Type: Industry Perspectives
GIDARA converts the one feedstock the world has too much of into the singular ingredient aviation needs to meet 2030 demands.
The aviation industry is stuck between a rock and a hard place, as the saying goes. While regulatory mandates, corporate commitments, and public pressure for decarbonization all close in, the SAF supply infrastructure isn’t ready to deliver a viable alternative.
The dominant production technology, HEFA, which converts used cooking oil and animal fats into SAF, is built on a finite resource and can’t scale fast enough to meet the needs of an industry facing binding mandates. Alternative pathways are too expensive or too immature to offer a long-term solution at scale (especially as regulation tightens even more over time).
As SAF demand triples to 40 million tonnes by 2035 and creates a 26-million-tonne deficit relative to projected capacity, it’s safe to say: aviation is facing a supply crisis.
It’s a complex problem, with a shockingly simple solution. The proven, commercialized gasification technology we need isn’t in development or waiting for a breakthrough moment. It’s been around for over 40 years, and it’s scalable, bankable, and ready for deployment.
Understanding the Landscape
We wouldn’t be having this conversation if two realities weren’t colliding at once: regulatory pressure is rising and SAF demand is outpacing available supply. Together, they’re forcing the aviation industry to acknowledge an unavoidable truth. The future of SAF will depend on new pathways that can scale commercially, economically, and fast.
Mandates Are Locking In Demand
The EU’s ReFuelEU Aviation regulation entered into force in January 2025. Fuel suppliers are now legally required to blend 2% SAF at EU airports, rising to 6% in 2030, 20% in 2035, and 70% by 2050. The UK goes further, requiring 9.5% SAF by 2030 while capping HEFA’s allowable share. This represents a deliberate push to force technology diversification.
Non-compliance penalties start at least twice the price differential between SAF and conventional jet fuel per tonne of shortfall. Fuel suppliers and airlines are making investment decisions based on these mandates.
The Gap is Already Visible
IATA’s Director General Willie Walsh said in December 2025 that airlines with 10% SAF targets for 2030 “will be forced to reevaluate these commitments” given current supply trajectories. SAF production growth is slowing, expected to reach just 2.4 million tonnes in 2026. The demand curve requires 15 million tonnes by 2030.
The Waste Problem Is Compounding
According to UNEP’s Global Waste Management Outlook 2024, municipal solid waste generation is projected to climb from 2.1 billion tonnes today to 3.8 billion by 2050. Much of that (plastics, forestry residue, agricultural waste, MSW) is otherwise destined for landfill or incineration. Every tonne burned or buried is both a missed opportunity and a live emissions liability.
The Current Solution Isn’t Scalable
HEFA is currently responsible for roughly 82% of all announced SAF capacity through 2030, according to SkyNRG. It’s mature and commercially proven, but the unavoidable reality? We’re running out of feedstock.
This fuel type runs on raw materials, including used cooking oil, animal fats, and waste greases, all of which are finite resources. As demand grows, the amount of available inputs for this fuel type stays constant. IDTechEx identifies 2030 as the approximate HEFA limit, when rising regulatory quotas will simply exceed what the feedstock pool can physically supply.
SkyNRG calls it the “HEFA tipping point.” IATA’s own feedstock study projects a 26-million-tonne supply gap by 2035 even under optimistic scenarios. The limitations of HEFA are not a risk, they’re a statistical certainty.
What About the Alternatives?
The other pathways in the conversation each have real barriers. When E-SAF is created via electrolysis, green hydrogen, and carbon capture, the cost of resources is a sizable barrier to entry. In 2025, E-kerosene, a key ingredient for E-SAF, sold for roughly €7,700 per tonne (compared to €700 for conventional jet fuel). IATA warns the cost gap could reach up to 12 times the fossil jet price, and compliance shortfalls from e-SAF mandates alone could push costs to €29 billion by 2032.
Alcohol-to-jet has entered early commercialization but remains significantly more expensive than gasification routes. Pyrolysis is advancing, but full certification remains in progress, and feedstock consistency and contaminant control are still major concerns. Co-processing (blending renewable feeds into existing refineries) is capped at roughly 5% co-feed under current ASTM standards. This option buys time, but lacks the ability to scale.
The industry has been optimizing around HEFA for a decade because it was the only commercial pathway. Now that the ceiling is visible, a genuine reckoning with alternative routes is underway. And the one with the most industrial proof (and the most feedstock available) is gasification technology backed by tried-and-true commercialization success.
