Net Zero at 35,000 Feet: Aviation’s Grand Plan Risks Becoming Trapped in Purgatory | News

For an industry often accused of moving too slowly on climate change, aviation has spent the better part of a decade doing something remarkable. It has aligned around a single destination.

Net zero by 2050 is no longer seriously contested within commercial aviation. Airlines, airports, manufacturers, fuel producers, regulators and governments broadly agree on the objective. The challenge is no longer ambition. The challenge is execution.

At the heart of aviation’s climate strategy sit two pillars. The first is Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), a renewable alternative to conventional jet fuel produced from sources such as waste oils, agricultural residues, municipal waste and, increasingly, synthetic e-fuels created using renewable electricity. Unlike hydrogen or electric aircraft, SAF can be used within today’s aircraft and airport infrastructure, making it the industry’s most immediate and scalable pathway to reducing emissions. The second pillar is CORSIA, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, a United Nations-backed framework established through the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) that enables airlines to offset emissions that cannot yet be eliminated through operational improvements or cleaner fuels. Together, SAF and CORSIA form the backbone of aviation’s pathway to net zero. 

Yet listening to discussions at the IATA Annual General Meeting in Rio de Janeiro, one senses a growing frustration among industry leaders. SAF, the technology expected to deliver the majority of aviation’s emissions reductions over the next quarter century, remains stuck in an uncomfortable middle ground. Too important to abandon, too expensive to scale, and increasingly trapped between competing regulatory frameworks, political priorities and market realities. 

The result is a sector that risks finding itself in a form of climate purgatory. Everyone agrees where they want to go. Few agree on how to get there.

What makes this situation particularly frustrating is that substantial progress has already been made. Airlines have committed billions of dollars. Governments have introduced mandates and incentives. New production technologies are emerging. Global carbon frameworks have been negotiated. Entire ecosystems of investors, fuel producers and infrastructure developers have formed around the promise of aviation decarbonisation. 

And yet the numbers remain stubbornly small.

According to IATA’s latest assessment, SAF production will reach approximately 2.4 million tonnes in 2026. That sounds significant until one considers that it represents just 0.8% of global jet fuel consumption. Even more striking is the fact that global production capacity is expected to exceed 9 million tonnes, meaning the industry already possesses considerably more potential than it is actually producing. The challenge is therefore not simply technological. It is economic, political and structural. 

This disconnect sits at the centre of the current debate.

For years, discussions around SAF have tended to focus on aviation itself. Airlines need cleaner fuel. Governments mandate cleaner fuel. Producers build cleaner fuel facilities. The logic appears straightforward. The reality is considerably more complicated.

One of the most compelling arguments presented in Rio came from IATA Chief Economist Marie Owens Thomsen, who urged policymakers to stop viewing SAF as an aviation problem and start viewing it as an energy-system challenge. Energy transitions, she argued, do not begin with the end user. They begin with primary energy sources, transformation infrastructure and distribution networks. Aviation may be one customer of the future energy economy, but it is not the only one. 

That distinction is more important than it may first appear. Jet fuel accounts for only around 10% of output from a typical refinery. Refineries survive because they produce multiple products simultaneously, from diesel and gasoline to petrochemicals and heating fuels. The economics of one output often depend upon the others. Attempting to develop SAF in isolation from the wider energy system risks misunderstanding how fuel markets actually work. 

This explains why many airline executives have become increasingly sceptical of policy approaches centred primarily on mandates. The criticism is not directed at the ambition behind them. Most carriers strongly support accelerating SAF adoption. Their concern is that policymakers have become preoccupied with creating demand before addressing supply.

Throughout the briefing, IATA repeatedly returned to a simple proposition: before governments mandate large-scale SAF consumption, they should first create the conditions necessary for supply to emerge. That means supporting feedstock development, accelerating certification, harmonising standards, improving infrastructure, reducing investment risk and building transparent global markets. Instead, many jurisdictions have focused on consumption mandates before resolving the underlying constraints limiting production. 

The consequences are increasingly visible.

In Europe and the United Kingdom, SAF mandates have produced pricing structures that, according to IATA, have effectively doubled SAF costs compared with market prices. At precisely the moment aviation faces a global fuel shock driven by geopolitical instability and supply disruptions, compliance costs are becoming detached from the underlying economics of fuel production. 

