The SAF Podcast

On this week's episode of The SAF Podcast we welcome back Nova Pangaea Technologies (NPT) for the first time since 2023. 10 months into his role as CEO, Stewart Stewart, we discuss what attracted him to SAF and get some updates from NPT.

We cover a variety of topics including:

• Why energy ventures fail: it’s rarely the chemistry, it’s the handoffs between science, engineering, finance and the first commercial plant. 
• A reminder of NPT's REFNOVA process which turns forestry and agricultural waste into second-generation sugars and biochar. The sugars become ethanol, which goes to SAF via alcohol-to-jet, while the biochar locks carbon into soil, making the fuel carbon negative on a lifecycle basis.
• The campaign two at the Wilton demonstration plant in Teesside delivered more than three days of stable, continuous operation, validated externally by Fichtner. His verdict: “boring is beautiful”, since every uneventful hour turns investor imagination into operating data.
• We discuss what is next up on the horizon as the NPT scale up continues. 
• Project Speedbird, with IAG/British Airways and LanzaJet, gives the company a clear route to market and a single killer app. Nova Pangaea provides the ethanol, LanzaJet the alcohol-to-jet technology, and IAG the offtake.
• On LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines facility, he’s watching closely but notes Nova Pangaea has fallback options: other alcohol-to-jet plants and road fuels
• Stewart argues the industry should reward emissions reduction, not just litres produced. Under the UK SAF mandate, Nova Pangaea can monetise its biochar sequestration through additional SAF certificates, delivering two to three times the carbon impact of other fuels.
• Sceptical of shipping feedstock around the world: with around 80% of European used cooking oil and tallow imported from Southeast Asia Stewart highlights HEFA supply security and sees book-and-claim as the more honest decarbonisation route.
• Finally we touch on NPT's continual fundraising and how much time this ends up taking from Stewart's schedule.

Check out the full episode to find out all the details. 

This week's episode of The SAF Podcast steps beyond SAF to ask a bigger question: what do today's energy shocks mean for investors? Jeffrey Altman, Senior Advisor, Finadvice joins Oscar and suggests the real crisis isn't the price of energy but the price of dependence.

Oscar and Jeff discuss:

• Why this energy crisis differs from past ones, and why there's no quick way to decouple our existing energy supply chain reliance. 
• Hybrid war, and why investors should start pricing in downtime.
• The shift from asset-light bets to capital-intensive investment in domestic manufacturing, alternative fuels and critical infrastructure.
• Why policy certainty is the biggest lever, and which governments are sending the right signals.
• What defence buyers actually want from SAF: reliable, commercially competitive fuel, not subsidy.
• How reliance on Asian supply is pushing the case for onshore and nearshore production.
• Why family offices could be the Medicis of the next innovation wave.

Check out this episode if you want to to hear a deeper discussion around current energy constraints and how to restructure them.

Certification has a reputation for being complicated. Dario Formenti, senior systems manager - sustainable fuels,  International Sustainability and Carbon Certification (ISCC) thinks that's overdone, and explains why.

On this week's episode of The SAF Podcast, Oscar and Dario cover why certification is far more than a stamp on paper. It underpins market access, compliance claims and the credibility SAF needs to scale. They also discuss:

• How ISCC handles e-SAF and RFNBOs, including its pre-certification framework for early movers
• Where ISCC PLUS, the credit transfer system and combined audits fit in
• The push for EU RED and CORSIA dual conformance
• Book and claim, and how to guard against double counting
• How to prepare for an audit
• Where certification is heading over the next three to five years

Dario is a chemist who has worked in ISCC's aviation and maritime team since 2022. If you produce, trade or buy SAF, this one is for you.

Certification is the bedrock on which a trustworthy SAF industry is built. Understanding the key factors behind strong traceability is vital and check this episode out to get up to speed. 

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This week Oscar is joined by Manshu Agarwal, CEO, HutanBio a UK based company aiming to commercialise the use of Algae as a feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel production. 

Manshu has watched the algae story play out once already. A chemical engineer by training, he cut his teeth at Sapphire Energy and then Synthetic Genomics — two ventures that between them raised hundreds of millions of dollars chasing algae biofuels, only to run into the same wall: the biology simply wasn't good enough to get costs down. Now at HutanBio, he's back for round two, armed with what he believes is the missing piece.

That piece is Spherica — an entirely new class of algae, discovered after HutanBio's founder spent a decade bioprospecting the oceans, screening a trillion organisms to find roughly 400 candidates and one genuine outlier. Spherica has a thick cell wall and packs around 300 thylakoid layers versus the 6-10 found in typical strains — translating into three times the oil productivity.

Agrawal walks through why that matters commercially: HutanBio is targeting under $1/litre at small scale and around 40 cents/litre (roughly $62/barrel) at full scale, using vertical, low-footprint photobioreactor systems developed first in Malaysia and now being scaled toward coastal deserts, starting with an MOU in Oman. 

He's candid about algae's credibility problem after two decades of hype and underdelivery — but argues the underlying case, heavy transport still has no cost-competitive liquid fuel alternative, hasn't gone away, and that Spherica is the platform that finally gives algae a real shot at cost parity.

Check out the full discussion on your usual podcasting platforms.

On this week's episode of The SAF Podcast, Ryan Jackson, CEO, Cielo Waste Solutions joins Oscar to discuss the company's project platform to constructing SAF projects. 

Jackson unpacks Cielo's flagship Nahoonai project, developed in partnership with the Lheidi T’enneh First Nation through Tano T’enneh Enterprises — a co-ownership structure he argues de-risks permitting and helps unlock financing through Crown corporations like the Canada Infrastructure Bank. 