Enter HTW® Gasification
The technology that can bridge the SAF supply gap isn’t waiting on a breakthrough. It already exists and has been operating at a commercial scale for decades. The best part? It runs on the one resource the world has in overwhelming abundance and is actively trying to get rid of.
Gasification-FT SAF, the pathway HTW® enables, is an ASTM-certified pathway already fully eligible under current blending mandates. Waste-derived syngas from gasification can be combined with green hydrogen from electrolysis to produce a hybrid fuel that is higher in carbon efficiency and significantly lower in cost than pure e-SAF routes, requiring far less green hydrogen to achieve the same output.
The only waste gasification technology with a verified commercial operating history, HTW® is deployable at lower CAPEX and OPEX than competing approaches and designed to reduce time by more than 15% and cut capital expenditure by up to 10%. As e-SAF frameworks mature, gasification syngas will play a critical role in connecting future demand with today’s solutions.
From Waste to Worth
HTW® is a pressurized fluidized bed gasification process. It converts non-recyclable solid feedstocks (biomass waste, municipal solid waste, mixed plastics, construction and demolition material) into clean, high-pressure syngas: the molecular foundation for SAF, biomethanol, renewable natural gas, and hydrogen.
All feedstocks are pre-sorted, shredded, dried, and pelletized before entering the gasifier. Pelletization homogenizes highly variable material, improves energy density, and dramatically reduces process risk. From there, the pelletized feed enters a pressurized fluidized bed operating at 700–900°C and up to 30 bar, where it breaks down into syngas. A cyclone, cooler, filter, and water scrubber complete primary cleaning, producing output that is chlorine-free, dust-free, and virtually tar-free.
That last point is more significant than it sounds. Most competing gasification technologies require a secondary partial oxidation (POX) step to crack heavy tars — adding capital cost, process complexity, and risk. HTW® eliminates that step. The syngas exits ready for downstream synthesis.
A Model That Just Works
Not all syngas is created equally, and “proven” doesn’t always mean the same thing. Some technologies have demonstrated operation at demo scale and are now trying to sell at commercial scale. Others have run on a commercial scale, but burning the syngas for power, which is far more forgiving than making molecules from it. If you’re going to produce SAF or methanol, the syngas has to be at a constant rate and quality. The moment you scale up without that track record, you’re solving problems on the back of a live project. Today’s financing environment does not give you that runway, but HTW® does. Here’s how:
Pressurized Operation
Operating under pressure reduces downstream compression requirements for Fischer-Tropsch or methanol synthesis, a direct CAPEX and OPEX advantage documented in HTW®’s own development history. Higher-pressure syngas requires less energy to compress for downstream high-pressure chemical synthesis, producing a more compact, energy-efficient process footprint.
High Energy Efficiency
In gasification, cold-gas efficiency measures how much of the feedstock’s original energy is actually retained in the syngas, rather than lost as heat during the conversion process. HTW® consistently achieves 75–85%, meaning the vast majority of what goes in comes out as usable fuel molecule rather than wasted heat.
Paired with significantly lower oxygen consumption (compared to competing technologies), the result is fewer compression steps, lower power demand, and OPEX that stays controlled even as feedstock costs fluctuate.
Single-Train Simplicity
Most large-scale gasification plants require multiple reactors running in parallel, adding complexity, redundant systems, and maintenance overhead at every turn. HTW® handles up to 1,000 tonnes per day in a single gasification train, which simplifies operations, improves uptime, and makes EPC execution significantly more straightforward.
The technology also uses a smaller air separation unit (the piece of equipment responsible for producing the oxygen the gasifier runs on), so single train design requires less oxygen output overall.
Clean Syngas
Most gasification technologies require an additional partial oxidation (POX) reactor after the gasifier (its own capital cost, engineering complexity, and failure modes). HTW®’s high-temperature post-gasification zone produces syngas that does not contain higher molecular weight hydrocarbons, eliminating that entire process block — and everything that comes with it.
Proven, Scalable, Bullet-Proof
The most common objection to any emerging energy technology is simple: has anyone actually successfully built and commercialized a model? The answer is complicated. Most gasification projects that have stalled or failed in the last decade did so not because the concept was wrong, but because the technology had never been stress-tested at commercial scale on real feedstocks, under real operating conditions, for long enough to know what breaks and why. HTW® answered that question over 40 years ago.
