Stakeholder preferences regarding sustainable aviation fuel technologies

Abstract

The airline industry is growing and so are its emissions. To diminish the airline industry's increasing emissions, carbon-neutral growth for this industry is adopted. Sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) are considered an important aspect to comply with these goals and a large upscale of the SAF industry is needed. Therefore, the European Commission recently proposed a SAF blending mandate which mandates the uptake of this industry. However, the SAF industry is still a relatively new phenomenon and faces multiple barriers of which one of which is the divergent perspectives of the stakeholder groups within the airline industry. This research aims to identify the preferences of these different stakeholder groups. The following research question has been formulated for this purpose: "What are stakeholders’ preferences regarding different SAF technology pathways, in order to stimulate the SAF upscale for 2030 and comply with the proposed SAF blending mandate by the European Commission?" To answer this research question, a qualitative approach is applied. As such, a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach is used, where the Bayesian Best-Worst Method (BWM) is applied to determine the stakeholder group preferences regarding different SAF technology pathways. These SAF technology pathways are scored on economic, environmental and technological criteria. The stakeholder analysis shows that the airline industry deviates from the other three stakeholder groups (SAF/aviation experts, SAF consumers and SAF producers) as this stakeholder group attains more value to SAF its economic performance, combined with a decreased importance of both its environmental performance and technological performance. It is also concluded that overall, SAF its performance on greenhouse gas (GHG) saving emissions and its production volume availability and scalability are both deemed critical for a SAF technology pathway. Also, the expected minimum selling price is an important criterion in the analysis. Given the considered criteria and their perceived importance, regardless of which perspective of the stakeholder group is considered, the Fischer-Tropsch technology performs well due to its good performance on environmental aspects and its high production volume availability and scalability. As this research shows the divergent perspectives within the SAF industry, future policies could focus on finding consensus between these stakeholder groups.