From Mandates to Markets: What the IFFW London Brief Revealed

On 19 October 2026 at Surveyors House in Westminster, the second IFFW City Brief asked what it will take to turn that demand into fuel that gets financed, built, insured and bought.

The London Brief ran under a single theme, From Mandates to Markets, and five questions framed the afternoon. How do we turn regulatory demand into bankable investment? Where can cross-sector collaboration create scale? How can more value be drawn from existing industrial assets? Which commercial and accounting models move capital along the value chain? And who coordinates investment and risk across the whole system?

No one in the room pretended those questions had tidy answers. What emerged instead was a frank picture of where future fuels stand today: costs that will not fall far on their own, policy that carries most of the weight, a supply pipeline running ahead of committed demand in aviation, and a shipping sector waiting on a global framework that may or may not arrive. Across seven presentations and two panels, one theme kept returning. The barriers are less about chemistry than about coordination.

Opening: Built Together

Peter Godfrey, Founder and CEO of CarbonSync Technologies, opened the Brief with a question first put to the room in Singapore in September. If the industry already knows how to produce many of the fuels it needs, why is it still so far from producing them at scale?

London, he argued, is where that question bites hardest. The UK SAF mandate rises to 10% of aviation fuel demand by 2030, with legislation in place for a revenue-certainty mechanism, while ReFuelEU Aviation and FuelEU Maritime tighten requirements on aviation and shipping. But mandates create obligations, not bankable projects. What is missing, he suggested, is not ambition but the thing IFFW 2027 has taken as its theme: markets that are Built Together.

The problem, he said, has been framed too narrowly. Aviation, shipping and land transport talk about different molecules, yet draw on the same feedstocks, hydrogen, refineries, ports and investors. That interdependence is why projects stall: producers, offtakers, infrastructure owners and financiers each wait for certainty from the others. The answer is to bring them to the table much earlier, aggregate demand and build infrastructure that serves more than one sector. Built Together, in his framing, is not a slogan about goodwill. Collaboration is part of the commercial architecture.

He also urged a more ambitious view of book-and-claim. Well-governed certificate systems, backed by long-term purchasing commitments, could direct value upstream, let buyers in different sectors support a common pool of production and firm up revenue for marginal projects. The safeguards are non-negotiable, from preventing double claiming to independent verification and a clear line between voluntary claims and mandate compliance, but they are reasons to build the framework properly rather than to scale back.

Europe's refining and petrochemical clusters, from Rotterdam and Antwerp-Bruges to the Humber and Teesside, give it a strong starting point, and the market will be international, which is why links between Europe and Asia sit at the heart of IFFW. Godfrey closed by setting out the five questions for the afternoon, each a test of what Built Together would mean in practice. The next phase, he said, will be shaped not by those who build the best projects in isolation, but by those who build the strongest value chains together.

Three sectors, three different stories

Nikolas Soulopoulos, Head of Commercial Transport Research at BloombergNEF, opened with a reminder that the starting assumption itself is uncertain. Institutional projections for global oil demand over the next two decades range from roughly 80 million to more than 100 million barrels per day. Data-centre growth, macroeconomic softness and geopolitical tension all pull in different directions.

Within that range, the three transport sectors face very different futures for low-carbon fuels. His framing was blunt: road has a limited future for liquid alternatives, aviation faces a policy push with limited impact, and shipping can compete and has further potential.

Road. Batteries, not liquid fuels, are reshaping road transport. Lithium-ion pack prices have fallen by around 90% in roughly 15 years, and electric vehicles are increasingly competitive across passenger and commercial segments, with adoption most visible in China. As road oil demand declines, a rising biofuel blend share does not translate into more biofuel. Absolute volumes could fall even as the percentage climbs, constrained by shrinking total demand and blend caps. For IFFW, whose land transport focus sits on long-haul freight, construction, agriculture and mining rather than light-duty vehicles, this is a useful clarification: the liquid-fuel opportunity on land is concentrated where electrification is hardest.

Aviation. SAF remains expensive and is expected to stay that way. BloombergNEF survey data put 2026 HEFA deliveries at around $1,817 per tonne, against forward prices of about $3,399 for advanced bio-SAF and roughly $5,015 for e-SAF, compared with fossil jet near $638. Feedstock costs cap the downside for bio-pathways; hydrogen costs drive the synthetic routes. Policy therefore does the heavy lifting. Even so, BloombergNEF expects SAF to reach only around 21% of European jet fuel demand by 2050, below what ReFuelEU implies, and around 8% globally. Asia Pacific sits at roughly 4%.

