New report: What could strengthen aviation’s decarbonisation efforts?
A deep-dive into the bottlenecks shaping aviation’s transition — and five promising technologies attempting to remove them.
The broad shape of net-zero aviation is no longer a mystery. The destination is clear, and so are the main routes to get there.
Medium- and long-haul aviation will depend on drop-in fuels compatible with today’s aircraft, increasingly produced from non-fossil carbon and hydrogen. Shorter routes will rely on electric, hybrid-electric or hydrogen aircraft where physics allows. Airports will electrify ground operations, address non-CO2 effects such as contrails, and draw more heavily on clean power. Residual emissions will need to be addressed through permanent carbon removal, with CO2 captured and stored deep underground.
In other words, we largely know what to do. Much of the underlying technology already exists. The problem is that every one of these pathways runs into a hard constraint.
Sustainable aviation fuels are limited by feedstock availability and cost.
Synthetic fuels depend on vast amounts of cheap, clean energy and hydrogen that do not yet exist at scale.
Electrification is pushing airport power demand beyond what many grids can reliably supply.
Carbon removals are essential in theory, but remain expensive and energy-intensive in practice.
The result is a widening gap between ambition and execution.
Across two books, more than 200 interviews, and years of tracking climate-tech developments across aviation, energy and carbon removal, one pattern has become increasingly clear: progress is being slowed less by a lack of invention, and more by bottlenecks.
Many first-generation solutions proved technical feasibility, but failed to clear the economic, energy or infrastructure hurdles required for scale. Some collapsed outright. Others survived, but stalled.
What we’re tracking in 2026
This new outlook does not attempt to predict the future or catalogue every emerging technology. Instead, it focuses on five areas where second-generation approaches are beginning to address specific constraints:
Natural hydrogen, with the potential to radically lower synthetic fuel costs if recoverable at scale;
On-site battery storage and microgrids, as airports confront rising electricity demand and grid fragility;
New nuclear, including small modular and micro-reactors, as a source of constant, low-carbon power;
Direct Air Capture 2.0, as the sector shifts toward more energy-efficient systems;
Waste-to-SAF 2.0, using regulated biogenic waste streams rather than mixed municipal waste.
None of these is a silver bullet, especially in isolation. But if they succeed, they could materially improve the odds that aviation’s decarbonisation pathways actually work through the 2030s.
Access your free copy of the report here.