The U.S. Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Agriculture have released the Implementation Framework for the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Grand Challenge Roadmap.

The SAF Grand Challenge was launched in 2021 as a government-wide strategy for identifying new technologies to produce SAF on a commercial
scale with the overall goal to produce three billion gallons per year of domestic SAF by 2030. The SAF Grand Challenge Roadmap, released in 2022, identified six action areas and associated activities, including Feedstock Innovation, Conversion Technology Innovation, Building Supply Chains, Policy and Valuation Analysis, Enabling End Use, and Communicating Progress and Building Support.

In September 2024, the Metrics Dashboard Fact Sheet was introduced showing that annual SAF domestic production and imports have grown from 5 million gallons in 2021 to 52 million gallons through the first six months of 2024.

This new implementation “framework provides SAF stakeholders with an understanding of what capabilities and programs federal agencies currently have in place to implement the roadmap actions.”

The Implementation Framework also identifies gaps in current programs and existing barriers to achieving SAF Grand Challenge near-term goals. Many of these gaps need support from the public and SAF industry partners to meet these goals.

Among the gaps identified are creating certainty in government policy to support build-out of SAF supply chains, expanding data and analysis and improving models for transparent and credible SAF supply chain analysis, expanding purpose-grown feedstocks, tapping the potential of waste and residual feedstocks, and using existing ethanol and petroleum industry infrastructure to rapidly scale up and deploy.