The cost to airlines is not trivial. Meeting SAF mandates and carbon requirements could add about $50 billion a year in airline costs over the next decade, against global airline net profits of roughly $40 billion in 2025. That gap explains why airlines lobby as hard on mandate design as they do.

Shipping. Here the economics look more promising. Low-carbon marine fuels may be more viable than in aviation, though synthetic fuels remain costly. LNG dominates alternative-fuel orders, accounting for about 21% of the newbuild orderbook by deadweight tonnage as of May 2026, while methanol has cooled to around 6% from earlier enthusiasm. Fuel oil still makes up roughly 70%. FuelEU Maritime, the Renewable Energy Directive and the EU ETS will push switching, and BloombergNEF's analysis suggests many vessel classes in European waters will struggle to meet tightening FuelEU limits. Yet regulatory costs shift the economics only modestly. The likely outcome by 2050 is a fragmented fuel mix of VLSFO, MGO, LNG, biofuels, methanol and ammonia, which brings real infrastructure and operational complexity for owners, operators and suppliers.

What the price is telling us

If the outlook sets the boundaries, price discovery shows how the market is behaving inside them. Sophie Byron, Global Head of Biofuels Pricing at S&P Global Energy, walked through how Platts assesses SAF and what recent movements reveal.

The European assessment set has grown quickly. Platts now covers CIF Northwest Europe cargoes, FOB barges in the Flushing-Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Ghent range, and a daily cost-of-production series. Two additions this year matter for anyone thinking about carbon value rather than volume: a UK HEFA SAF certificate assessment launched in April, and a European SAF cost-of-abatement assessment launched in May, which expresses the carbon value of the fuel alongside its volumetric price. Market participants have also asked for cost-of-production coverage to extend to Brazil. Demand for separate Annex IX Part A and Part B assessments has not yet appeared.

Recent price action shows how much of the European market runs on policy timing. Prices firmed around September 2025 on refinery maintenance, reduced Chinese exports and fourth-quarter compliance buying, then swung sharply around the US-Iran conflict. The more recent softening reflects oversupply, Chinese export volumes and buyers who have already covered their compliance positions. Whether that becomes a recurring Q4 pattern is one to watch.

The US picture is built differently. SAF is assessed as a premium to jet, but its real value is stacked from D4 RINs and the RIN multiplier, California LCFS credits and the 45Z tax credit. Strip those out and the voluntary-market price per gallon is markedly lower, a reminder that US SAF economics are largely a function of credit design.

In Asia, feedstock is the story. Used cooking oil prices rose as biodiesel demand climbed once FAME became cheaper than gasoil, and Indonesia's B50 mandate, implemented on 1 July, pushed palm oil and its residues higher. Platts has updated its Singapore-aligned Straits SAF assessment to be feedstock-agnostic, which better reflects how the regional market is developing.

Looking ahead, S&P flagged several variables: an expanding Chinese SAF export whitelist, the possibility of a Chinese SAF mandate, the European Commission's decision on SAF anti-dumping duties, and US arbitrage as RIN values strengthen. On current trends, S&P sees a compliance gap opening against ReFuelEU quotas, and suggests policy flexibility on quotas, feedstock eligibility, multipliers or penalties could come onto the agenda. Contracting is also diversifying. Jet-plus-premium, fixed-price, feedstock-linked, abatement-value and index-based structures each allocate risk differently between producer and offtaker, and the open question is when European pricing will begin to split by feedstock or pathway.

Beyond HEFA: the technology runway

HEFA works, it is bankable, and it will not be enough on its own. That was the starting point for Zainab Yaqub, Senior Licensing Manager at Topsoe, the Danish technology licensor founded in 1940 with around 3,000 employees and a heavy R&D focus.

Topsoe's HEFA technology runs at 26 operating plants with more under construction. Co-processing in existing refineries offers a drop-in route, with ASTM currently allowing up to 5% by volume. But feedstock accounts for an estimated 60-80% of levelised cost, and that is where HEFA's ceiling sits. The future of the pathway, in Topsoe's view, lies in optimisation, revamps, more co-processing and a broader feedstock base: oils from intermediate crops, crude tall oil, biogas-derived ketones, biocrudes from waste and sewage sludge, and plastic or tyre pyrolysis oils. Competition for those feedstocks from other end markets remains a wild card.

