New report Finds SAF will not reduce GHG Emissions

At a State House press conference, a new report regarding SAF was released, along with a petition signed by 50 organizations and over 14,000 signatories, asking the administration not to accept SAF claims by Massport.

The new report, titled “Barriers to Implementing Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in Massachusetts,” by the Institute for Policy Studies, finds that Massport’s claim that SAFs “have the potential to dramatically reduce lifecycle aviation emissions to near zero by 2050” is false and misleading. Not only does SAF not reduce Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions significantly, in many cases, it actually increases emissions.¹ Furthermore, SAF is much more expensive than fossil jet fuel, and any attempt to facilitate conversion to SAF would require huge public subsidies, exceeding the entire Massachusetts transportation budget.²

“SAF won’t help the Commonwealth reduce emissions. Period. It will not scale at the pace of climate change. It is a diversion of money and attention in this moment,” said Chuck Collins, co-author of the report.

Massport’s charter was amended in 2024 to require Massport to consider GHG emissions as part of airport planning. The Agency hopes that by convincing the public and the legislature that SAF will soon eliminate jet emissions, their plans for growth, including the expansion of private luxury jets, will be allowed to continue. Massport proposes that their fuel systems are “SAF-ready,” and so their extraordinary GHG emissions should be allowed to continue and grow unchecked. In Massachusetts today, jet CO2 emissions are roughly equivalent to those of the City of Boston. However, Boston has a plan to dramatically reduce CO2 emissions by 2050, while the industry projects Massachusetts jet emissions to increase during the same period.

The proposal to dramatically increase private luxury jet capacity in Massachusetts, with expansion planned at Hanscom, Plymouth, Barnstable, and other airports, is particularly egregious. This form of travel is widely recognized as “The most environmentally destructive activity a person can engage in without getting arrested.” The attempt to “greenwash” private jet emissions and push forward with this expansion should be stopped by the administration, which otherwise loses all claims to environmental legitimacy.

At the press conference, local Representative Carmine Gentile addressed the crowd: “How can we tell working families to switch to electric cars, to insulate their homes, take the T while letting the ultra-rich burn jet fuel to take quick flights to the Caribbean? That would be a moral failure.”

1. Emissions of SAF are exactly the same as fossil jet fuel when burned. Some CO2 is captured during the production of SAF, reduced by processing emissions, land-use changes, and energy-related emissions. If agricultural feedstock sources are used, the enormous cropland requirements will necessitate cutting down forests, which will eliminate CO2 capture by those forests and overwhelm any SAF benefit. If energy is used to make synthetic SAF, the CO2 associated with that energy will cancel out all of the benefit of SAF until all fossil sources are removed from the electrical grid, and all process heat is generated from clean energy. ↩︎
2. Alternatively, federal mandates to require SAF use could be enacted, or a national Carbon Price of approximately $500 per ton could drive conversion to SAF (which may not actually save GHG). None of these is likely to occur in the foreseeable future. ↩︎