Credit: Air France
LE BOURGET—Air France expects sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) costs to rise to €650 million ($750 million) in 2030, up from €90 million in 2024, as a European mandate for SAF use rises to 6% SAF, the airline’s CEO Anne Rigail says.
“Our issue at the moment—it’s not new but we have to fight against it—is that SAF is currently very expensive, about three to four times more expensive than conventional fuel,” Rigail said June 17 in an address at the Paris Air Lab, part of the Paris Air Show.
The cost—and availability—of SAF is a big issue for European airlines, which have in recent months been expressing doubts about whether the 2030 SAF target, part of ReFuelEU Aviation legislation, is attainable, and even controversially suggesting the target should be pushed back.
On that same timescale, Rigail says European Union (EU) Emissions Trading System (ETS) costs will reach more than €200 million, up from €100 million, while the cost of fleet renewal—which the airline says is currently the most efficient way for it to decarbonize—will be stable at around €1 billion.
Rigail says European airlines risk being put at a disadvantage to airline peers from other parts of the world because of rising decarbonization costs in the region.
“It’s crucial for us to implement mechanisms in the EU to narrow the price gap between SAF and fossil kerosene to preserve our competitiveness. Those mechanisms, for us, must include directing aviation-related regulatory costs toward SAF development. This is what Germany just announced with the intention to allocate toward SAF 50% of its aviation ETS revenues,” Rigail says. “This is also what has been decided in France in the maritime sector. It’s time to reassess aviation taxation.”
At a European level, airlines are awaiting the presentation of the Sustainable Transport Investment Plan, due to be presented later this year, which they hope will be a steppingstone to increasing SAF volumes and bringing down prices.
Speaking to Aviation Week on the sidelines of the air show, Rigail says it is a question of “wait and see” as to whether investment in SAF would be tackled as the industry hopes in this plan.
But she says Air France is hopeful of a growing move in the region toward allocating ETS revenues to SAF purchase and investment in the SAF supply chain, as recently seen in Germany.
“That’s something we’re asking for in France,” Rigail says. “We have hope that little by little awareness is growing that European airlines will not be able, in a world in which there is international competition, to finance their decarbonization costs by passing them on to customers.”
During her speech, Rigail noted that European carriers had lost 11 points of market share on routes to and from Europe over the past 20 years, with a total market share of 41% in 2024 compared to 52% in 2004. Non-European carriers have been growing twice as fast on that timescale, she says. French carriers have lost 19% of market share between France and the rest of the world over that period.
“With the increase in environmental regulation in the EU but not in other regions, the risk is not only to see this trend continue, but to see this trend ... worsen. The core issue is that those environmental constraints and their associated costs are not harmonized in the world,” Rigail says.
The airline industry is still waiting for other parts of the world to follow the EU and the UK in imposing SAF mandates, she adds.
Referring to the recent move to increase the so-called “solidarity tax” on aviation in France, a move heavily criticized by airlines, Rigail says: “Overtaxing aviation does not reduce its impact, it only undermines its accessibility and limits the ability of airlines like Air France to invest in fleet renewal and SAF. We urgently need a wake-up call in the EU. We know that the UK, U.S. and China are moving very fast on SAF, and we cannot let the EU be marginalized. We need a clear, coordinated policy.”
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