In March 2018, the ICAO Council endorsed the 2050 ICAO Vision for Sustainable Aviation Fuels. This vision is a living inspirational path and calls on States, industry and other stakeholders, for a significant proportion of aviation fuels to be substituted with sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) by 2050.

The Vision is an outcome of the second ICAO Conference on Aviation and Alternative Fuels (CAAF/2). The Conference noted that this path would be based on the assumptions of a progressive increased use of sustainable aviation fuel, and should be periodically reviewed through a stocktaking process to continuously assess progress on SAF development and deployment.

As a result, ICAO is pursuing the Stocktaking Process as a means to "take stock" of global progress on the development and deployment of SAF. Building upon the success of the First ICAO Stocktaking Seminar toward the 2050 Vision for Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFS2019), the scope of the Stocktaking process has been expanded to encompass other possibilities for in-sector aviation CO₂ reductions (including technology and operations).

Yearly events have been held since then; all the presentations are available on the dedicated event websites

As part of the Stocktaking Process, ICAO is constantly updating SAF production indicators provided in the ICAO SAF tracker tools. ICAO welcomes the provision of additional information to be considered in the stocktaking process (officeenv@icao.int).

Stocktaking 2019 results

Historical production

Figure 1 shows that commercial production of SAF increased from an average of 0.29 million litres per year (2013-2015) to 6.45 million litres per year (2016-2018).

 Figure 1: Historical production of SAF

Future production capacity

Figure 2 shows that up to 10.9 Mt (13.6 billion litres) per year of SAF production capacity may be available by 2032. However, there is significant uncertainty on the share of this capacity that will be directed to SAF compared to other fuels. The deployment scenarios shown in Figure 2 ("high ratio" and "low ratio") intend to highlight that uncertainty.

In this regard, the second ICAO Conference on Aviation and Alternative Fuels (CAAF/2) in October 2017 encouraged States to promote policies that strive to establish a level playing field between aviation and other transportation sectors on the use of sustainable fuels.

 Figure 2: Projected scenarios of SAF production 

Sources:

• Data gathered at the first ICAO Stocktaking Seminar toward the 2050 Vision for Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFS2019), held in Montreal from 30 April to 1 May 2019.
• Data gathered from questionnaires submitted as part of the 2020 ICAO Stocktaking Seminar on aviation in-sector CO₂ emissions reductions 
• Publically available information