The longer runway is synthetic. Topsoe and Sasol offer an integrated licence for Fischer-Tropsch gas-to-liquids, covering both gasified biomass and waste and the e-fuel route. In the e-SAF configuration, green hydrogen and CO₂ pass through Topsoe's eREACT reverse water-gas-shift technology to make syngas, followed by FT synthesis and upgrading, with by-products recycled to maximise jet yield. The technology is not yet commercial at scale. The Danish pilot has logged thousands of operating hours, a small-scale unit at the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) is under construction, and Topsoe is targeting TRL 9 in 2028. Biomass and waste gasification and the novel catalyst hardware are the least proven blocks; the rest have established industrial analogues. Several G2L projects have completed FEED, and the hope is that one reaches FID within the next year.

Nihad Kasraoui, Head of Process Engineering at Metafuels, made the case for a different feedstock: methanol. The Swiss company's aerobrew process converts bio-methanol or e-methanol into a synthetic jet component through dehydration, olefin compression, oligomerisation, hydroprocessing and fractionation, using a catalyst designed to favour kerosene over naphtha and gasoline. Crucially, the product does not need an oil refiner to finish it.

The methanol pipeline gives the argument weight. More than 210 sustainable methanol projects are reportedly in development, with 35.7 million tonnes a year of planned capacity, of which 19.5 million tonnes is e-methanol. Demand has so far come mainly from marine, but Metafuels expects aviation to accelerate it. Methanol-to-jet is moving through ASTM D4054 qualification towards inclusion in D7566, a process she described as taking three to four years of property and safety testing.

Metafuels' 50-litre-a-day demonstration plant at the Paul Scherrer Institute has completed its first campaign and produced a kerosene fraction; a second campaign begins in November. Its first commercial project, Turbe, sits at the Evos terminal in the Port of Rotterdam: 10 tonnes a day of SAF, flexible between bio and e-methanol feedstock, now in FEL-3 with FEED under way. Heads of terms are signed for feedstock and offtake, a €2 million development grant is in place, FID is targeted for Q3 2027 and operations for 2030. A later phase is scoped at 100 tonnes a day.

Both speakers ended in the same place. Scaling depends less on any single technical breakthrough than on aligning feedstock supply, logistics, finance, regulation, offtake and EPC capacity at once. Metafuels listed the practical constraints, from catalyst sensitivity and scarce qualified vendors to permitting, certification and blending infrastructure, and argued for early engineering collaboration, FMEA-based risk identification and early alignment of commercial agreements.

Shipping: coordination before compliance

Francesco Sandrelli, Policy Director (Environment) at the UK Chamber of Shipping, set out two initiatives that tackle shipping's fuel problem from opposite ends: getting the fuel, and handling it safely once it is on board.

The UK Alternative Maritime Fuels Coalition, modelled on the ECSA Clean Maritime Platform, brings together 11 signatory organisations spanning shipowners, fuel producers and technology providers. It exists because of a classic standoff. Producers want demand certainty before they build; owners want fuel certainty before they commit. The coalition's answer is shared evidence and joint policy recommendations, on a technology-neutral basis grounded in lifecycle assessment and verifiable performance. Its near-term priorities are input to the UK Government's consultation on domestic maritime fuel regulation, expected at the end of the year, and a push for an appropriate share of UK ETS revenue to be reinvested in maritime fuel production, port infrastructure and deployment.

The Safety of Alternative Fuels Working Group, set up by the Chamber in 2024, works on the operational side. It now draws on 52 organisations, including 22 shipowners and operators, classification societies, equipment makers, suppliers, ports and government departments, across five pathways: battery energy storage, biofuels, methanol and ethanol, hydrogen and ammonia. In 2025 it ran five workshops with 18 speakers and 206 participants, producing five preliminary risk assessments, a resource library and a stakeholder map. The headline hazards are familiar but unresolved: thermal runaway in batteries, simultaneous operations and flame detection with methanol, material compatibility and crew competency with hydrogen, and toxicity and emergency response with ammonia. Year two begins with a battery workshop on 3 November 2026, led with the

Maritime Battery Forum.

The maritime panel

The panel that followed, moderated by Dora Branyan, IFFW Regional Partner, brought Francesco together with Edmund Hughes of IBIA, Norma Tregurtha of Bonsucro and Paula Nava of Marquis Global Energy to ask what is bankable now and what may be viable within a decade.

Conventional fuels still dominate orders and bunkering. LNG and biofuels are available today. The newer entrant is ethanol, which three major engine makers confirmed in 2025 can run as a drop-in in methanol-capable engines. Paula described rising maritime interest from US ethanol producers, while Norma pointed to an underused resource: Bonsucro certifies around 3.7 million tonnes of ethanol a year, but only about 1 million tonnes currently sells as certified. She framed first-generation ethanol as a near-to-medium-term option and second-generation as a longer-term prospect, with producer greenhouse gas performance improving over time.

