Could biofuels meet demand for global aviation?

Most of the world’s liquid biofuels currently go into cars and trucks, not planes.

But how will this change in the future? Electric vehicles look like the leading decarbonization solution for road transport. Plummeting costs of batteries have made electric cars (and increasingly trucks) competitive with petrol and diesel ones.

In a previous article, we looked at how biofuel land could be used more efficiently for road transport. We found that the world could electrify all its cars and trucks if we installed solar panels on less than one-third of the land used to grow biofuels.

The outlook for aviation is less clear. Short-haul flights might go electric. Long-haul ones will be more challenging to electrify (although some analysts remain optimistic).1 Hydrogen is one possible alternative to jet fuel, but it is still far from commercial scale.

Another option that gets a lot of attention is biofuels. A small amount of biofuels is already blended into jet fuel supplies in some countries. In 2023, Virgin Atlantic made headlines when it flew the first transatlantic flight powered entirely by biofuels. For many airlines, biofuels are currently the most practical decarbonization option.2

But how much biofuel does aviation actually use today? How much would be needed to replace fossil jet fuel — and could popular sources such as waste cooking oils ever meet that demand?

In this article, we put the key numbers into perspective.