Alongside the favorable terms this partnership opens up Jackson discusses the project's revenue model and why Canada is in his mind the best place to develop a project, thanks to the stackable federal and state level credits available. This means Cielo can plan to sell their SAF at parity with Jet A1 and then generate the majority of its revenue through these credits. 

We finish the episode by evaluating the realistic decarbonisation targets for aviation to achieve as well as the big challenges that the SAF industry is trying to solve. 

This week Khaled, Ramon and Miguel of Hydrocarbon Engineering join Oscar on The SAF Podcast to tell the story behind their accidental discovery: a reactor built to  produce bio-oil that, instead, yielded a diesel-like hydrocarbon in a single step. 

Years of reverse engineering later, the Valencia-based team has turned that anomaly into a feedstock-agnostic, single-stage hydrothermal process for producing SAF, renewable diesel and other hydrocarbons — one that removes the need for a separate hydrogen source entirely. 

They discuss the ambiguity of self-assessed TRLs, early interest from British Airways/Iberia, a build-and-license commercialisation strategy, and their target of bringing SAF production costs down to around $1,500 per tonne, against today's $6,000–$9,000 range, as they push from TRL 6 towards a first commercial plant at a biomethane site.

For the third year running, Oscar sits down to unpack the 2026 SAF Market Outlook report once again with Mark Kelly (ICF) and this year with Iris Warnaar (SkyNRG).

The headline numbers: SAF demand is forecast to reach 12.8 million tonnes by 2030 (3.6% of jet fuel) and climb past 190 million tonnes by 2050, though US policy headwinds have pulled the near-term forecast down from last year's projections. On supply, 2030 capacity now stands at 18.5 million tonnes, creating a brief surplus before the market tightens again — and Asia has overtaken every other region to lead the global pipeline, largely to feed European demand.

The conversation digs into the HEFA feedstock constraint that still hasn't gone away, genuine, if modest, progress on eSAF and alcohol-to-jet and China's evolving role as both supplier and its own energy security case study. 

The episode closes with the third section of the report, a proper stress-test of the energy security argument that's dominated SAF conversations all year: real driver of investment, or narrative running ahead of the economics? Iris brings the optimism, Mark brings the risk register, and between them the picture that emerges is "positive but uneven" — with plenty left to sort out before the 2027 report rolls around.

If you have not already read the full report you can find it here: https://skynrg.com/2026-saf-market-outlook/

James Hygate, CEO and founder of Firefly, returns to The SAF Podcast for the first time since December 2023 — and a lot has happened. James brings his characteristic blend of technical depth, founder candour, and big-picture ambition to a brilliant wide ranging discussion.  

James opens with a comprehensive update on Firefly's progress: the selection of Turkish engineering firm Altaca as their HTL technology partner, the securing of a site at an existing refinery in Harwich for the downstream hydrotreating facility, and supply agreements with water companies including Severn Trent and Anglian Water that already cover more feedstock than the first facility needs. He also touches on the significance of the Boeing investment, the Builders Vision backing, and the ongoing Series B round that Firefly hopes to close shortly.

James also shares his observations from a recent visit to Shanghai on the pace of Chinese SAF and renewables infrastructure development, the implications of used cooking oil supply being internalised within China, and what lessons — if any — Western developers can draw from "China speed." We also explore the trajectory of the wider SAF industry, James's concerns about policy wobble and its chilling effect on infrastructure capital, and a frank view on whether some SAF projects are gaming mandates rather than genuinely pursuing decarbonisation.

Throughout, James returns to the thread that has defined his 20-year career in low carbon fuels: the only thing worth doing is something that can move the needle on climate change. For Firefly, that means wet-waste-to-jet at gigaton scale — and James believes the technology stack to do it is now in place.

In this episode, Oscar is joined by two guests at the heart of Europe's eSAF scale-up effort: Amy Herbert, Arcadia eFuels, and Thomas Engelmann, KGAL— both key figures within Project SkyPower, the industry coalition to the European Commission to put in place the conditions needed to bring eSAF projects to final investment decision.

Amy opens with an overview of Arcadia eFuels and its flagship Project Endor in Denmark — one of the most advanced eSAF projects in Europe, with FEED complete, permits secured, and an offtake agreement on the verge of being signed. Thomas explains KGAL's role as an infrastructure equity investor — with a stake in Project Endor — giving him a view of the eSAF financing challenge.

The conversation digs into Project SkyPower's ten-point recommendation letter to the European Commission, with a particular focus on the proposed double-sided auction mechanism and the role of H2 Global as a market-making intermediary. We explore why this instrument is seen as critical to breaking the chicken-and-egg deadlock between offtakers and producers — and why the timeline for getting it in place is a source of real concern, given that the 2030 eSAF mandates are fast approaching and greenfield refineries take years to build.

We also have a frank debate on airline competitiveness and the level playing field argument, whether eSAF is being treated fairly given that new fossil refineries would face comparable economics, why renewable electricity cost — not policy complexity — is a fundamental driver of eSAF pricing, and why the question isn't really whether to be optimistic about 2030, but what Plan B looks like if Europe fails to act.

Getting fully behind World Cup fever, SAF Investor is running The SAF World Cup.

Gathering experts from different countries, we will be running a knock out style bracket to find the most promising SAF country in the world. Decided by popular vote!

Whether it is policies, access to capital, offtakers, feedstock access, infrastructure expertise all these will be key discussion points. 

Join for a bit of World Cup fun alongside some serious discussion!

Speakers include:

Trevor Best, Syzygy Plasmonics - Brazil

Philippe Haffner, Haffner Energy - France

Jim Stonecipher, EdyMac - United States of America 

Andrew Symes, OXCCU - England

Izabela Santos, StratX Group - Sweden

Listen to the full webinar on our podcast for some light but informative SAF competition.