Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

opinion

by Oscar Henderson

October 27, 2023

The global Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) industry currently does not have adequate supply to meet demand. It needs Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

The 2022 sci-fi thriller, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, dives into the multiverse on the back of the female lead struggling to pay her tax returns. The following 140 minutes sees Evelyn attempt to protect the thin veil of reality that holds everything together. It is more fun than it sounds.

Everything, everywhere, all at once is also what Jonathon Counsell, global head of Sustainability, IAG Group, says needs to happen to scale up all forms of SAF production. “We need everything. We are in a hard to decarbonise sector, we will need all technologies,” Counsell tells SAF Investor.

Everything

Diversification is a priority for IAG. It has signed agreements for SAF produced from the Alcohol-to-Jet pathway, from Project Speedbird in the UK with Nova Panagaea Technologies and LanzaJet, in which it also invested $865m earlier in 2023.

LanzaJet has also signed an offtake agreement with IAG for production at their Freedom Pines facility in Georgia, US. The airline group has also signed an agreement with Velocys for SAF produced from municipal waste through the Fischer-Tropsch process. This is exciting as it helps solve the aviation decarbonisation problem as well as the landfill problem, says Counsell.

IAG is also looking at announcing an agreement with a Power-to-Liquid facility in the next six months.

Everywhere

“With SAF, every country [has the flexibility to] produce it, with one of the pathways or feedstocks…Everybody should be looking at establishing their own SAF industry,” explains Counsell. “Let’s get that global supply up and running as quickly as possible.”

IAG is committed to working collaboratively, not just to decarbonise its own operations, but airline operations globally. With the oneworld partnership, it is able to use the global outreach to secure SAF deals not only in the US, UK and EU, but across the world. Encouraging worldwide SAF production is the key to helping the production reach scale. “There is not one airline or company that can address the climate change challenge. It has to be done collaboratively across the whole industry,” says Counsell.

There is now clear industry drive, as 40% of airlines by capacity have committed to 10% SAF by 2030. This is an encouraging step forward but there is still a long way to go.

All at Once

Counsell highlights two key factors that need to be done in the short term to encourage long term production: policy clarity and the strong signal of demand.

“If you don’t get policy support you won’t get the investment to enable this scale up,” stresses Counsell.

This is a critical aspect to de-risk SAF for investors, as is the certainty of strong demand. IAG made a voluntary commitment to use 10% SAF by 2030, roughly 1m tonnes of fuel. When the announcement was made, it was 10 times the total SAF produced in 2021. So far IAG has secured 25% of its required supply and hope to have contracts in place for 100% within the next three years, Counsell tells SAF Investor.

Airline investments are not going to be enough to fund projects to commercialise SAF production, there will be a huge reliance on prime capital.

“The primary role airlines can bring is to provide committed demand. Longer term agreements that can provide bankability for SAF plants,” says Counsell. This was a strong rationale behind the voluntary SAF target announcement and the announcement of 100% offtake from the Speedbird project.

Unlike the lead of the film, Counsell stresses that he is not alone fighting for SAF.

You can listen to the podcast interview here.