« SAF will never take off without urgent price regulation » (O. Georgoutsakou / A4E)

Airlines for Europe Calls for Market Reform and Flexible Frameworks to Drive SAF Adoption

What is Airlines for Europe's position on the development of sustainable aviation fuel?

Airlines for Europe brings together 16 European airlines and we are an active stakeholder in the deployment of the Destination 2050 roadmap. We are 100% committed to everything that can decarbonise our sector, and SAF is obviously a key part of that. We are working closely with the regulatory authorities at European level and are fully aligned with the Sustainable Transport Investment Plan (STIP) announced in November 2025: all that remains now is to roll it out.

While we agree with the broad thrust and direction of this plan, we also stand by our position: financing the transition to net zero for aviation will cost €1.3 trillion between now and 2050, to the tune of €500 billion a year. Passengers alone cannot bear these costs, so other levers of financing need to be activated.

In this overall picture, SAF is one of the most mature ways of decarbonising aviation, but there is still a long way to go, and blending mandates alone will not be enough to develop a sector that is still in its infancy, or to create a functioning market. There are currently too few players, too little transparency, and prices that are far too high for this SAF sector to truly take off.

With jet fuel prices surging, should the price gap between SAF and conventional kerosene be narrowing?

Logically, yes, since SAF feedstocks are not affected by the current energy crisis, the price differential between jet fuel and SAF, which stands at three to five times the price of kerosene, should naturally decrease as jet fuel prices rise. With kerosene having doubled from around €700 to €1,400 per tonne, one would expect some convergence. But this has not happened: SAF price curves have simply followed those of jet fuel. This is precisely why we say that this is not a market at all. There is no transparency, too few players, and a very opaque price formation mechanism.

We have been invited by DG Competition and DG MOVE to share evidence as part of an investigation into SAF prices, to check that there are no anti-competitive practices along the value chain. Producers like Neste, the Finnish market leader, have been losing money for a very long time, while airlines are paying a very high price per tonne, so we are clearly not looking at an ideal market model.

What are your recommendations for the competitive development of the SAF and e-SAF markets?

First of all, we need to create a market! The blending mandates, 2% by 2025 and 6% by 2030, help to mark out the roadmap, but they will not be enough on their own to drive the adoption of SAF, let alone e-SAF, which costs five to ten times more than conventional kerosene. We are aligned with ReFuelEU's medium- and long-term objectives, but we are asking for flexibility for airlines: it's a new world, and we need to allow everyone to enter it at their own pace, while keeping everyone on the same course.

We also propose that the book-and-claim system, which allows purchasers to acquire certificates rather than physically uplift SAF in order to meet their blending obligations, should be introduced immediately, and in any case before the e-SAF sub-mandate comes into force in 2030. Airlines simply cannot wait five years for this system to be put in place.

These are just a few ideas, but the priority remains, of course, to drastically reduce the price of SAF, and even more so the price of e-SAF, if we want to build a viable industry capable of scaling up in the time available, which is not very long.

What is A4E's position on the EU Emissions Trading System?

The EU ETS is specific to Europe, which is a handicap to the competitiveness of our companies and our continent. Recently, the Commission announced that 20 million ETS allowances would be allocated to airlines for the incorporation of SAF in their jet fuel, thereby subsidising the price difference between the various fuels, and we were hoping for 50% more.

For our part, we are more in favour of aligning ETS tariffs with those of CORSIA, and of really ramping up this mechanism, in which 130 countries around the world are participating, and which has the advantage of effectively financing the decarbonisation of aviation. While ETS revenues are, in principle, earmarked for decarbonisation, they are not specifically earmarked for aviation, and it is even very difficult to trace the use of the money by the Member States to whom these revenues are paid.

We are also opposed to extending the ETS to flights outside the EU, also for obvious reasons of competitiveness: we live in a global and competitive world, and it seems inconceivable to us to put such a burden on European airlines.