// eSAF Market
A global industry is forming around eSAF. Demand is rising while supply remains scarce, and projects are being developed wherever renewable electricity is available and the investment environment is stable.
// Growth drivers
Climate is the most visible: aviation is only about 2.5% of global CO2 emissions today, but that share is set to triple by 2050 without a fuel switch.1 Energy security is the next, and rarely sharper than now, as the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strips more than ten million barrels a day from world supply, the largest oil shock since the 1970s.1 Fuel made from domestic renewable power removes that exposure outright. And there is real commercial pull: airlines and their customers, especially younger and wealthier flyers, increasingly want lower-emission flights.
Where governments turn that pressure into working policy, demand for eSAF firms up enough to justify expensive plants. The EU mandates a rising blend requirement for sustainable fuel,2 while the United States subsidises production directly, through clean-fuel tax credits. eSAF has been made only in demonstration and pilot plants; no one has built it at commercial scale. The chemistry is well understood, but assembling the full chain at the size and scale required has never been done. A new fuel market is taking shape, with a new set of factors deciding who competes in it.
// Supply
The synthesis at the heart of eSAF is not unproven: South Africa’s Sasol has produced synthetic fuel at commercial scale through Fischer-Tropsch synthesis since the early 1980s, though from coal rather than from captured CO₂.3 The market is now calling for the fuel to be made from renewable power and recycled carbon, and at the significant volume aviation now needs.
The pipeline is growing fast; the project map shows where it stands across Europe and North America. Europe holds around half the world’s announced eSAF capacity, and China is advancing more than ten large-scale projects of its own. The market is still an early scramble over who partners with whom, how to secure power and carbon, and how to reach the airports that will burn the fuel. No European project had reached a final investment decision by mid-2026; the first anywhere was Infinium’s Project Roadrunner in Texas, in May 2025. Operating SAF capacity is still almost all the established HEFA bio-pathway, about 99% of roughly 4.4 million tonnes a year worldwide at the end of 2024.4
Growth has brought a shakeout: 16 announced European projects were paused or cancelled between 2024 and 2025, and projected 2030 output was revised down as oil majors pulled back to prioritise shareholder returns. But new announcements have more than replaced them, and the projects that fell away were largely the least economic and poorly sited.
// Inputs
Producing eSAF requires three physical inputs, and the cost and availability of each shapes where a project can be built. Electricity is the largest: it is the dominant cost in making eSAF, so the price of renewable power, more than anything else, determines where production is viable. The lowest-cost regions for power-to-liquid fuel, such as Brazil and Australia, reach green-hydrogen costs of about 95 to 110 euros per megawatt-hour because their combined wind and solar resources deliver low-cost electricity at high utilisation.5
Carbon is the second input. Every tonne of eSAF needs roughly four tonnes of CO₂, drawn from biogenic point sources where they exist and, in time, from direct air capture. Water is the third, and the one most often overlooked: electrolysis consumes purified water, and in regions where freshwater is scarce or contested, securing a reliable supply is a real constraint on where a plant can sit. The locations that can supply eSAF competitively are those that hold all three together: low-cost renewable electricity, a source of carbon, and dependable water.
Renewable electricity, the single largest cost, and what decides where a plant is viable.
About four tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of fuel, from biogenic sources or, in time, direct air capture.
Purified water for electrolysis, a real constraint where freshwater is scarce.
// Global policy landscape
Policy is not background to this market, it is what will decide its shape. The choices governments make now determine which fuels get built, where, and how fast, and some of those choices cost the taxpayer nothing while shaping citizens’ energy security and emissions for decades. The instruments fall into a few broad forms, and they differ by region. Europe works mainly through demand: ReFuelEU Aviation requires a rising share of sustainable fuel in the jet fuel uplifted at EU and EEA airports, from 2% in 2025 to 70% by 2050, with a separate eSAF sub-mandate that no other pathway can fill, because there is not enough land to decarbonise aviation with crop- and waste-based fuel alone. Around it, the EU Emissions Trading System prices carbon into every intra-EEA flight, the RFNBO framework under RED III defines what qualifies as a renewable synthetic fuel, and CORSIA adds a global offsetting layer. The United States works through supply, paying producers directly through clean-fuel tax credits rather than mandating a blend.
