American Airlines and Google have signed a three-year, 35-million-gallon (132-million-liter) SAFc agreement, which American has described as the largest publicly announced SAFc agreement between an airline and a single corporate customer to date. The fuel will be supplied by Valero Marketing and Supply Company from waste feedstocks like used cooking oil. American will purchase and take delivery of physical fuel for Chicago O’Hare International Airport, and Google will receive the environmental benefits via the SAFc Registry to address its emissions from employee business travel. American puts the cumulative reduction at nearly 300,000 metric tons of CO2-equivalent over the term of the agreement.
The structure is the part worth reading carefully. This is a book-and-claim SAFc transaction, not a tri-party physical-flow deal. American buys the molecules. Google buys SAFc certificates retired against the agreement’s environmental claim. The two sides of the contract pay for different things, and the SAFc Registry is the rail that keeps them lined up. The corporate-SAFc buying model is not new at this scale: SABA’s 2024 framework agreements with United and other carriers already established it for Microsoft, JPMorgan, Meta, Deloitte and others. The AA-Google deal differs in being a bilateral airline-to-single-corporate-customer SAFc agreement of unusually large size, rather than a pooled-buyer SABA-style structure.
By entering into this long-term commitment, we are sending a vital demand signal to catalyze investment and bring more SAF to market.
That line, from Kate Brandt, Google’s Chief Sustainability Officer, identifies the lever Google says the deal is pulling. Whether SAFc revenue at this size and tenor is bankable enough to support producer FID decisions is contested among project lenders, but multi-year corporate attribute demand is one of the inputs producers cite when evaluating new capacity. Jill Blickstein, American’s Chief Sustainability Officer, described the agreement as a step toward reducing emissions from the airline’s operations and supporting the development of a stronger, more resilient SAF market.
Valero anchors the supply side. The American press release frames the SAFc as derived from waste feedstocks like used cooking oil, an existing Valero/Diamond Green Diesel hydroprocessing strength, without naming a specific pathway or feedstock origin. That detail matters because the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Credit, as set out in the IRS proposed rule published in the Federal Register on February 4, 2026 (REG-121244-23), restricts post-2025 feedstock to North American origin for the credit to attach. Neither party has disclosed whether the UCO supporting this offtake is North-American-sourced, so the deal’s relationship to 45Z is not established in the announcement itself. The fiscal lever American does name is the Illinois SAF tax credit, which the airline credits to Governor JB Pritzker and the Illinois General Assembly as the policy mechanism that made the agreement possible.
The announcement also references American’s broader Chicago decarbonization work, including a 16-week 2025 trial with Contrails.org and Flightkeys that integrated contrail-avoidance routing into the airline’s flight-planning processes. American reports the trial delivered a statistically significant 62 percent reduction in contrail formation in the trial subset. That is a trial result on a defined flight set, not an operational fleet-wide figure, and the work is layered on top of the SAFc agreement rather than substituting for it.
The forward read is whether bilateral airline-to-single-corporate-customer SAFc deals at this scale begin to displace SABA’s pooled-buyer model as the dominant corporate-SAFc structure. Whether other major corporate buyers follow Google at LAX, SFO, ATL or DFW (the airports where corporate flying density makes the math work) is the signal worth watching across the rest of 2026 and 2027.
Source: American Airlines press release
