Sustainable Aviation Fuel Study: SAF Means ‘Sacrificing Affordable Food’

By ALAN GUEBERT

The four-page executive summary of the November-issued report on sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) doesn't predict when or how the hopefully-named "green" aircraft fuel will be produced.

Instead, the 72-page, fact-filled report makes a CO2-tight case that this largely crop-based, "renewable" alternative to today's carbon-heavy jet fuel should never be produced.

The reason, it explains, is as obvious as the food on your plate: "Citizens want affordable food and sustainable food systems. Farmers want to maximize soil carbon sequestration and begin to reduce fertilizer use. We all want to be able to develop renewable energy supplies…"

But SAF's eggs-in-one-basket project "risks moving us away from all these goals" because it will 1.) likely raise food prices; 2.) "reduce the sustainability of food systems;" 3.) "slow or reverse agricultural soil carbon sequestration;" and 4.) "drive up fertilizer use and attendant agricultural GHG," or greenhouse gas emissions.

Moreover, the massive push toward SAF is a massive rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul scheme that will "put impossible-to-meet demands onto limited supplies of clean, renewable energy thereby slowing emissions reductions in other sectors."

Or, as the report notes bluntly: "If governments continue to encourage and subsidize the SAF megaproject," they are actively working "to solve one problem but create many larger problems."

The report, issued by Canada's National Farmers Union and written by Darrin Qualman, contains 20 bullet points to drive home those key findings. Equally important, these obvious yet rarely discussed consequences of SAF are substantiated by page after page of fact-based analysis.

A detailed examination of what the airline industry projects for air travel in 2050 proves SAF is not just a false hope, but an environmental, societal, and financial disaster.

For example, by 2050, airline travel is projected to hit 13.6 trillion passenger miles per year, or two times today's mileage. As such, Boeing and Airbus estimate they will need to make 40,000 new aircraft by 2043 (today's commercial fleet has an estimated 28,400) to accommodate the flood.

By itself, that near doubling of new aircraft means massive increases in raw materials, fossil fuels, and CO2 production. There's nothing "green" about any of that. Additionally, experts estimate commercial airlines will use 174 billion gallons of aviation fuel in 2050, or 75% more than today's 100 billion gallons.

If accurate, the farm-sourced SAF needed to replace petroleum jet fuel by 2050 would require 2 billion acres of mostly soybeans, canola, and corn. Two billion acres, writes Qualman, is "20 times the total cropland area of Canada (and) five times the cropland area of the United States."

And that excludes military and private aircraft use while also consuming all the feedstock for today's alternative fuels such as ethanol (5.5 billion bu. of U.S. corn in 2024), and biodiesel (55 million bu. of U.S. soybeans in 2024).

But that won't happen, explains the NFU report, because "Producing even a small fraction of the huge SAF demand from grains and oilseeds… will exert upward pressure on food prices–especially as we simultaneously add two billion people to our global population."

That means "These food price impacts will hit the poorest and hungriest hardest, but will also have negative impacts on nearly every family on Earth."

In fact, Qualman adds, "SAF may come to stand for 'Sacrificing Affordable Food'" because the "SAF project will put the food-purchasing dollars of Earth’s poorest billion people into competition with the vacation dollars of the richest billion."

In short, Qualman says, "It's just not going to work. It's fiction."

And, he warns, "(A)ny plan to fuel that doubling of air travel largely from the planet’s oversubscribed land base reveals an ignorance of the magnitude by which we have already transgressed planetary boundaries—how far we have already moved outside the 'safe operating space for humanity' …"

Alan Guebert is an agricultural journalist who was raised on an Illinois dairy farm and worked as a writer and senior editor at Professional Farmers of America and Successful Farming magazine and is now a contributing editor to Farm Journal magazine. Guebert and his daughter Mary Grace Foxwell co-wrote “The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey: Memories from the Farm of My Youth” [University of Illinois Press, 2015]. See past columns, supporting documents, and contact information at farmandfoodfile.com

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2025

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