With the holiday season about to peak, more than 60 million people are expected to fly during the UK’s big summer getaway, according to the UK Civil Aviation Authority. Every one of those flights highlights the scale of aviation’s decarbonisation challenge. Although the sector accounts for about 2–3% of global energy-related CO₂ emissions, it remains one of the hardest industries to decarbonise.
Unlike road transport, aircraft cannot simply switch to batteries. Long-haul flights require energy-dense liquid fuels, meaning sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) will play a central role in reducing emissions for decades to come.
The pressure is also mounting. To accelerate the transition, the EU’s ReFuelEU Aviation regulation requires fuel suppliers to blend increasing volumes of SAF into jet fuel – starting at 2% in 2025 and rising to 70% by 2050, with dedicated targets for synthetic fuels such as electro-sustainable aviation fuel (e-SAF). Those mandates are expected to drive billions of euros of investment in new production facilities over the coming decades.
But producing SAF at commercial scale is far from straightforward.
Copper’s perspective
Through our work helping clients communicate complex energy-transition technologies, we have seen the conversation evolve. The challenge is no longer just developing lower-carbon solutions but proving they can be deployed at scale with the reliability and investor confidence needed to build viable markets.
E-SAF is a good example. Produced by combining renewable hydrogen with captured CO2 before converting it into synthetic kerosene, e-SAF is widely recognised as one of the most promising pathways to decarbonising aviation.
The chemistry is well understood. The greater challenge is delivering commercial-scale plants that are both technically reliable and economically viable.
An e-SAF facility integrates multiple complex process technologies, each affecting efficiency, reliability and cost. With significant upfront capital required, developers must demonstrate not only that individual technologies perform as intended but that the entire process can operate reliably over decades.
That makes technology selection a strategic business decision as much as an engineering one.
Why technology maturity and integration matters
When evaluating technologies, developers are increasingly looking beyond performance claims.
They want evidence that a process has been demonstrated, that critical equipment has been proven and that lessons from real operating plants have been incorporated into the design. Increasingly, they are also favouring integrated process technologies that combine the key stages of e-SAF production into a single optimised process.
Integration matters because the interfaces between technologies are often where complexity –and risk – emerge. By optimising the process as a whole, rather than as a series of individual units, developers can improve reliability, reduce technical risk and strengthen project economics – helping make projects more attractive to investors.
Small improvements can deliver major economic gains
Commercial success ultimately depends on producing as much sustainable aviation fuel as possible from every tonne of carbon and every unit of renewable electricity. That means optimising the entire process rather than focusing on individual pieces of equipment.
Advances in catalyst performance, efficient syngas production, intelligent heat integration and recycling suitable intermediate streams can each improve performance by a few percentage points. Individually those gains may appear modest, but together they can have a significant impact on operating costs, plant efficiency and overall project economics.
Just as importantly, designing for reliability from the outset helps maximise plant availability, ensuring expensive assets spend more time producing fuel and less time offline.
The next phase of aviation decarbonisation
The SAF industry is moving rapidly from demonstration projects towards large-scale commercial deployment. Innovation remains essential, but the next phase of growth will increasingly be defined by technologies that combine efficiency with operational maturity, proven integration and investor confidence.
As governments continue to tighten SAF mandates and airlines seek to reduce life-cycle emissions, success will depend not only on developing better technologies but on deploying them with the confidence that they can perform reliably at industrial scale. That is the story companies in this space now need to tell.