The numbers tell the story. In 2025, conventional jet fuel averaged approximately US$721 per tonne. SAF itself averaged around US$2,180 per tonne. Yet the implied SAF compliance price in Europe and the UK rose to between US$3,433 and US$3,519 per tonne. From the industry’s perspective, a policy mechanism intended to accelerate decarbonisation is instead making the transition substantially more expensive than necessary. 

The problem becomes even more acute when examining e-SAF, the synthetic fuel pathway widely viewed as essential to achieving net zero over the longer term. Current global operating and under-construction e-SAF capacity amounts to around 20,000 tonnes. Yet European and UK mandates alone require roughly 600,000 tonnes by 2030, a thirty-fold gap. To bridge that shortfall would require approximately twenty new refineries. At present, only one commercial-scale facility is under construction. 

The mathematics are uncomfortable. Under current trajectories, airlines may soon face regulatory obligations that exceed the physical availability of fuel. Compliance penalties could run into billions of euros annually, not because airlines are unwilling to participate, but because the supply chain has not yet developed at the pace policymakers assumed. 

Viewed from Rio, this appears less like a failure of ambition than a failure of sequencing.

The irony is that several practical solutions already exist but receive comparatively little attention. Co-processing, which enables SAF production within existing refining infrastructure, could unlock meaningful volumes at lower cost and with shorter lead times. Lower Carbon Aviation Fuels (LCAF), another ICAO-recognised pathway, remain underdeveloped despite their potential contribution. Industry leaders repeatedly argued that the easiest emissions reductions are often being overlooked in favour of technologies that remain years away from commercial maturity. 

There is also a deeper issue around market design.

One of the more striking observations during the briefing was that SAF today barely functions as a genuine market. It remains a patchwork of private transactions, local agreements and fragmented supply chains. Volumes are limited, prices lack transparency and distribution remains constrained by geography. In essence, aviation is attempting to scale a global climate solution without first building a truly global market. 

This explains IATA’s enthusiasm for “book-and-claim” systems and the newly established CADO SAF Registry. The objective is not simply administrative efficiency. It is to create a global market where SAF can be produced wherever feedstocks are cheapest and most abundant, while allowing environmental attributes to be traded internationally. Nearly 150 organisations have already joined the registry initiative, reflecting a growing recognition that market infrastructure may be just as important as production technology. 

The same tensions are visible in the parallel debate surrounding CORSIA.

Created by ICAO and supported by more than 130 participating states and nearly 700 airlines, CORSIA remains one of the few genuinely global climate frameworks operating at industry scale. Airlines can meet obligations through approved carbon credits, known as Eligible Emissions Units, or through the use of qualifying sustainable fuels. It represents a rare example of countries agreeing to a common mechanism rather than pursuing competing national approaches. 

Yet here too, implementation is proving more difficult than agreement. Current demand for CORSIA-compliant carbon credits through 2026 is expected to reach approximately 213 million tonnes of CO₂. Available supply stands at just 38 million. The resulting shortfall of around 175 million tonnes highlights a recurring theme running through much of the sustainability discussion in Rio: governments have become highly effective at creating obligations, but considerably less effective at ensuring the mechanisms required to fulfil them exist at sufficient scale. 

None of this means aviation is abandoning its net-zero ambitions. If anything, the industry’s concern is the opposite. Executives increasingly worry that poorly coordinated policies, fragmented regulations and premature mandates could slow the transition by making it more expensive, more complex and less investable than necessary.

The frustration is amplified because the opportunity remains extraordinary. The Americas alone are projected to deliver around 8 million tonnes of SAF capacity by 2030. Brazil possesses enough biomass feedstock potential to produce approximately 12 million tonnes of SAF annually by the end of the decade using established technologies, exceeding its own domestic requirements. Similar opportunities exist across other feedstock-rich regions. The resources exist. The demand exists. The climate imperative certainly exists. 

What appears to be missing is coherence.

There is a growing sense that governments, regulators and industry participants are all pulling in broadly the same direction but at different speeds, using different maps and occasionally pursuing different definitions of success. The industry’s message from Rio was not that net zero is unattainable. Rather, it was that decarbonisation cannot be legislated into existence through mandates alone.

Net zero remains achievable. The technologies exist. The feedstocks increasingly exist. The capital exists. What remains uncertain is whether policymakers can resist the temptation to regulate the destination before building the road.

Until that balance is found, sustainable aviation fuel risks remaining what it has increasingly become: a solution caught between aspiration and implementation, between urgency and practicality, and between political ambition and industrial reality. For an industry that has spent decades perfecting the art of moving people efficiently around the world, it is a surprisingly difficult place to be.