A SAF story of air travel

Four years ago, I flew to Italy for the annual meeting of Baker Hughes in Florence. It was January 2020, the first reports about Covid were beginning to trickle into the public space and no one had any idea what was coming. Also, my two-way plane ticket was cheaper than the one-way train ticket from Milan to Florence.

This is about to change. It is already changing, in fact. But in the near future, air travel is about to become a luxury and not only because airlines have a lot of losses to make up for since lockdown times. It’s because airlines are facing SAF mandates and those are going to add a lot to ticket prices. A very substantial lot.

Last week, Energy Intelligence calculated that SAF mandates were going to add 8 billion euro, or $8.8 billion, to airlines’ fuel bills in 2030. The calculations were based on a report by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and I must say that report makes for fascinating reading in the price comparison section.

From this section we learn, for instance, that the price of a tonne of sustainable aviation fuel in 2023 was 2,768 euro. We also learn that there are many different kinds of SAFs that researchers are playing with — and that they are even more expensive, reaching estimated costs of as much as 8,700 euro per tonne for SAFs produced from air-captured CO2. We can only hope nobody invests in trying to make that particular SAF commercially available.

So-called conventional aviation fuels otherwise known as jet fuel are the baseline for these cost estimates. And that baseline amounts to 816 euro per tonne, or less than a third of the 2023 average price for SAF made from waste oils. It is with utter shock, therefore, that I must relate this report from the International Air Transport Association, which earlier this month lamented the fact that SAF production was growing disappointingly slowly. I cannot imagine why. And you’d never guess who the IATA is blaming for this sad state of affairs.