We are happy to share that our Cleantech Analyst, Ingrid El Helou, was recently a panelist at the session “Exploring the implications of EU and US policy approaches to stimulate adoption of low-carbon fuels: focus on shipping and aviation” at the 2024 ETERC Conference organized by the European Transport & Energy Research Center (from the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis), in collaboration with Ghent University.
This panel addressed current EU and US policies and their potential to decarbonize aviation and shipping. The discussion centered on the efficacy of current policies in stimulating the uptake of low-carbon fuels and what policies are still needed to improve scale-up and reduce risks along the way. FCA’s main key takeaways from the panel discussion are:
✅ ReFuelEU Aviation is a SAFs uptake mandate that provides long-term visibility to 2050 and increases certainty in the future demand for SAFs in the EU. However, accelerated funding and additional investment schemes, such as for synthetic jet fuels (e-fuels), are needed to help facilitate the successful commercialization of such projects and the scale-up in domestic SAF production.
✅ Flexibility mechanisms such as Book and Claim could help achieve ReFuelEU Aviation’s targets. However, an EU framework must be developed to ensure that such schemes do not override, but are instead complementary to domestic SAF development, thus ensuring industrial resilience within the EU.
In line with the discussion, our new technical report on ReFuelEU Aviation’s Targets assesses the feasibility of meeting ReFuelEU Aviation’s progressively increasing SAF targets by 2050. Read the full report here!
