American Airlines, JetBlue Call for More Sustainable Aviation Fuel Support | News World – Buy Aussie News

American Airlines and JetBlue Airways are calling for more support from government and the energy industry to develop and produce sustainable aviation fuels at scale to meet carbon emission reduction goals.

Sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF for short, “is a lot more theoretical than it is real” today, American Airlines Chief Sustainability Officer Jill Blickstein said at the U.S. Travel Association’s Future of Travel Mobility conference in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

Blickstein referred to the numerous SAF supply agreements that American and other airlines have signed but have yet to begin producing the low-emission fuels in significant quantities. That limited production is a problem given the airline industry’s plans to significantly ramp up SAF usage in their drive to produce net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

IATA estimates that 65% of global airline emission reductions will come from the adoption of SAF.

JetBlue aims to use 10 million gallons of SAF annually in just seven years, or by 2030. That represents a more than 14-fold increase over the airline’s sustainable fuel usage last year of roughly 700,000 gallons.

Getting from 700,000 gallons to 10 million is the problem given current levels of support, JetBlue President and Chief Operating Officer Joanna Geraghty said at the event. The airline aims to be net-zero by 2040.

The Biden Administration included the first-ever U.S. SAF incentives in 2022’s Inflation Reduction Law. The tax benefits flow to the companies that produce and blend the fuels, rather than the airlines themselves, in an effort to jumpstart U.S. production.

The U.S. produced 15.8 million…