In our latest Sustainability in the Air episode, recorded as CERAWeek gets underway in Houston, we sit down with Meg Gentle, Executive Director at HIF Global, to explore how a company best known for e-methanol is entering the aviation fuel market, with two distinct pathways and an argument that could reshape how airlines think about SAF procurement.
Meg Gentle has spent her career building energy infrastructure at scale. As a senior executive at Cheniere Energy and later as CEO of Tellurian, she was instrumental in the emergence of the United States as the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) — a transformation that involved deploying over $30 billion into facilities including Sabine Pass, Corpus Christi, and Freeport LNG.
Now, as Executive Director at HIF Global, she’s applying that same infrastructure mindset to a very different challenge: producing synthetic fuels from recycled CO2 and renewable energy, and bringing them to the aviation market.
It’s a transition that Gentle describes as a natural evolution rather than a sharp pivot. “Over that time, I really developed this passion for developing new things… Trying to see where energy needs to go and how we can create new markets to make that happen,” she told us. “It was sort of an easy transition to say, all right, now we’ve established the LNG market. What is the future of fuels?”
Here are the key highlights of the conversation:
How Chile’s wind resource sparked the e-fuels model (3:34)
How e-fuels are made using hydrogen and captured CO2 (5:37)
Why methanol offers more flexibility than Fischer-Tropsch fuels (7:15)
How waste methane becomes sustainable aviation fuel (18:46)
Why waste-based SAF can beat HEFA on cost and climate impact (20:04)
Understanding negative carbon intensity and why it matters (23:59)
Why policy certainty is the biggest hidden challenge in scaling SAF (33:04)
Keep reading for a detailed overview of the episode.
Starting from Patagonia
That future began taking shape in one of the most remote places on earth. HIF Global’s Haru Oni facility in southern Chile was the world’s first operating e-methanol and e-gasoline plant, taking advantage of Patagonia’s extraordinary wind resource.
“Patagonia actually has the best wind in the world,” Gentle explains. “The turbines can operate at over 70% capacity factor, compared to what’s considered good wind at about 40%. But there is very little population, very little industry in southern Patagonia. So even if you can generate the electricity, what will you do with it?”
The answer was to convert that renewable electricity into transportable liquid fuels. This involves using electrolysers to produce hydrogen, combining it with captured CO2, and synthesising the result into methanol, which can then be converted into gasoline, diesel, marine fuel, or jet fuel.
From Chile, HIF Global has built a portfolio spanning Uruguay, Brazil, Texas, and Australia. Each location was chosen for its combination of low-cost renewable power, access to CO2, and proximity to markets. “We decided the best approach is to have some geographical diversity,” Gentle said, “so that we can provide highly reliable production and access the market from different places.”
Two pathways into aviation
What makes HIF Global’s aviation play distinctive is that they’re pursuing two quite different SAF pathways simultaneously.
For the European market, where ReFuelEU mandates a synthetic fuel sub-quota from 2030, HIF Global plans to ship e-methanol — likely from their Uruguay project — to European refineries, where it would be converted to jet fuel and blended into existing distribution systems. The company has recently signed offtake agreements with German companies including MB Energy and German eFuel One for e-methanol supply.
For the US market, however, HIF Global is taking a different approach entirely: RNG-based SAF. Renewable natural gas. Here, methane captured from dairy manure and other waste sources can be converted to jet fuel via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, and carries extraordinarily low (often deeply negative) carbon intensity scores.
(It’s the RNG-based SAF pathway that is the subject of a working session HIF Global is hosting at CERAWeek this week, examining whether RNG-based SAF can achieve a lower cost of CO2 abatement than HEFA — the hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids pathway that currently dominates SAF supply.)
“We start with basically trash feedstock. Because it is waste, it’s actually much worse for the environment when it decomposes as methane,” Gentle explains. “If we can capture that waste product and make it into aviation fuel, it is actually reducing CO2 emissions by much, much more than a regular HEFA product. So for the same kind of cost, you’re getting a much greater environmental benefit, or said the opposite way, for the same environmental benefit, you have a much lower cost.”
The case for regulatory certainty
When asked about the biggest obstacle to scaling these pathways, Gentle pointed not to technology or capital but to policy stability. “People really underestimate the need for long-term certainty,” she said, advocating for what she calls early mover protection, a guarantee that the regulatory rules in place when a project starts construction will remain stable for 10 to 20 years.
“We have to have flexibility to change the rules, but you’ve got to give some early mover protection to let people get started.”
It’s a perspective shaped by decades of building infrastructure where investment decisions are measured in billions and timelines in decades, and it carries particular weight as governments on both sides of the Atlantic navigate the tension between ambitious SAF mandates and the investment certainty producers need to meet them.
Looking ahead
Gentle sees a future where airlines won’t differentiate between HEFA, eSAF, or RNG-based SAF. Instead, they’ll simply purchase aviation fuel rated by its carbon intensity score.
“We can standardise everything just on the carbon intensity score, which means we can sell the product on a dollars-per-CO2-abated basis,” she said.
For now, HIF Global is focused on building the value chains to get there — and on making the case, one working session at a time, that the economics of SAF are about to look very different.
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