The Berrenrath plant in Germany ran for more than 12 years from 1986, processing 25 tonnes per hour of feedstock and achieving up to 91% availability (well above the 8,000-hour industry benchmark). Over its operational life, it processed a total of 3.6 million tonnes of feedstock for methanol production, successfully demonstrating plastics waste gasification at an industrial scale. A commercial HTW® plant followed in Oulu, Finland, in 1988, converting peat to ammonia, and an MSW gasification plant operated in Niihama, Japan, from 2000.
GIDARA acquired the technology from ThyssenKrupp in 2019 and has since updated the model to process 100% biomass and waste feedstock into the purest form of syngas (the most critical ingredient in SAF).
Let’s Talk Real-World Application
For a waste-to-SAF project to make an actual difference, it has to pass two tests. First: every component in the production stack must demonstrate credible, independently verifiable performance at the required scale, because lenders and independent engineers will scrutinize each one. Second: the integrated project has to generate a return on invested capital that justifies the risk.
HTW® seamlessly passes both. Our proof points are specific and defensible, from availability data from commercial operations and reference plants with documented performance to standardized engineering packages and alliance partners that banks recognize.
HTW® gasification solves aviation’s shortage problem because it makes real-world sense. With 84–91% operational reliability and 10–20% CAPEX advantage over competing gasification processes, investing in HTW® is a strategic step forward, not a leap of faith. Designed to lower OPEX across the entire project lifecycle, single-train architecture requires fewer process units, high-pressure operation that shrinks the Air Separation Unit, and eliminates the POX block.
Repeatable: A Proven, Scalable Model
Standardized into a repeatable system, gasification technology becomes a viable, real-world solution. GIDARA has developed 500- and 1,000-tonne-per-day HTW® plant designs with documented cost curves, validated process performance, and modular FEED and EPC phases.
For independent engineers, GIDARA provides process flow diagrams, energy and mass balances, and performance curves. Our detailed documentation turns due diligence from an obstacle into a formality and provides a tried-and-true roadmap to creating the highest-quality, purest syngas.
Coordinated: One Network, Full Accountability
The SAF Technology Alliance with Honeywell UOP, Johnson Matthey, and Samsung E&A covers everything from synthesis through EPC delivery: a coordinated system that project finance lenders can underwrite, not a series of independent handoffs. GIDARA’s licensed scope, the “gasification island”, covers feedstock intake through primary-cleaned syngas.
Everything downstream is covered by the SAF Technology Alliance: Honeywell UOP for synthesis and upgrading, Johnson Matthey for catalyst systems and methanol synthesis, and Samsung E&A for full EPC delivery. That same modular architecture also makes the system compatible with green hydrogen injection. As e-SAF frameworks and hydrogen economics mature, the integration pathway already exists through a coordinated delivery system that cuts time to start up by more than 15%.
Integrated: Seamless Entry into e-SAF Production
HTW®’s clean, high-pressure syngas is purpose-built for streamlined synthesis, where syngas becomes liquid fuel. While other forms of syngas require additional purification steps, our process delivers a finished product ready for immediate use. GIDARA’s primary-cleaned output (chlorine-free, dust-free, particle-free) passes through secondary conditioning (water gas shift, acid gas removal, polishing) before entering a synthesis unit.
Circular: Engineered for Future Benefit
Every tonne of waste diverted from landfill or incineration and processed through HTW® avoids direct methane and CO₂ emissions while producing low-carbon fuels that displace fossil equivalents. Paired with renewable power and carbon capture, this pathway achieves carbon-negative performance.
The Industry Doesn’t Need a Moonshot. It Needs a Latter.
Aviation has a supply problem, not a technology problem. GIDARA converts the one feedstock we have an unlimited supply of (waste), into the one ingredient we need most to meet sustainability targets over the next five years.
There isn’t time for more analysis, feasibility studies, or conference presentations on solutions that aren’t ready for deployment. Aviation needs the confidence and agency to move forward with a platform built to accelerate decarbonization. A commercially proven, economically viable, deployable-today step that makes a real dent in both the waste problem and the carbon problem, without requiring a twenty-year runway or a bet on technology that’s never been run at commercial scale.
Why? The projects that begin development in 2026 and 2027 will be the ones delivering certified fuel volumes in 2030. The supply gap is real. The feedstock is abundant. The technology is proven. The window is open.