SAF growth needs registry links: 123Carbon

opinion

by Fayaz Hussain

April 14, 2025

Registry management has emerged as a critical infrastructure component as more and more corporates look towards sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to mitigate their aviation-related scope 3 emissions. Netherlands-based 123Carbon is positioning itself as a key player in this space. It recently announced a strategic partnership with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to develop interoperability between their respective SAF registries.

Founded in 2021, 123Carbon operates its registry as “an independent and integrated platform for the assurance, issuance, management and transfer, currently, of transport-related certificates,” explains Jeroen van Heiningen, the company’s founder while speaking to SAF Investor.

“We are basically a registry that operates throughout transportation on all modalities – that’s air, road, rail, barging through a book-and-claim solution. We allow carriers and fuel suppliers to transfer the environmental benefits of their actions to downstream parties.”

The company’s blockchain-backed registry ensures allocation of environmental benefits from scope one parties (like airlines) to downstream scope three entities (such as corporate customers and freight forwarders) This prevents double counting and ensuring calculation accuracy.

At the heart of 123Carbon’s business model is the book-and-claim system. “We make sure that they [airlines] can issue high quality, high integrity insets that are compliant with the latest standards and are externally verified in an efficient way,” van Heiningen says. “And then we offer the digital pathways through which they can then share those certificates with their customers, keeping in mind that we guard the chain of custody and who gets to claim what.”

Van Heiningen says 123Carbon takes a comprehensive approach to certificate creation through a four-step process. First, they determine the insetting model, as “both a SAF supplier can move into creating certificates, as does World Energy does, but also an airline can create them,” explains van Heiningen.

Next comes legal review to ensure proper ownership of environmental attributes, followed by calculating both greenhouse gas reductions and transport activity metrics. Finally, they validate all documentation, relying on established International Sustainability & Carbon Certification documentation for sustainability verification. Although specific monthly volumes remain confidential, 123Carbon has processed significant amounts of SAF.

“In total, on the registry that we have contracted about 350,000 tons of CO2, which is an equivalent of over 100m litres of pure biofuel (including both SAF and renewable diesel) being processed across the industries that we serve,” van Heiningen reveals.

Starting in Europe, the company has expanded globally. “We’ve seen a huge pickup in APAC, especially in Japan. So we’ve got a very strong customer base in Japan, and we now see a pickup on the US side across all modalities,” says van Heiningen.

The company’s partnership with the IATA seeks to build on the goal of standardisation. The association recently launched its own SAF Registry, aiming to “enable a global market for SAF that will accelerate the transition to net zero emissions by 2050”.

Their collaboration focuses on creating a unique identifier with aligned data points between registries, establishing information exchange processes to prevent double issuance and developing a dispute resolution process. “We’re starting off easy. We’re starting off first by creating a unique identifier through which we can say, well, can we compare, do the checks?” explains van Heiningen. “Then the second phase is, can we align on the data set that we’re both providing?”

Despite these efforts, van Heiningen believes multiple registries will continue to exist, which will mean challenges in the form of interoperability. “We don’t believe that this will be one registry market. There will be multiple registries active because each registry has their own different view,” he says.

“Transferability between the registries is now the next big thing. How do we make sure that if a SAF supplier has registered something on Registry A, but a forwarder or another party is working on a different registry, that the two can meet?”

He emphasises that registries like 123Carbon provides “one single level of data points or level of transparency and also external validation of a company.” Its partnership with IATA SAF Registry is one step forward to developing that standardisation where multiple registries can begin to reach a common modus operandi.

While debate is still ongoing about SAF certificates’ acceptance by reporting frameworks like Science-based Targets Initiative and GHG Protocol, van Heiningen sees market activity as validation of the approach.

“Every transaction is also proof that the market is accepting this as a solution,” he argues. “Why would a company buy SAF if they could also plant a tree, if it would have made no difference for SBTi? Every transaction made for us is proof that the markets are convinced that this is an interesting, at minimum, an interesting instrument to reduce CO2 emissions.”