Global aviation’s best shot at going green relies on scarce fuel

In Tuas, Singapore’s industrial-heavy district, Finnish company Neste Oyj is building what will one day be the world’s largest facility for sustainable aviation fuel. Once up and running in 2023, the plant should produce 1m metric tons a year — a decent amount, but still less than 0.3% of annual global jet fuel demand. What little there is will be expensive: SAF costs as much as five times as traditional jet fuel, itself coming off a 14-year peak. This is a problem for the airline industry, which is counting on sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, as a critical component in its efforts to decarbonize. As of now, airlines contribute more than 2% of the world’s carbon emissions and lag almost all other sectors in pledges for a cleaner future. The IATA, the lobby group of 290 airlines, has said the industry will become carbon neutral by 2050. Getting 65% of the way there means switching to SAF in a meaningful way, it says. It’s hard to see how it gets there. SAF currently accounts for less than 0.1% of global jet fuel use. It’s expected to rise to about 4% in 2030, nearing only 6% by 2050, according to BloombergNEF. Even as production ramps up, a goal to replace 100% of jet fuel with SAF by 2050 is “overly ambitious,” Bloomberg Intelligence said in a note earlier this month.<br/>