The potential scale-up of sustainable aviation fuels production capacity to meet global and EU policy targets

Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) offer an opportunity to reduce aviation greenhouse gas emissions, but their global production scale-up to meet policy goals remain unexplored. Here, we describe the Global SAF Capacity Database to quantify global and EU SAF capacity, comparing it to production capacity announcements. Despite announcements of 9.1 Mt/year (2.2 Mt/year in the EU) by 2024 and 38.9 Mt/year (9.3 Mt/year in the EU) by 2030, only 24% (26% in the EU) of the announced capacity was realized on time by 2024. Over 40% of the announced capacity for 2030 is at risk of delays and cancellations. We use the database in a diffusion model parametrized by announced capacity, realization rates, expected demand, and historical growth analogs to calculate SAF potential scale-up to meet net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Even if SAF follows the rapid scale-up of solar and wind energy, the global and EU capacity will fall short of their respective targets by 42% and 18% in 2030, and 7% and 5% in 2050.