In this episode, we speak with Elvis Ebikade, Director of Strategic Market Development at Bioleum Corporation, about Africa’s SAF production potential, the technical challenge of aromatics, and what actually makes a SAF project bankable.
Most conversations about sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) begin and end with who’s buying it: which European airlines face ReFuelEU mandates, which US carriers are signing offtake agreements, where the blending terminals are.
Far fewer people are asking the harder question: where should this fuel actually be produced? And who captures the value when it is?
Elvis Ebikade sits at an unusual intersection. He grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, did his PhD in catalysis and biomass conversion at the University of Delaware, spent time at Boston Consulting Group, and then nearly two years inside Southwest Airlines’ SAF procurement team, where he negotiated offtake deals and saw first-hand how airlines decide what to buy and at what price. He’s now Director of Strategic Market Development at Bioleum Corporation, a US-based company developing a lignocellulosic platform that converts woody biomass into SAF, renewable diesel, and other fuels.
Here are the key highlights of the conversation:
Why the Global South should produce SAF, not just export feedstocks (7:31)
From climate solution to energy security: reframing the SAF narrative (17:56)
Bioleum’s Farm-to-Fuel platform (24:20)
The blending issue: why today’s SAF still depends on fossil jet fuel (26:49)
What makes a SAF project truly bankable? (32:30)
The danger of building businesses around permanent subsidies (37:01)
The mindset shift that could accelerate the energy transition (39:56)
Keep reading for a detailed overview of the episode.
The production geography argument
Ebikade is a passionate advocate for reframing the Global South from raw material supplier to fuel producer. The current model, he argues, makes little sense. He points to a story we reported recently: that the feedstock for Kenya Airways’ first SAF flight in 2023 originated in Kenya, was shipped to Italy for processing, and came back as SAF at 6-7x times the cost of conventional jet fuel.
Ebikade draws a parallel with Nigeria’s own crude oil history. For decades, Nigeria exported crude and reimported refined products at a premium. The Dangote Refinery, now operational with a capacity of 650,000 barrels per day, built with Nigerian capital and execution, has begun to change that equation.
If Africa can refine crude oil at that scale, Ebikade argues, the case for refining biofeedstocks locally is at least as strong, and potentially stronger, because the carbon intensity penalty of shipping feedstocks across continents directly undermines SAF’s core value proposition of lower lifecycle emissions.
Africa has the largest amount of arable land of any continent, abundant oil crop feedstocks for the HEFA pathway, agricultural residues suitable for alcohol-to-jet, woody biomass for gasification and pyrolysis routes, and solar resources for future e-fuel production. The feedstock diversity, Ebikade argues, creates resilience that single-pathway regions cannot match.
Beyond sustainability: the energy security argument
One of the more striking arguments in this conversation is Ebikade’s contention that renewable fuels are shifting from a sustainability narrative to an energy security one. Countries with abundant feedstocks now have a form of energy sovereignty they never had when dependent on crude oil imports.
That reframe, he suggests, changes who sits at the table: it brings in finance ministries, trade departments, and agricultural policymakers alongside the sustainability teams that have traditionally led these conversations.
The blend wall and why aromatics matter
On the technology side, Ebikade is equally direct. Most SAF produced today is paraffinic, meaning it lacks the aromatic hydrocarbons that conventional jet fuel contains.
Under ASTM D7566 regulations, SAF can only be blended with fossil jet fuel up to 50%, and in practice most blending happens at 30-40%. This creates significant downstream infrastructure complexity: airports and fuel terminals need separate storage tanks for neat SAF, for jet fuel, and for blending, with dedicated piping for each.
Bioleum’s platform addresses this by converting lignin, a structural component of plants that makes up roughly 30% of biomass, into aromatic-rich fuel blendstocks. Combined with its cellulose-to-ethanol pathway and its acquisition of Hexas Biomass (whose high-yield energy crops can grow on marginal land), the company aims to produce a fully formulated, drop-in fuel that mirrors the composition of conventional jet.
What makes a SAF project bankable
Perhaps the most practical section of our conversation concerns what separates a real SAF project from a promising spreadsheet. Ebikade identifies four essentials:
Secured feedstock
Credible offtake
A credible construction and engineering partner, and
A technology pathway with a credible path to cost parity
On that final point, without a path to parity, he notes, you’re asking lenders to underwrite a perpetual subsidy, and they won’t.
He’s particularly sharp on the gap between modelled economics and operational reality. A project may show attractive numbers in a financial model, but if the feedstock hasn’t been qualified under the relevant regulatory framework, if chain of custody and traceability data don’t exist, or if impurities in the biomass kill the conversion process, the project fails on execution, not on technology.
Our take
Ebikade makes a compelling case that the geography of SAF production and SAF consumption will not be the same, and that the Global South has structural advantages that the industry has been slow to recognise.
The energy security reframe is particularly noteworthy: it offers a rationale for SAF investment that doesn’t depend on climate policy alone, which matters in a political environment where climate framing has become counterproductive in some key markets.
The structural barriers remain real: capital access, certification infrastructure, political risk, and the challenge of building supply chains from scratch in markets where fuel logistics are already constrained. But the direction of travel Ebikade describes, where feedstock abundance, lower costs, and renewable energy potential converge, deserves more serious attention than it currently receives.
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