JetBlue Q&A: How SAF can Help Aviation Reach Net Zero

With the aviation industry aiming for net-zero emissions by 2050, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has identified sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as a necessity.

IATA says it could make up 65% of the industry’s net zero strategy.

JetBlue is a major airline headquartered in New York City that operates more than 1,000 flights per day.

Sara Bogdan, Managing Director and Head of Sustainability and ESG at JetBlue, has been with the company for 10 years.

Amy Burr is President of JetBlue Ventures, a JetBlue subsidiary that invests in and partners with early-stage startups to improve the industry. 

Aether Fuels is a climate tech company that aims to decarbonise hard-to-abate industries.

In 2024 it secured more than US$35m in funding, including investment by JetBlue Ventures, to boost sustainable fuel development and signed a memorandum of understanding with JetBlue to supply SAF to the airline. 

Conor Madigan is Founder and CEO of Aether Fuels, and aims to support industries where batteries aren’t an option for the foreseeable future. 

Sara, Amy and Conor share their expertise with Sustainability Magazine.

How important is SAF to aviation sustainability goals?

Sara: While there are a number of levers we use to address our carbon emissions and meet our sustainability goals, SAF is expected to be the key contributor to large-scale lifecycle emissions reduction, which is highly dependent on availability and costs of supply.

For JetBlue, the impact of SAF represents more than half our projected emissions reduction pathway.

Advancements in aircraft technology and fuel efficiency represent the second-most significant opportunity for emissions reduction. This includes efficiencies as we transition to newer and more advanced aircraft, the incremental improvements for aircraft delivered in subsequent years, as well as potential for broader efficiency improvements for next generation aircraft yet to be developed. In the US, procedural optimization via ATC modernisation led by the FAA and fine-tuning of our own operations will also significantly contribute to further emissions reductions. 

While we’re taking the steps we can on our own to reduce emissions, we also recognise the airline industry can’t reach their goals alone and must continue to encourage the growth of the SAF market.

The market has come a long way since we first started regularly flying on SAF in 2020.

We’ve more than doubled our uptake in their operation each year since and are projecting to do the same in 2024. Despite that growth and our eight separate partnerships established for current and future SAF supply, there continues to be a need for more affordable SAF.

We continue to look for additional supply and push for policy support that encourage the SAF market and open up opportunities for producers. Along with collaboration across industry groups and corporate partners to help cover the current price premium for SAF through purchase of SAF certificates or book and claim initiatives, we believe we can build a more sustainable future of flight.

Amy: Investing in startups who are pioneering sustainable solutions is a key pillar of JetBlue Ventures’ strategy. Our commitment to sustainability includes revolutionising how we fly and transforming aviation to meaningfully reduce aircraft emissions. This requires fundamentally rethinking aircraft design, fuel sources, and propulsion systems.

Our goal is to drive meaningful change in sustainable aviation, supporting JetBlue’s net zero carbon goals and the broader aviation industry’s sustainability objectives.

We are excited to back some of the most cutting-edge innovators developing technologies to accurately measure and mitigate emissions, improve environmental protections, and enable revolutionary propulsion systems for cleaner transportation.

To date, we’ve invested in 14 companies that fall within our sustainability theme or whose technology contributes to sustainability.

We’ve backed several innovative companies in the sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) space that have made significant advancements, each playing a crucial role in various parts of the SAF production pathway – Aether Fuels is one of these, and we see their mission to unlock a broader range of SAF feedstock as a vital step on the road to net zero flying.

What is the current state of the sustainable fuels market?

Sara: It’s growing – for example, we continue to more than double our usage of SAF year-over-year since taking our first delivery of regular SAF in 2020, today receiving SAF from three different producers.

Earlier this year we also announced our first regular supply of blended SAF for commercial air travel in New York. This newly available SAF in our hometown and one of the world’s busiest airspaces is a key signal of the growing engagement by major fuel producers and the potential of SAF to meaningfully address aviation’s carbon emissions. 

For the aviation industry to meet our shared goals though, we really need to see rapid growth in SAF production and continue to urge policy support to encourage those producers. Today, as a result of state-level programs incentivizing the use of renewable fuels, the majority of domestically supplied blended SAF is delivered into West Coast airports.

Engagement across public and private sectors is needed to expand the supply of SAF to more cities and grow the economies of scale – and JetBlue and JetBlue Ventures’ engagement and investment in SAF technology companies like Aether Fuels is an important part of that.

How is the sustainable fuels market evolving?

Conor: It’s growing rapidly, but it needs to accelerate even faster. In aviation, for example - global production of sustainable aviation fuel is set to grow 98% to 1.95 million mt this year – and 81% from 2024 to 2025. This is impressive growth, by any standard – but the estimated production in 2024 is only 0.53% of aviation's fuel requirements overall.

Regulation is gradually ramping up – the EU has mandated 2% SAF use starting in 2025, scaling to 70% by 2050. The UK is also starting at 2% in 2025, aiming for 22% by 2040. Japan is aiming for 10% by 2030, while Singapore is aiming for 3 to 5% by 2030.

Even meeting the relatively modest 2025 and 2030 targets is going to require a huge amount of effort and investment – and arguably growing further to reach the 2040 and later targets will be even tougher as we exhaust supplies of the “lowest hanging fruit” feedstock – like used cooking oil (UCO).

A critical part of the solution is unlocking new forms of feedstock – waste carbon that can be economically turned into fuel and, importantly, is widely available enough to meet the huge demand of these industries.

We’ve come a long way making SAF by hydrotreating waste lipid feedstocks (like UCO), a process referred to frequently as HEFA (hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids).  This is how we make the SAF available today, but we are already starting to run out of these feedstocks, and thus we need to unlock new and more abundant feedstocks to keep scaling. This means finding ways to economically utilize more challenging but more abundant feedstocks, like agricultural and forestry waste, industrial gases, and captured CO2 and hydrogen. 

How is Aether's technology different from others available?

Conor: Our Aether Aurora technology economically converts these low value and abundant waste carbon feedstocks into liquid fuels. It optimises, intensifies and simplifies the steps around the existing Fischer Tropsch (FT) process, which turns hydrogen and carbon monoxide into liquid hydrocarbons. 

Specifically, our tech simplifies the syngas generation stage of the process (creating the carbon monoxide and hydrogen), via novel catalysts and a reactor that uses electric heat rather than combustion to generate the heat of reaction, allowing for a smaller, cheaper reactor with a higher yield.  

In addition, we simplify the upgrading step after the FT step, where the raw FT hydrocarbons are transformed into the finished fuel products.  We use novel catalysts to reduce the need for internal stream separations and thus allow for plants with fewer internal process steps and equipment and greater energy efficiency. 

What this means is that we can more economically transform our waste carbon feedstocks into our desired end products.  And in turn we can economically build plants at the right scale nearby feedstock supplies to significantly reduce the need for dedicated feedstock transport and aggregation. And because our technology is naturally flexible in the types of feeds it can utilise, we can build in more locations and take advantage of more feedstock sources. 

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