path is more ambitious. Airbus has been testing non-drop-in fuels, specifically neat synthetic paraffinic kerosene (SPK), which lacks the aromatic molecules found in conventional jet fuel.

Hydrogen: still in the game

Despite a reset to the ZEROe timeline, Airbus remains committed to hydrogen propulsion. “For us, hydrogen remains a very promising pathway to produce an aircraft that would ultimately not emit any CO2 when flying,” says Manhes.

The challenge, he stresses, goes well beyond the aircraft itself. Airports, hydrogen production, and supporting logistics all need to mature in parallel. “We realised that this ecosystem wasn’t ready yet,” he acknowledges, underscoring the need to align aircraft development with the wider hydrogen ecosystem.

Building momentum, from ecosystems to demand

Manhes points back to the A380 program as an early lesson in the importance of systems thinking and why ecosystem development is essential for the adoption of new technologies. While Airbus could design and build the new A380 aircraft, airports also had to adapt and introduce infrastructure changes to accommodate the new aircraft. “We learned through the A380 experience that we can build aircraft, but we need to work with others,” he says.

Airbus also purchases SAF for internal operations and business travel and has partnered with airlines, including easyJet, to support voluntary SAF programmes. For Manhes, these corporate purchases play a critical role in signalling demand to fuel producers.

“When you fly to a conference, try to buy SAF,” he says. “You don’t need to go big. You can start with 1%, 2%, or 5%. One gallon at a time, we can make the SAF transition a reality.”

The Middle East opportunity

Manhes is optimistic about the Gulf region’s potential to become a global SAF hub. “The region is remarkable in its ability to go fast and go big,” he says. With abundant renewable energy and a track record of rapid deployment, “if there is one place where eSAF in particular could be produced and at a lower cost, it is in the [Middle East] region.”

That confidence is reinforced by concrete examples. In 2023, Emirates operated what was, at the time, a highly innovative A380 test flight using 100% drop-in SAF on one engine, an experience Manhes says delivered valuable technical learnings for Airbus. He also points to less visible but equally important trials, including a methanol-to-jet test flight carried out on an Airbus helicopter in 2023 during COP28 in Dubai.

Taken together, Manhes’ message is pragmatic. Decarbonising aviation will not hinge on a single technology or breakthrough, but on coordinated progress across fuels, aircraft, infrastructure, and demand. The challenge is complex, but as Manhes makes it clear, progress is already underway.

CAE is the global market leader in flight simulation, operating over 340 full-flight simulators in 70+ training locations worldwide.

A looming talent crunch

According to CAE’s 2025 Aviation Talent Forecast, released at the Paris Airshow earlier this year, the industry will need 1.5 million personnel over the next decade. This includes pilots, maintenance engineers, air traffic controllers and cabin crew.

For the Middle East specifically, the challenge is acute. “About 31,000 pilots need to be trained over the next 10 years,” Azar-Hmouda explains. That represents roughly a doubling of the region’s current pilot population.

Training for a new generation

Meeting this surge in demand involves more than expanding simulator capacity; it requires rethinking how pilots are trained.

Emerging technologies are central to this shift. CAE is expanding the use of augmented and virtual reality alongside full flight simulators, creating a broader ecosystem of learning tools. The response from younger trainees has been particularly positive. “You look at the generation today, it’s like, yes, that’s what I want to see, and I want something to be able to adapt to what my gaps are,” he says.

This, however, leads to a bigger challenge: personalising training at scale. “How can I personalise that training without, of course, creating 600 solutions?” Azar-Hmouda asks.

With millions of training hours generating vast amounts of data, CAE is also exploring how artificial intelligence can help tailor learning pathways for individual pilots. The aim is to sift through the accumulated data and uncover “one or two ‘aha!’ moments” that can be incorporated back into the innovation process, to continue improving training outcomes.

Sustainability through simulation

On the environmental front, the logic is straightforward: training conducted in simulators rather than actual aircraft reduces emissions. CAE continues to work with regulators and airlines to shift more training into simulation environments.

A zigzag path to leadership

Reflecting on his own career, Azar-Hmouda shares guidance for emerging leaders. “The best part of the journey is when you push yourself outside the comfort zone,” he says. “[For me], it was not all lined up, and it hasn’t been a path of vertical growth. It’s been a lot of zigzagging, which I think is what builds the fundamentals of leadership.”

