All hype and no substance?

“Build it and they will come.” For the last three years, since the Fit-for-55 (Ff55) announcements made it clear that there would be a SAF mandate in the European Union, that phrase seems to have been the mantra for prospective SAF producers.
With the UK also busy developing their own post-Brexit mandate, the prevailing paradigm has been that capacity was needed, fast, and a lot of it, to satisfy the tsunami of demand generated by the new mandates.
To add to the sense of excitement, the US Administration responded by generating their own SAF headlines when the IRA package came out, with the “clean fuel producer credit” or CFPC poised to drive the creation of a domestic SAF industry outre-Atlantique.
In fact, many commentators including this author have opined that matching the pace of worldwide demand growth with enough capacity – and, therefore, enough capital - would be a near-impossible task.
A simple calculation of the demand potential in 2040, based on the original Ff55 target of 32% (as we know, the target for 2040 ended up even higher at 34%), yielded a cool 15 million metric tonnes of demand just for the EU, with probably a few...