Whether you're frequently flying or not, you're probably aware that emissions from flying are sky high. So, what if we could turn waste products from plants and foods into sustainable fuels for airplanes? Well, we can, we call it sustainable aviation fuel or (SAF) for short, and it's a growing area of research and opportunity for Australia, as we take off into the world of sustainable aviation fuel.

SAF is a broad term for aviation fuels that come from sustainable sources of feed stock as opposed to traditional fossil fuels. We're already making SAF from plants and fats, but it's even possible to make sustainable fuels from agricultural wastes and algae. When fuel is made from plants and fats, we say it's biogenic.

Biogenic fuel is the most readily available and will play a key role in reducing emissions in the aviation industry in the short term. Producing SAF will provide new opportunities for Australia. 

Growing the crops for sustainable fuels will provide farmers with new income streams and could provide a way to create value from wastes all while reducing emissions from an industry that we heavily rely on.

But we need to carefully consider the trade-offs and benefits of different feed stocks and processes. For example, we don't want crops that we're growing for SAF to compete with food crops for water or land allocation. To make biogenic fuel, we need to understand the bio resource environment and carefully consider land allocation for food production, biofuel, feed stocks, and environmental protection.

What we're interested in is using components like green hydrogen or carbon that is derived from sustainable sources and converting that into aviation fuel so we can successfully synthesise a synthetic crude that can be upgraded to a sustainable aviation fuel. But we also have a lot of work to do. To optimise that process.

This fuels net zero, but it will take some time to scale production for commercial quantities, which is why we're focusing on scaling biogenic SAF in the meantime. But tech isn't the only barrier. Currently, biofuels are a lot more expensive than fossil fuels because the cost of both feed stocks and production processes is higher.

This means that the airlines would have to find a way to cover the extra costs. At the moment, SAF can help reduce emissions by anywhere between 20 and 95%, depending on which feedstocks we use, how we grow them, and how we process them. 

Australia has the opportunity to become our leading exporter of SAF, but it depends on creating strong sustainability credentials to ensure that we produce the feed stocks in a way that guarantees our food supply, shrinks our carbon emissions, and protects our environment and biodiversity.

To understand the best pathways for creating SAF, we need to collect data on feedstock and processes to measure their different levels of sustainability. This will help us create transparent and traceable supply chains where we can ensure compliance at each step. In the short term, sustainable aviation fuel will play a key role in helping reduce emissions in aviation, but most of the SAF that we create now still produces some emissions.

It is important to reduce emissions as much as possible, but we must also remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through nature-based solutions and novel technologies. 

Overall, sustainable aviation fuel provides Australia with the opportunity to reduce emissions from one of our hard to abate industries while building a new industry with new jobs for our regions.