His approach to talent follows a similar principle. Technical ability is important, yet passion and fit matter just as much. “You can interview someone with excellent skills and still not have the right fit. We look for the person who truly matches the role, because once you have that, you can really unleash their full potential.”

As aviation continues its rapid expansion in the Middle East, that combination of passionate people and adaptive technology may prove essential in keeping the skies safe.

Dubai Airports owns and manages the operation and development of Dubai International (DXB), the world’s largest international airport, as well as Dubai World Central, Al Maktoum International (DWC), which is positioned as Dubai’s airport of the future.

When asked about Dubai Airports’ environmental strategy, Griffiths didn’t rely on distant promises or broad ambitions.

Incremental upgrades with big impact

DXB has replaced more than 150,000 light bulbs across the airport with LEDs. The runways and taxiways now run entirely on LED technology. Smarter air conditioning controls help regulate temperatures more precisely, cutting energy use. The airport also recycles all its cooking oil, is steadily working toward achieving zero landfill waste.

Dubai Airports is also preparing to retire hydrocarbon-fuelled vehicles from the airside areas of both DXB and DWC. Griffiths pointed out that the move to cleaner technologies must be anchored by practical tools and solutions before imposing definitive phase-out deadlines.

The SAF challenge

While Dubai Airports is making strong progress on its ground operations, Griffiths is candid about aviation’s wider obstacles. “About 80 to 90 percent of all the emissions are an industry problem,” he says, noting the long road ahead for alternative propulsion capable of supporting long-distance jet travel. In the immediate term, the industry needs to solve sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production and consumption at scale, says Griffiths.

He proposes an equalisation strategy to stimulate demand and unlock investments. “Let’s put a small surcharge on each litre of jet A1 so we can equalise the cost of each litre of SAF.” This, he suggests, would help subsidise new production capacity and allow economies of scale to bring costs down over time.

As the lead for sustainable aviation fuel in King Charles’s Strategic Markets Initiative, Griffiths seeks to encourage governments to adopt policies similar to Singapore’s SAF Levy model.

Building capacity for the future

The UAE’s mandate to produce 700 million litres of SAF annually by 2030 signals a clear commitment to scaling cleaner alternatives. With abundant solar resources that can support emerging power-to-liquid (PtL) technologies, the region is positioning itself to play a significant role in future SAF production. For Griffiths, expanding supply is part of a wider effort to accelerate the industry’s transition and ensure that airports are ready to support higher SAF uptake as availability grows.

Griffiths is equally focused on strengthening the organisation that will help deliver this transition. Over the past 15 years, Dubai Airports has run a proactive recruitment and development programme that has transformed its leadership structure. Today, 78% of his management team are Emiratis, a shift he describes as a social legacy for the country as much as an achievement for the airport.

For Griffiths, the path forward is defined by collaboration, technology and a willingness to move faster than the status quo. As Dubai continues its rapid growth, that combination may well prove decisive in shaping the future of sustainable aviation.

Boeing expects sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to do most of the heavy lifting in aviation’s journey to reduce net-zero emissions, arguing that physics, infrastructure realities, and commercial pressures leave few alternatives capable of scaling fast enough in the short to medium term.

Speaking at the Aviation Carbon conference in London, Steve Gillard, Boeing’s Regional Sustainability Director for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Türkiye, and Central Asia, said SAF remains “the only game in town” in terms of available renewable energy options. Electrification and hydrogen may play future roles, he said, but neither can deliver sector-wide decarbonisation at the required pace.

Moderator Shashank Nigam, founder and CEO of SimpliFlying, set the tone by noting that “airlines are largely reliant on SAF and market measures to reduce emissions,” and asked Gillard whether carriers were now blending multiple approaches.

Gillard replied that this is not a hypothetical direction of travel. “I’m seeing it today,” he told the audience, adding that physics limits the choices available, forcing operators to combine multiple strategies, including SAF, efficiency upgrades, and carbon removals, depending on their fleet and geography, among various elements.

Costs and context

Nigam also asked about the persistent ‘green premium’ attached to low-carbon fuels, asking Gillard whether SAF and removals would ever shed their price disadvantage. Gillard cautioned against generalisations, pointing to wide regional variations.

In parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, he said, HEFA-based SAF can already compete with traditional Jet A1 because of existing Jet A1 logistics and distribution costs. In some defence applications, where fuel transport consumes vast quantities of fuel, power-to-liquid pricing can appear attractive rather than prohibitive. “Economics are relative,” Gillard said, adding that policy remains critical to closing the premium.

On whether OEMs could accelerate price convergence, Gillard argued the issue is not just technology but timing; as renewable electricity and hydrogen costs fall, pathway economics will shift. However, the trajectory will vary: some routes to SAF will scale cleanly; others, he implied, may struggle without regulatory support.

OEMs at the fulcrum

Nigam raised the role of manufacturers in bringing novel fuel pathways to market. Gillard responded that Boeing’s efforts span technology testing and work with ICAO and partners such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) on the development of sustainability standards.

The company helps shape certification frameworks, ensuring new fuels meet safety criteria and are deployable on existing aircraft. “Safety and quality come first before we look at anything else,” he stressed.

The company also seeks to spotlight SAF technologies it sees as viable at scale. Gillard cited Firefly Green Fuels (which converts sewage into jet fuel) from the UK as an example of unconventional feedstock innovation with global potential. “Every human, he joked, produces the equivalent of around five litres of jet fuel a year, a feedstock that keeps on giving.”

Cascade: Bringing scenarios to life

Nigam referenced recent Boeing–SimpliFlying workshops, in which participants from aviation, policy, and energy used the Boeing Cascade Climate Impact Model to test assumptions on emissions reduction pathways.

Gillard highlighted that Cascade gathers publicly available data and is open and free for everyone to use. It allows users, including airlines, investors, and regulators, to adjust assumptions on reducing emissions and see potential outcomes immediately. One such outcome that has surprised many participants across workshops: swapping large shares of SAF for hydrogen without changing hydrogen’s upstream emissions can cause total emissions to rise by 70%.

“You then have to ask why,” Gillard noted. The explanation lies in how most hydrogen is produced today, with only a small proportion being clean hydrogen.

Regional realities

According to Gillard, every region has its unique conditions: Africa holds immense feedstock availability and sees SAF export opportunities in Europe; the Middle East combines solar potential with energy expertise; Türkiye and Central Asia are aligning with Europe while exploring local production capacities.

The discussion closely mirrored themes explored in the second volume of the book, Sustainability in the Air, in which Boeing’s multi-faceted approach to aviation decarbonisation is detailed around their “SAF&” philosophy – advancing SAF as the primary lever for emissions reduction, while continuing to explore advanced technologies, operational efficiency, and market-based measures.

In the book, Boeing executives argue that while SAF will carry most of the load, no single solution can achieve net zero in isolation, a point echoed repeatedly in Gillard’s remarks.

In the fireside chat, Shashank Nigam noted that the industry is now moving from high-level ambition to practical implementation, where questions of cost, scale, and interoperability are overtaking ideology.

Gillard’s assessment serves as both a grounding reality check and a clear call to action. The roadmap to 2050 is being written not by a single breakthrough, but by the steady, collaborative scaling of sustainable fuel, guided by smart policy and grounded in regional truths.

Yousif Lootah, CEO of Lootah Biofuels, sat down with SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam to discuss how he’s turning used cooking oil (UCO) into sustainable aviation fuel, with a sense of urgency that’s deeply personal.

The beauty of drop-in technology

What drew Mr Lootah to biofuels when he started in 2010 was their immediate practicality. Unlike many other sustainable solutions that require wholesale infrastructure changes, biofuels offer something aviation desperately needs: compatibility with existing systems.

“We don’t need to buy a new car or new airplane or new engines or hybrid or futuristic innovations, but [we can make it work] in the same infrastructure, same engines, same petrol stations, same everything, same infrastructure that have since decades ago, you know?” he noted.

This is particularly crucial for aviation, where aircraft built today will continue flying for three decades or more. With global fleet numbers projected to grow from 29,000 to 43,000 aircraft by 2044, drop-in technology isn’t just convenient, it’s essential.

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Exporting a circular economy

Lootah Biofuels isn’t limiting its ambitions to the UAE. The company has successfully exported its technology and knowledge to the Maldives, where it’s created what Mr Lootah proudly called “a practical circular economy.” The island nation’s reliance on diesel marine transport made it an ideal candidate for biofuel production from the waste cooking oil generated by its luxury hospitality sector.

