When people talk about sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), the conversation usually revolves around airlines.
How quickly will airlines adopt SAF?
Will governments increase blending mandates?
Can production scale fast enough to meet demand?
These are important questions undoubtedly. But they focus on the end of the value chain. The real battle is happening much earlier.
Before a single gallon of SAF reaches an airport, producers must secure the feedstocks that make it possible. Increasingly, those feedstocks are becoming the primary factor in determining who can produce SAF with profit (and who can't).
As the SAF market matures, an important fact is taking shape: understanding feedstocks is just as important as understanding fuel.
No matter how advanced the production technology becomes, every SAF pathway starts with a raw material.
For today's commercial production, that often means used cooking oil (UCO), animal fats, vegetable oils, or waste oils processed through the HEFA pathway.
But the market is expanding rapidly to include multiple other feedstock sources:
Waste Ethanol
Crop Ethanol
e-Methanol
Renewable Hydrogen
Municipal Waste
Biomass
Other Alternative Inputs
ResourceWise's market coverage now models economics across multiple SAF pathways, reflecting just how diverse the feedstock landscape has become.
Each pathway has its own economics.
Each depends on different supply chains.
And each is exposed to different market risks.
Understanding those upstream markets increasingly determines whether a SAF project succeeds.
One of the largest shifts in recent years reveals that feedstocks are no longer local markets.
Used cooking oil collected in Asia may ultimately help produce renewable fuels in Europe.
Animal fats from North America can influence renewable diesel margins on other continents.
Waste ethanol values may change because of developments occurring thousands of miles away.
In short, the market has become more deeply interconnected than ever before.
Our latest SAF Snapshot illustrates this clearly. Chinese SAF exports continue to rise as European buyers secure growing volumes.
Meanwhile, market participants report that many Chinese producers are already contracted through the end of the year. This leaves far less supply available for spot purchases.
Those trade flows don't simply affect finished fuel. They also reshape competition for the feedstocks needed to produce it.
As more industries pursue low-carbon fuels, they're often competing for the same limited pool of renewable feedstocks.
Renewable Diesel Producers
SAF Producers
Marine Biofuel Suppliers
Renewable Chemicals
In many cases, they're all looking for similar waste-based oils and fats. That competition can tighten supply, increase prices, and quickly alter production economics.
Recent market movements underscore this point. During May, several key waste-based feedstocks continued to strengthen. US markets led gains, with tallow and UCO values increasing across multiple regions.
These changes may appear modest in isolation. But for producers operating at commercial scale, relatively small changes in feedstock costs can have a significant impact on margins.
Another misconception is that feedstocks always behave as a single market. In short, they don’t.
Used cooking oil may strengthen while vegetable oils soften.
Waste ethanol can outperform HEFA economics.
Animal fats may respond to completely different supply dynamics than agricultural oils.
The SAF Snapshot highlights this growing divergence, showing different modeled economics across Crop Ethanol ATJ, Waste Ethanol ATJ, HEFA SAF, eSAF, and E-Methanol ATJ pathways.
Each solution responds to its own combination of feedstock costs, renewable electricity, hydrogen prices, and policy incentives.
For market participants, that creates opportunity. Rather than relying on a single production pathway, companies can continually evaluate which feedstocks and technologies offer the strongest economics under changing market conditions.
The evolution of feedstock markets is changing how companies think about procurement.
Historically, feedstocks were often viewed as production inputs to be sourced as efficiently as possible. Today, they are becoming strategic assets.
Securing long-term access to reliable, low-carbon feedstocks can provide a competitive advantage that extends well beyond procurement. It can influence:
Production Costs
Carbon Intensity Scores
Regulatory Eligibility
Margin Performance
Long-Term Investment Decisions
As governments expand SAF mandates around the world, those advantages become increasingly valuable.
One of the clearest lessons emerging from today's SAF market is that downstream fuel prices rarely tell the whole story. By the time finished fuel prices begin to move, feedstock markets have often been shifting for weeks or months.
Changes in UCO Availability
Shifting Export Flows
Regional Tallow Markets
Renewable Hydrogen Pricing
Waste Ethanol Supply
Each can provide an early indication of where SAF economics may be heading. That's why many market participants spend as much time monitoring feedstocks as they do watching finished fuel prices.
Demand for sustainable aviation fuel will almost certainly continue to grow as airlines pursue decarbonization goals and governments implement increasingly ambitious mandates. But demand alone won't determine who succeeds. The companies that consistently understand feedstock availability, pricing, trade flows, and pathway economics will be in a stronger position to respond as markets evolve.
In many ways, the future of sustainable aviation fuel won't be decided at the airport. It will be decided much earlier: where feedstocks are produced, traded, priced, and secured.
Understanding sustainable aviation fuel means understanding far more than airline demand. Feedstock availability, pricing, policy developments, and global trade flows increasingly determine how the market evolves.
ResourceWise’s Monthly SAF Snapshot report provides a timely analysis of these upstream dynamics alongside SAF pricing, production pathways, policy developments, and global market intelligence. Connecting feedstock markets with downstream fuel economics helps market participants identify the trends shaping tomorrow's SAF market.