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Aviation is one of the major drivers of the global economy. Every day, nearly 10 million people use airplanes for work, travel, business, or to visit family. But this enormous movement comes at an energy price: airlines consume around 100 billion gallons of fuel per year, an amount that makes decarbonizing air transport particularly difficult.
The problem is that an airplane cannot easily operate using the same solutions that are beginning to transform the automobile industry. Current batteries have too much mass to provide the necessary energy for long-haul flights. Therefore, finding sustainable aviation fuels has become one of the great technological challenges of our time.
SAF: a first alternative already in operation. Sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) are already a reality. They can be manufactured from various raw materials, including used oils, greases, and certain waste products. The drawback is availability. We cannot dedicate large tracts of agricultural land to cultivating raw materials exclusively for fuel production, because we would compete with food production and other land uses.
Therefore, although bio-based SAF will play an important role, it will hardly be the only solution. In 2025, it represented only about 0.6% of the fuel used by global aviation, and IATA forecasts approximately 0.8% for 2026.
What if we manufacture fuel with CO₂? Here, a particularly interesting possibility emerges: eSAF, synthetic fuels produced using captured carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and renewable electricity.
The company Infinium has already demonstrated that this idea can work. Its Pathfinder project, in Corpus Christi, Texas, began producing eFuels in 2023 using CO₂ and renewable energy. And a test flight has already been conducted.
The next step is Project Roadrunner, a manufacturing plant currently under construction in Texas and scheduled to begin operations in 2027. The facility will produce approximately 7.6 million gallons of eSAF and other eFuels annually.
This may seem like a huge figure, but it's enough to compare it to the more than 100 billion gallons that aviation needs annually. The conclusion is clear: production capacity would have to be multiplied many times over.
Hydrogen is also knocking on the door. Another alternative is to use green hydrogen directly as fuel. Its advantage is obvious: it can be produced using renewable electricity and water. But significant technical difficulties arise. Hydrogen occupies a large volume and must be stored, especially in liquid form, at extremely low temperatures. It also requires new infrastructure, distribution systems, and adapted aircraft designs.
There will be no magic bullet. The future will probably not depend on a single fuel. The solution will be a combination of bioSAF, eSAF, hydrogen, energy efficiency, new aircraft, and improved operations, implemented gradually.
And, at least during the transition, all of this will come at a cost that we will have to start paying as soon as possible. Today, SAF is still much more expensive than conventional fuel.
But history shows that when there is a collective challenge and knowledge, investment, and will are mobilized, we are capable of overcoming obstacles that seemed impossible. The climate challenge is too important for us to allow ourselves to fail.
And while we wait for those solutions, there is also a simple and immediate measure: fly less and only when it is truly necessary. Every liter of fuel that we don't need to produce, transport, and burn also counts. Time will tell how we will fly. What is clear is that we will have to start deciding, as soon as possible, which energy sources we want to use.
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