With the UAE’s growing population and increasing consumption, the company imports feedstock whilst simultaneously building partnerships with international leaders before establishing its own production facility.

The Middle East advantage

Mr Lootah sees the region’s geographic position as pivotal. “It is in the middle of the world, of the new world,” he said, pointing to the massive growth expected in China and India through 2040 and 2050. The future of aviation will inevitably be sustainable, he argued, and the region is positioned to lead, but not alone.

“As I said, in the region, we don’t want to do everything ourselves,” he emphasised, gesturing to the international presence at the airshow.

The challenge of cost and carbon credits

The elephant in the room, however, is economics. If airlines were forced to use 100% SAF today, the burden wouldn’t primarily fall on carriers, it would hit passengers directly through higher ticket prices. Mr Lootah believes the solution lies in global carbon credits and proper carbon accounting for airline emissions.

“I think there has to be a global carbon credit. Carbon calculations to fix the production of the carbon emission of airliners,” he said, expressing optimism about platforms like Boeing’s Cascade that are helping to simplify these complex calculations.

A personal commitment

Outside the boardroom, Mr Lootah lives his values. He drives a Ferrari SF90 Spider – hybrid-powered and running on the bio racing fuel his company produces. He’s an advanced diver, a paddle enthusiast, and harbours ambitions of earning his pilot’s licence.

But perhaps most tellingly, he recalled his late father’s advice: to fear the Almighty and do good deeds, knowing that when you help others, especially the poor, blessings return in unexpected ways.

As the aviation industry grapples with its decarbonisation challenge, Mr Lootah’s approach offers something increasingly valuable: practical solutions grounded in real-world infrastructure, powered by partnership, and motivated by a father’s hope for his children’s future.

In conversation with SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam at the Aviation Carbon Conference in London, Airbus executive Bertrand de Lacombe outlined Airbus’ position across short-, medium- and long-term climate measures, as well as the company’s work with governments and airlines to expand the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) ecosystem.

Taking a bold stance, de Lacombe said the aviation sector is entering a period where growth and decarbonisation must advance in parallel, emphasising that the industry needs “global regulation, long-term coordination and a realistic view of technology timelines” to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Two conditions for aviation’s future

De Lacombe said governments have made clear that aviation remains a strategic sector, referencing the recent ICAO assembly.

Airbus’ role, he said, is to “pioneer sustainable aviation” by working across technology, operations, SAF and market-based measures. This is because Airbus sits at the intersection of manufacturers, airlines, airports, regulators and fuel producers. As a result, its strategy is built around short-term and long-term tracks that follow ICAO’s global net-zero framework.

SAF: Certification and scale-up

Asked by Nigam what Airbus is doing to accelerate SAF adoption, de Lacombe pointed to two priorities: certifying the fleet for 100% SAF use by 2030, and helping to build out supply through partnerships.

De Lacombe also shared insights on three different aspects of the SAF ecosystem:

1. Policy: He highlighted recent UK policy developments, including contracts-for-difference-style price-stability mechanisms, calling the UK “an important leader” in transforming SAF into an industrial strategy rather than a purely environmental initiative.

2. Pricing: On pricing, he said mandates help signal demand, but additional tools are still required: “There is still the problem of price for airlines.” The company has pushed EU policymakers to consider price-certainty and revenue-stability mechanisms similar to those in the UK.

3. Certification: Regarding certification for 100% SAF, he stated that the work is technically complex because SAF’s properties differ from those of petroleum jet fuel, requiring validation that no parameter in the aircraft-engine system is adversely affected.

Near-term technology: Engines, wings and efficiency

For the 2030s aircraft generation, Airbus is focusing on conventional but higher-efficiency improvements. These include: new wing designs, new engine architectures developed with suppliers, and higher bypass ratios.

Airbus is still evaluating future iterations of the A320, A321 and A350 families but has as yet not announced new programme decisions. The company’s main constraint, he emphasised, is not demand but capacity: Airbus and its competitors face backlogs stretching up to a decade.

Hydrogen timeline extended to the 2040s

Nigam asked for updates to Airbus’s ZEROe hydrogen programme. De Lacombe said Airbus still sees hydrogen as a “fantastic long-term solution,” particularly for reducing both CO₂ and non-CO₂ effects.