The mandate has enforcement behind it: the penalty for not supplying the fuel is set above the cost of the fuel itself. Transport and Environment estimates that suppliers delivering no eSAF would face fines of around EUR 8 billion for the 2030 obligation alone, with a supplier the size of Air bp, which provides roughly a quarter of European jet fuel, exposed to approximately EUR 2 billion.6 The two models place the cost differently: the US production credit draws on the public purse, while Europe’s mandate places it on suppliers and, ultimately, on flyers. Some of the most consequential choices, such as carbon pricing or recognising a fuel’s emissions saving, cost the taxpayer nothing yet steer billions in investment.7
The blend requirement at every EEA airport
| Year | SAF | eSAF |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 2% | n/a |
| 2030 | 6% | 1.2% |
| 2032 | 6% | 2.0% |
| 2035 | 20% | 5% |
| 2040 | 34% | 10% |
| 2045 | 42% | 15% |
| 2050 | 70% | 35% |
From 2025, every fuel supplier must blend at least this share of sustainable fuel, and the synthetic (eSAF) portion shown beside it, into the jet fuel uplifted at each airport. Aircraft flying today are already certified for blends of up to 50%, with approval for 100% expected this decade.
eSAF is the most expensive sustainable aviation fuel to produce, costing several times as much as fossil kerosene, by EASA's 2025 estimate up to roughly ten times, and two to three times as much as other SAF.8 A single large-scale plant needs on the order of one to two billion euros of capital, and meeting global 2030 demand has been estimated to require between 19 and 45 billion dollars of investment, depending on the mix of pathways built.9 Most developers are start-ups rather than oil majors, and the high, front-loaded cost combined with uncertainty over the long-term price of the fuel has kept the cost of capital high.
The result is a chicken-and-egg condition that has held the market back: producers are reluctant to commit without guaranteed demand, while buyers are reluctant to sign at today's prices.9 This, more than any doubt about the fuel itself, is what has kept European projects short of final investment decision. The fuel works and the demand is set in law; what the market is still assembling is the financing structure to build at scale.
// Outlook
eSAF is an early industry, but not an unproven one: the chemistry is established, the costs are falling, and the regulatory framework is in place. Each plant is a major piece of process engineering and infrastructure, so scaling the industry is a question of building and financing projects one by one, not stamping out units in a factory. The piece still being assembled is finance, and the calls now coming from across the industry are for the revenue certainty that lets first plants reach investment decision, and for mechanisms such as book-and-claim that widen the pool of buyers able to share the early cost.
The direction of travel is set. Renewable power is becoming less expensive year on year, every plant built lowers the cost and risk of the next, and the demand written into European law runs to 2050. The producers that secure financing in the next few years will be supplying a market that is short of fuel and growing for decades. That is the opportunity in front of locations, like Iceland, that hold the inputs the fuel depends on.
// The EU position
This must be a wake-up call and a turning point · when Europe steps away from fossil fuel dependence, and steps towards clean energy autonomy.
Dan Jørgensen
EU Commissioner for Energy and Housing · presenting the AccelerateEU initiative, April 202610
// eSAF
What eSAF is, why it counts as sustainable, and how it drops straight into today's aircraft.
// Technology
From renewable electricity, water, and CO₂ to jet fuel, and where the technology stands today.
// eSAF Cost
Why eSAF costs more than fossil jet fuel today, and why the gap is closing.
// eSAF vs the Alternatives
eSAF, biofuel, hydrogen, batteries: why the electrofuel route is the one that scales.