The obstacle is demand. Nava noted that today's biofuel buying is largely voluntary, driven by owners and cargo owners with their own targets, and that broad commercial uptake needs a global regulatory framework. Edmund, who represents the bunker industry at IMO, described deep uncertainty over the IMO Net-Zero Framework and its effect on investment. Owners need confidence that compliant fuel will be available worldwide and that the rules offer workable compliance routes. He drew attention to draft reward provisions that say "may" rather than "shall". Estimates of the fund's scale diverged widely in discussion, from around US$1.9 billion after five years in one study to shipowner estimates of up to US$15 billion in the first year.

Without a global framework, the panel warned, regional and national rules will fragment compliance and multiply administrative burden. Francesco reiterated the call for EU ETS revenue to flow back into shipping decarbonisation. One question was left hanging: if the IMO does agree an equivalent global measure, will the EU actually withdraw its own?

The gap is on the demand side

Amelia Ransome, Director of Product at SkyNRG, challenged one of the industry's most comfortable assumptions. For years the SAF conversation has been about scarce supply. The SkyNRG and ICF 2026 SAF Market Outlook suggests that, through 2032, demand may be the tighter constraint.

Supply roughly doubled in 2025 to around 1.9 million tonnes. Meanwhile the 2030 demand forecast has been cut from 15.5 to 12.8 million tonnes, largely on policy and incentive changes in the US. Set that against 18.5 million tonnes of capacity announced for 2030 and around 5.7 million tonnes has no forecast buyer. Mandates in the UK and EU provide a floor. They do not fill the gap. If voluntary demand does not grow, projects get delayed or cancelled, and investor confidence weakens with them.

The obvious candidate to close the gap is the corporate buyer, and the obvious objection has been accounting. If a company buys SAF certificates, can it count them? Ransome pointed to three developments in 2026 that move that answer towards yes.

First, the Science Based Targets initiative's Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0, launched in June, recognises certificates and market mechanisms, including book-and-claim, within corporate climate targets, through routes such as activity pools and sector-level engagement alongside contribution claims. Second, SBTi sets out integrity criteria for what counts as a high-integrity certificate, and the SAF market is well placed to meet them. Third, the GHG Protocol's 2026 white paper on actions and market instruments signals movement towards market-based emissions statements that include purchased certificates.

The caveat is that more guidance is still coming, from SAF-specific implementation guidance under SBTi to updates to reporting standards. But the foundations are there. With disclosure rules, mandatory assurance and investor scrutiny all tightening, long-term offtake gives companies a credible way to show how they will meet future targets, and gives producers the contracted revenue they need to finance. SkyNRG's prescription was simple: engage corporate buyers now, make it easier for them to buy, and protect the integrity of the market while doing so.

For Asia, where book-and-claim infrastructure and CORSIA-eligible supply are both still taking shape, this is directly relevant. A credible voluntary market could absorb early regional capacity well before national mandates mature.

The insurer in the room

Insurance rarely gets a slot on a fuels agenda. Michel Krenzer, Energy Transition Lead at SCOR, made a persuasive case that it should. Large projects do not reach financial close without insurance, which makes insurers part of the bankability equation whether the industry recognises it or not.

SCOR covers the full range of aviation decarbonisation routes, from SAF and e-SAF to hydrogen and electric aircraft and carbon removal. Citing IATA's Fly Net Zero roadmap, Krenzer noted that SAF is expected to deliver around 65% of the sector's emissions reductions, with carbon capture also required to reach net zero. Beyond taking on risk, insurers bring engineers, scientists and lawyers to risk analysis, offer risk-control

recommendations and share lessons across portfolios.

The barriers are practical. There is not enough data to price many of these risks, the number of projects is growing faster than expertise, and skills gaps exist on both sides of the table. Emerging technologies are harder to insure than SAF plants already built or in construction, and price volatility feeds into underwriting. Underwriters look at engineering surveys, the sponsor's financial strength, natural catastrophe exposure and, critically, how prototypical the technology is. Wording matters too: business interruption terms are central, and it is still unclear how carbon credits and related instruments tied to SAF and renewable diesel should be treated in policy language. Large corporate risks are typically shared across several insurers under a lead, which makes standardised clauses valuable. They shorten negotiations and reduce friction.

Krenzer pointed to an 18-month Geneva Association process with government and industry on carbon capture and storage as a model. Its conclusions translate directly to fuels: cross-sector collaboration enables scale, clear regulation builds confidence, whole value chain assessment improves insurability and risk allocation, and clear risk allocation frameworks speed up project development. More data, shared earlier, means better pricing, and better pricing means more projects that banks will finance.