The concept will also be based on fuel-cell electric propulsion rather than direct hydrogen combustion, which Airbus has now deprioritised.

Safety and certification

During the audience Q&A, de Lacombe stressed that safety remains “the first priority” in any new technology pathway, and that there is “no possibility of compromise.”

He further noted that the ICAO has set a long-term vision of zero fatalities by 2050, guiding certification of new fuels and engine types. Noise reduction remains important, he said, but climate impact is increasingly treated as the primary constraint for future aircraft design.

A collaborative path

Throughout the discussion, Nigam emphasised the need for clearer pricing models and simpler consumer propositions for SAF.

This collaborative approach reflects the broader theme of de Lacombe’s remarks: that reaching net-zero will require alignment across the entire aviation ecosystem, with Airbus leveraging its position to connect technology development, policy frameworks, and market mechanisms.

From 24 to 26 November, Singapore will host the Sustainable Aviation Futures Asia-Pacific Congress 2025, bringing together over 400 leaders from across aviation, energy, and finance to chart the region’s path to net-zero flight. The event comes at a defining moment for the Asia-Pacific (APAC) aviation sector: after years of discussion, the region is finally shifting from SAF planning to SAF production.

Ahead of the event, we’ve released a new report – Asia-Pacific Sustainable Aviation Fuel Outlook 2025 – that maps the APAC region’s policy breakthroughs, emerging capacity, and capital flows. The report finds a region in rapid transition: 2025 is the year APAC moves from aspiration to action.

The Asia-Pacific region is home to nearly 40% of global aviation traffic, making it central to any meaningful decarbonisation of air travel.

Historically, APAC has lagged North America and Europe in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) uptake, in large part because policy drivers and commercial initiatives were slower to develop here.

In 2025, APAC stands at a crossroads where it can transform from a passive consumer of others’ SAF into an active producer and leader in sustainable fuel.

From goals to mandates

Since 2024, multiple APAC governments have moved from tentative goals to concrete blending targets and mandates:

• Japan leads with a binding 10% SAF mandate by 2030, supported by subsidies and a dedicated SAF Taskforce.

• Singapore has committed to 1% SAF for all flights by 2026, rising to 3–5% by 2030.

• India has blending targets of 1% by 2027 and 2% by 2028 for international flights, backed by new certification standards.

• Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand each unveiled roadmaps beginning around 2026–2027, while South Korea confirmed its first mandatory 1% blend by 2027 for departing flights.

Investment momentum and industrial partnerships

Australia’s newly announced A$1.1 billion Cleaner Fuels Programme, a ten-year fund to support low-carbon fuels, is the region’s first large-scale government subsidy for SAF. Similar public support is emerging in Japan and Singapore, while Indonesia and Malaysia are preparing fiscal incentives tied to their mandates.

Private financing alliances have also taken shape. The Qantas-Airbus Sustainable Aviation Fuel Financing Alliance (SAFFA) has raised around US$200 million, investing in projects across the U.S. and APAC. Meanwhile, oneworld member airlines joined forces with Singapore Airlines and Breakthrough Energy Ventures to launch a US$150 million fund in 2025 to accelerate SAF technology commercialisation.

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Key insights from the report

• Policy turning point: Nine APAC countries have formal SAF targets; mandates in Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are enforceable by 2027.

• Industrial scale-up underway: Regional SAF capacity has expanded sharply, led by Singapore, China, and Japan, with multiple new plants due before 2030.

• Investment acceleration: Australia’s A$1.1 billion fund and airline-financier alliances like the SAFFA mark the arrival of serious capital behind SAF in APAC.

• Feedstock abundance, certification gap: Asia’s waste oils and residues offer unmatched supply potential, but sustainability verification remains uneven.

Why this matters

Globally, SAF still accounts for less than 1% of total jet consumption. To meet 2030 climate goals, production must scale hundredfold.

If current targets are met, APAC’s SAF supply could reach 1.7 billion gallons by 2030, positioning it as the largest SAF market in the world by 2040. But that outcome depends on the next two years: policy execution, feedstock logistics, and investment alignment between governments and industry.

As our report concludes, this is the decade when planning turns to production, and the APAC region’s energy transition takes flight.

Download the full report for a closer look at the mandates, investments, and partnerships powering Asia-Pacific’s SAF transition.