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Home Energy Energy-General By Leon Stille - Oct 05, 2026, 3:00 PM CDT Battery-electric aircraft can displace fuel on shorter routes, but long-haul aviation will continue to require energy-dense liquid fuels. Germany’s proposed €2-billion eSAF double auction tackles the sector’s real bottleneck: producers need long-term contracts, while airlines refuse to accept today’s twelvefold price premium for a decade. The auction can bring the first projects to final investment decision, but the eventual winners will be producers that combine scale with cheap renewable electricity, reliable carbon supply and falling conversion costs.
Electric aviation is advancing faster than many critics expected. Batteries will not remain confined to tiny experimental aircraft, and short regional routes are a credible early market. But electric aircraft will not replace every jet.
Long-haul aviation requires enormous energy at very low weight. Even with better batteries and airframes, liquid fuels will retain a large role for decades. The question is therefore which sustainable aviation fuels can reach scale at a price airlines can eventually afford.
Germany has now designed a €2-billion experiment to help answer that question. The headline sounds absurd. According to EASA’s 2025 reference prices , synthetic aviation fuel averaged approximately €7,520 per tonne, compared with €640 for conventional jet fuel.
Germany is preparing to support a product that costs almost twelve times more than the fuel it is meant to replace. Yet the scheme may be one of Europe’s more intelligent attempts to scale an immature technology. It does not pretend eSAF is competitive.
It makes producers compete to close the gap. Europe Has Projects but No Bankable Market Europe does not lack eSAF announcements. Transport & Environment counts 41 large-scale European projects with almost 3 million tonnes of potential annual output.
Only four are considered advanced, and none has reached a final investment decision, or FID. Individual plants can require €1–2 billion of capital. Renewable electricity produces hydrogen through electrolysis.
That hydrogen is combined with sustainable carbon dioxide and converted into synthetic hydrocarbons. The resulting fuel can use existing aircraft, storage and airport infrastructure. The commercial structure is much harder.
Producers need decade-long contracts to finance billion-euro plants. Airlines and distributors will not commit for ten years at today’s price when costs, regulations and competing fuels will change. Neither position is irrational.
Together, however, they create a deadlock. Producers cannot reduce costs without building plants, and plants cannot be financed until costs have fallen enough to attract buyers. A mandate alone does not solve this.
ReFuelEU requires synthetic fuels to account for 1.2% of aviation fuel supplied at EU airports from 2030 , within an overall 6% SAF requirement. But airlines are already challenging the synthetic-fuel obligation because hardly any firm production capacity exists. In March, Airlines for Europe said projects with committed investment would provide only 0.7% of the volume needed to meet the 2030 target.
Europe has successfully created compulsory demand for a product that barely exists. Germany’s auction is intended to create the supply. One Auction Gives Producers Time and Buyers Flexibility Germany’s Federal Ministry of Transport plans to use the H2Global double-auction model, with funding of up to €2 billion .
On one side, a state-backed intermediary signs long-term purchase agreements with producers offering qualifying eSAF at the lowest price. On the other, it auctions the fuel to distributors under shorter contracts. Public funding covers the difference.
This separates two time horizons that the private market cannot currently reconcile. The producer receives the revenue certainty needed to finance a first-of-a-kind facility. The buyer avoids locking itself into a high ten-year price.
Both auctions also create price discovery: governments learn the support producers require and the value buyers attach to the fuel. That is better than handing every project the same production subsidy. Competitive bidding rewards cheaper electricity, higher efficiency, better carbon sourcing and construction discipline.
The subsidy gap should decline in later rounds. If it does not, policymakers learn that the technology is not progressing fast enough to justify more support. The first €2 billion will not transform aviation by volume.
At the full €7,520-per-tonne production-cost reference, it would purchase only around 266,000 tonnes. Because the government covers the difference between buying and resale prices rather than the entire fuel cost, actual supported volumes should be higher. Even so, European aviation consumes tens of millions of tonnes of jet fuel annually.
The auction is an industrial-development instrument, not a near-term decarbonization solution. Its value lies in moving projects from PowerPoint to steel. Germany Already Learned How an Auction Can Fail The approach is not entirely new.
Germany included eSAF in the original H2Global pilot launched in 2022. That lot ended without a contract award , and the available funding was reallocated to renewable methanol. That failure matters because it shows that auction design cannot manufacture investable projects from nothing.
Tender conditions, available budgets, production schedules and technical qualification must match the maturity of the market. But the wider H2Global mechanism did produce a result. Fertiglobe won the renewable-ammonia lot with a contract to supply up to 397,000 tonnes cumulatively through 2033 at a delivered price of €1,000 per tonne .
The award provided the project with a long-term European buyer and helped advance it toward investment. The mechanism cannot make every project succeed, but it can make viable supply bankable. Germany’s new eSAF proposal improves on the failed pilot through a dedicated budget and a longer delivery horizon.
It also sits within an eight-country Early Movers Coalition seeking to mobilize at least €500 million for an initial multinational auction. European Production May Not Be the Cheapest Production There is nevertheless a tension in Germany’s approach. Qualifying fuel must be ASTM-certified, comply with the EU’s renewable-fuel rules and be produced within the European Economic Area.
Those requirements strengthen traceability and could establish a domestic industrial base. They also exclude many locations with better solar and wind resources, cheaper land and potentially lower hydrogen costs. Electricity is the dominant input in eSAF production.
Converting renewable power into hydrogen, then into hydrocarbons, and finally into jet fuel loses substantial energy at every step. No auction design can repeal thermodynamics. The long-term winners are therefore likely to operate where renewable electricity is abundant and cheap, sustainable carbon is available, plants can achieve high utilization and export infrastructure already exists.
Europe may win through efficient equipment, engineering and offtake markets while importing part of its eventual fuel supply from regions such as North Africa, the Middle East, Australia or Latin America. Early European production still creates operating experience, standardized contracts, certifiable supply chains and real cost data. But industrial policy should not become permanent protection from better producers elsewhere.
Electric Aircraft and eSAF Are Not Rivals The temptation is to turn aviation decarbonization into another technology contest. It should not be one. Battery-electric aircraft can eliminate fuel consumption entirely on suitable short routes.
Improved rail can replace some flights. Operational efficiency and better air-traffic management can reduce demand further. Scarce bio-based SAF should focus on applications where sustainable feedstock can deliver genuine lifecycle savings.
The remaining long-haul fleet will still need liquid fuel. For that segment, scalable eSAF is one of the few credible routes to deep emissions reductions without replacing the global aircraft and fueling system. Germany’s auction will not make synthetic jet fuel cheap in 2030.
It may reveal which projects have a realistic path toward becoming cheaper in the 2030s. That is the real competition. Electric aviation will shrink the market that needs fuel.
The producer that can supply the remainder at scale—and close a twelvefold price gap fastest—will own one of the energy transition’s most valuable niches. By Leon Stille for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com Rubio Opens 4-Day NATO Tour in Iceland to Discuss Arctic Security Aramco CEO Warns Oil Inventories Are ‘Scarily Thin’ Supreme Court Takes Up Boulder Climate Suit Against Exxon and Suncor Download The Free Oilprice App Today Back to homepage Leon Stille Leon Stille has a background in energy sciences (MSc and BSc) and is pursuing a PhD in energy policy. He currently runs his own company,...
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