Building bankable markets

Godfrey returned to moderate the closing panel and opened it with an observation that summed up the afternoon. The day had examined each link in the value chain in turn. Far less time had gone on the chain as a whole. His panel set out to fix that: Bruno Maier of INPASA, Cindi Bough of Climate Investment, Eirik Pitkethly of bp, Freya Burton of LanzaTech and Haldane Dodd of ATAG.

Cindi set the scale. Aviation, maritime and road transport together account for about 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and no single technology, investor, insurer or policymaker can move that alone. Her sharpest warning was about policy volatility: abrupt changes destroy the investment case faster than any cost curve can rebuild it.

The panel was candid about the cost premiums investors are being asked to underwrite. Indicatively, HEFA runs at about twice the cost of fossil jet, first-generation alcohol-to-jet at two to three times, second-generation at three to four, and e-fuels at around ten. Higher-risk pathways need stronger signals. Mandates need credible enforcement and real financial incentives behind them, and policy has to stay both consistent and economically viable.

Bruno offered Brazil as proof that durable policy builds scale. The US produces around 66 million cubic metres of ethanol a year and Brazil around 38 million, together roughly 89% of global output. Brazil's long-standing blending obligations show how stable policy can deliver volume, investment and energy security at once.

Haldane noted that 46 countries now have some form of SAF mandate, and argued that supply-side incentives must sit alongside demand mandates. Coordination across aviation, maritime and land transport would give a clearer view of total fuel need and real feedstock availability, rather than each sector planning against the same pool in isolation.

Freya brought the industrial lens. Waste gases from steel and refining are a feedstock in their own right. Lessons transfer between sectors, and the oil and gas industry's processing expertise is what will take these fuels to commercial scale and lower cost. Repurposing refining capacity and building new feedstock chains also creates jobs and can address problems such as agricultural waste burning.

That raised a wider point. Much of the value future fuels create, in jobs, air quality and food security, is invisible to carbon credit accounting. Panellists suggested food, fuel and animal feed can be complementary outputs rather than competitors.

Not everything was agreed. Views split on whether international commodity markets can allocate supply efficiently under existing rules, or whether new rule sets are needed to draw investment into higher-cost pathways. There was more consensus that regional action is possible, and necessary, while global agreement remains slow.

Asked what they wanted from Singapore in June 2027, the panel was consistent: research that quantifies fuel demand and policy gaps across all three sectors, market experience shared directly with policymakers, consistent policy, cost alignment, and a little more optimism.

What London means for Singapore

Put the afternoon's sessions side by side and the five opening questions start to answer themselves, at least in outline.

Regulatory demand becomes bankable investment only when mandates are enforced, stable and backed by incentives on the supply side, and when the cost premium is shared credibly between producers, airlines, shipowners and corporate buyers. Cross-sector collaboration creates scale because aviation, maritime and land transport draw on the same feedstock, the same capital and the same infrastructure; ethanol moving into methanol-capable engines and methanol moving into jet are two live examples from this one afternoon. Existing industrial assets, from refineries to steel mills, hold more value than current accounting captures. New commercial and accounting models, from cost-of-abatement pricing to SBTi-recognised certificates, are starting to give buyers a reason to commit. And coordinating investment and risk across the system means bringing insurers, lenders, technology licensors and regulators into the same conversation earlier than they usually arrive.

What London made plain is that none of this is primarily a technology gap. It is a coordination gap. That is why International Future Fuels Week brings aviation, maritime and land transport under one roof rather than three.

The IFFW City Briefs continue in Houston on 3 November 2026. The full programme convenes at Sands Expo and Convention Centre, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, from 14 to 17 June 2027, where the questions raised in Westminster will be taken to the market at the centre of Asia's fuel trade.

With thanks to all speakers at the IFFW London Brief: Amelia Ransome (SkyNRG), Bruno Maier (INPASA), Cindi Bough (Climate Investment), Dora Branyan (IFFW), Edmund Hughes (IBIA), Eirik Pitkethly (bp), Francesco Sandrelli (UK Chamber of Shipping), Freya Burton (LanzaTech), Haldane Dodd (ATAG), Michel Krenzer (SCOR), Nihad Kasraoui (Metafuels), Nikolas Soulopoulos (BloombergNEF), Norma Tregurtha (Bonsucro), Paula Nava (Marquis Global Energy), Peter Godfrey (CarbonSync Technologies), Sophie Byron (S&P Global Energy) and Zainab Yaqub (Topsoe).