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The One Big Beautiful Bill, passed in early July, has paralysed progress towards making aviation fuel mainstream in the US. What now?
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill has tarnished the President’s relationship with former chum Elon Musk, but there’s plenty of collateral that hasn’t received nearly as much attention.
The Act, consistent of Trump’s ideologies packed into one neat and tidy file, has heavily targeted plans for renewable infrastructure. Already, federal funding towards developing aviation fuels has received a huge hit and the industry’s recent momentum has been lost.
Aviation is responsible for around 2.5% of yearly global carbon emissions, and there’s little prospect of that figure diminishing, given we have no viable alternatives for large, portable quantities of energy-dense fuel. An electric battery capable of powering an international flight, for instance, would be much larger and heavier than airplane fuel tanks.
Before Trump began his second term in the White House, there had been optimism about the industry’s prospects for becoming significantly more sustainable, driven by bold targets. By 2030, the US aimed to produce 3 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), with the goal of scaling up to supply enough to power all commercial flights by 2050.
That vision now appears entirely pie in the sky, if you’ll pardon the pun.
The administration’s rollback of incentives has sent shockwaves through a sector that was only just beginning to gather steam. Promising SAF startups are already reporting delayed projects, investor pullback, and increased uncertainty around long-term viability.
Without policy stability or federal backing, the high production costs of green fuels make it near impossible to compete with traditional jet fuel, especially in a market now chock-full of deregulation and fossil fuel favouritism.
