Sustainable aviation fuel: what does it mean for airport expansion?

This briefing paper has also been published as a webpage: Sustainable aviation fuel: what does it mean for airport expansion?

Author: Dr Sebastian Eastham, Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Aviation, Department of Aeronautics - Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London

Reviewer: Dr David Danaci, Research Fellow, Department of Chemical Engineering - Faculty of Engineering, Imperial College London

Media enquiries: grantham.media@imperial.ac.uk  
Policy enquiries: c.hewitt@imperial.ac.uk

This background briefing explores the topic of ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ (or SAFs), including their history, why they have been slow to scale-up, which cost and resource barriers will persist, and why SAFs are unlikely to be the game-changer that many are hoping for when it comes to solving the climate change questions raised by Heathrow expansion.

Key points

• Sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) are the aviation industry’s main focus for reducing the net CO2 emissions from flying.
• Unsubsidised SAF will never achieve cost-parity with fossil jet fuel.
• Scale-up of SAF will be slow and expensive due to fundamental resource constraints.