Solutions for the market ramp-up of sustainable aviation fuels

Sustainable aviation fuels are an important component in the defossilization of aviation. However, the market ramp-up of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) faces barriers in areas such as production, regulation, financing, the aviation market itself and challenges at airports and airlines.

As part of the “InnoFuels” project, we held this workshop with representatives from politics, administration, aviation, industry, research and associations to evaluate the practicability, financial and time feasibility and effectiveness of measures to make SAF more attractive for manufacturers, airlines, airports and investors.

Existing and new solutions were discussed and further developed to help overcome the identified barriers.

An overview of the results:

These are the solutions that the individual groups believed should be driven forward most urgently and most importantly in order to overcome the biggest barriers - low production capacities, lack of investment and lack of planning security:

• An official guide for committed companies and potential investors that meets the criteria of safety, consistency, resilience and security of supply
• Mobilization of research to accelerate technology upscaling and approval processes
• Development of a financing system that also secures refinancing
• Incentives for the use of SAF
• A distance-based, earmarked levy to finance long-term public tenders
• Grandfathering for initial installations over a longer period of time
• Homogenization of sustainability, CO2 and electricity procurement criteria

What’s next:

The solution approaches are consolidated in a report and analyzed in terms of feasibility, financing, advantages and disadvantages. In the further course of the project, selected solutions are then developed in greater depth and elaborated.