Sustainable aviation fuel

Assembled from 15 blocks · 2 evidence · 9 related

1. Story
2. Liquid hydrocarbon fuel chemically close enough to kerosene to be burned in existing engines and moved through existing pipelines and hydrant systems — a drop-in replacement, certified for blending up to fifty per cent under current specifications. The category covers routes with very different properties: hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids made from used cooking oil, tallow and vegetable oils, which is nearly all of current production and is limited by feedstock; alcohol-to-jet; gasification and Fischer–Tropsch synthesis of residues and wastes; and synthetic power-to-liquid fuel made from electrolytic hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide, which is unconstrained by feedstock and is several times the price of fossil kerosene. The practical position in the mid-2020s was that sustainable aviation fuel accounted for a fraction of one per cent of global jet fuel use while policy attempted to force the curve — the European Union's ReFuelEU Aviation regulation imposed a two per cent blending obligation from 2025 rising in steps toward mid-century, with a sub-mandate specifically for synthetic fuel so that the cheap feedstock route could not satisfy the whole requirement. The honest summary is that the sector's only near-term lever is a fuel that is scarce and expensive, and that the mandate structure is an attempt to buy down that cost by guaranteeing demand — the same mechanism that worked for solar, applied to a technology with no comparable manufacturing learning curve. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Aviation
5. Sustainable aviation fuel
6. Connections
7. Aviation
8. The European Union sustainable aviation fuel blending obligation begins
9. The electrified share of final energy
10. Gravimetric energy density as a transport constraint
11. Sustainable aviation fuel
12. The European Union sustainable aviation fuel blending obligation begins
13. Evidence
14. The reference source for world energy balances, final energy consumption by carrier, generation mix, technology cost trends and scenario pathways used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: no edition was retrieved in this session — iea.org was refused by the network egress proxy — so every figure attributed to this series is stated as a magnitude with the specific gap named on the citing record, and no current-year quantity should be presented to a reader without confirmation against a named edition.
15. Supports the sectoral emission structure used throughout this pack, the treatment of industry process emissions as distinct from energy emissions, the assessment of technology cost declines in solar, wind and storage, and the identification of aviation, shipping and heavy industry as hard-to-abate. V55 verification basis: not retrieved in this session; no chapter, table or page number is cited because none could be confirmed, and every sectoral share attributed here is given as a range rather than a figure.