A Washington State University study published in Biomass and Bioenergy concludes the United States will produce around 2.1 billion gallons of sustainable aviation fuel in 2030 even under optimistic project completion assumptions, about 30% below the SAF Grand Challenge target of 3 billion gallons set by the federal government in 2021.
The shortfall is not a forecasting quibble. It reflects three structural constraints that have been understood inside the SAF community for years but rarely modelled together: hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) is still the dominant production pathway, used cooking oil supplies are tightening globally, and roughly half of announced SAF projects historically reach commercial production. The combined effect compounds.
Lead author Kristin Brandt and co-author Michael Wolcott, the Regents Professor at WSU and director of the FAA-funded ASCENT consortium (co-led by WSU and MIT), modelled announced and in-progress US SAF projects through 2030. “Announcements are not the same thing as fuel. People announce giant facilities with aggressive timelines all the time, but historically many projects get delayed, scaled back or never move forward,” Brandt said in the WSU press release. The press release notes substantially lower production levels are possible depending on market conditions, project delays and policy support, with the 2.1-billion-gallon figure presented as an optimistic case rather than a base case. Brandt also flagged a global shortage of used cooking oil as a binding feedstock constraint on the dominant HEFA pathway.
The result lands in the middle of an ongoing question about whether the 3-billion-gallon goal can be reached with HEFA-led capacity alone, or whether material non-HEFA scale-up is required this decade. If the federal target is to be met at all by 2030, additions outside HEFA would need to ramp materially faster than current final investment decisions imply. A recent Methanol Institute analysis frames methanol-to-jet as a possible bridge in the post-HEFA supply mix, though commercial deployment of those alternatives is still in the first-of-a-kind phase. Separately, much of the US project pipeline has been underwritten by European offtake demand, and the WSU findings highlight that the same HEFA feedstock economics now squeezing US output also shape the commercial calculus for trans-Atlantic SAF flows.
