From cooking oil to jet fuel: Cathay Pacific shines the spotlight on SAF
Oliver Haas, head of sustainability for commercial and innovation at the airline, sets out to demystify the use of sustainable aviation fuel
“Do you know what this is, or what this might be – the dirty-looking one?” asks Oliver Haas, the head of sustainability – commercial and innovation at Cathay Pacific, holding up a laboratory bottle filled with dark, murky liquid. The bottle contains used cooking oil, Haas explains, which is one of the raw materials most widely used for producing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
“And this is SAF,” Haas says, holding up another sealed bottle filled with crystal-clear liquid. “It’s jet fuel – though most people wouldn’t guess it, since it looks just like water. But it’s incredibly refined and packed with high-performance chemistry.”
“The magic of SAF is that basically you can turn this into this,” Haas says, holding the two bottles side by side. “You can turn a waste product into jet-grade fuel.”
Having been obsessed – in his words – with aircraft since he was five years old, Haas now sits in an office filled with models of them. And a key part of his job is to accelerate SAF adoption at Cathay Pacific.
In addition to used cooking oil, raw materials used to produce SAF include municipal waste, agricultural residue and even carbon dioxide. The chemical properties of SAF are almost identical to those of conventional jet fuel, and both types can be safely combined for use in aircraft.
“The benefit of SAF is that it is a so-called ‘drop-in fuel’,” Haas says. “Today, it has to be blended by up to 50 per cent with jet fuel, and there are various tests happening in the industry to allow 100 per cent of it to be used. But fundamentally, it can be dropped into an existing aircraft.”
While there are other options for powering an aircraft in a more sustainable way, including hydrogen and electricity, “the big challenge in aviation is that it is very difficult to find alternatives that can compete with jet fuel,” Haas says.
While small electric aircraft are under development, Haas points out they are more suited for regional, short-haul routes in markets such as Europe, the United States and Australia. And though hydrogen can fuel larger aircraft, the challenge lies in producing it cleanly and at a scale that makes it viable.
According to technical analysis conducted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations agency, SAF has the greatest potential to reduce carbon emissions produced by air travel.
Haas cites a typical flight from Sydney to Hong Kong as an example: “That is a nine-hour flight, which Cathay Pacific currently flies with aircraft that carry more than 300 passengers. There simply aren’t many options to move that many people over that distance in that time, other than by using liquid fuels.”
While SAF is, for now, the most viable option for airlines to reduce their carbon emissions while maintaining current numbers of flights, it also comes with significant challenges, such as high production costs. And SAF supply is still limited – in 2024, it made up just 0.3 per cent of global jet fuel production, according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), a trade body with 350 member airlines. At these levels, costs will remain high at all points of the SAF supply chain.
Cathay Pacific has launched a new platform that allows passengers to estimate the carbon emissions generated by their flights and make a voluntary contribution to buy SAF attributes. SAF attributes are the environmental benefits that result from a specified amount of SAF used to replace conventional jet fuel.
Each contribution made is used to purchase SAF that is in addition to the airline’s mandated requirement of the percentage of SAF to be mixed into conventional jet fuel. Some countries and trading blocs have now mandated a minimum usage requirement for SAF. The United Kingdom, for instance, has set a SAF usage target of 10 per cent by 2030, while the European Union has set a minimum mandate of 2 per cent this year, to be increased to 70 per cent by 2050.
Eligible members of the Cathay membership programme can earn one Asia Mile for every HK$1 contribution they make to the SAF programme – a special rate offered to passengers to encourage them to take meaningful action and contribute to scaling up the use of SAF.
However, the use of SAF continues to remain a mystery to many people. Haas explains that unlike an electric car, which feels different in the way it sounds, drives and accelerates, SAF is effectively invisible to passengers.
“Even if I put SAF in the aircraft you are sitting in, you don’t have an emotional relationship with that. You can’t touch it. You can’t smell it. You can’t feel it. The whole point of SAF is that it is made to be as close to an equivalent of conventional jet fuel as possible,” he says.
With this in mind, Haas and his team are working on ways to make SAF more relatable to passengers, with most ideas still in their early stages.
No airline can do this alone, and Cathay Pacific’s approach to scaling SAF also includes the Corporate SAF Programme, established in 2022 for its corporate customers. It allows them to purchase SAF attributes with the airline and supports companies in reducing indirect emissions from business trips, while helping the airline to scale SAF usage.
Recently, the airline also announced its participation – as a founding investor – in a new fund, alongside several Oneworld alliance members and Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), an investment firm founded by Bill Gates that funds climate technology. The Oneworld BEV Fund will address difficulties around the production and cost of SAF, and invest in new technology to that end. Cathay Pacific also announced a joint investment agreement with Airbus, valued at HK$545 million (US$70 million), to drive the development of SAF production globally.
And at its home base, Cathay Pacific has co-initiated the Hong Kong Sustainable Aviation Fuel Coalition, working with partners to support policy and infrastructure development that will facilitate the use of SAF at Hong Kong International Airport.
However, it is the need to increase general awareness of SAF that Haas says keeps him awake at night and gets him up in the morning.
“Aviation connects people, culture and ideas, and I want to see more of that happen,” he says. “And as individual fliers, we carry a responsibility when we fly. The future of aviation is about continuing to make global travel possible, not just for ourselves, but for others and other generations too.”