Sustainable Aviation Fuel Deployment Strategies in Europe: Supply Chain Implications and Climate Benefits

Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) could reduce aviation's CO₂ and contrail climate forcing. This study quantifies the contrail mitigation potential and fuel supply chain costs of a uniform SAF distribution scenario, assuming all departing flights use a 10% SAF blend by mass. Building on this, we propose three SAF allocation strategies that optimize the same SAF supply to maximize contrail mitigation, while considering real-world supply chain constraints and additional costs. A seasonal strategy - providing SAF to all flights from October to February at higher blend ratios (28%) - achieves the highest benefit-to-cost ratio (1.7-7.2) and lowest abatement cost (€14-61/tCO₂e). It raises annual reductions in contrail energy forcing (EF_contrail) from 7-8% (uniform vs no-SAF scenario) to 12-13%, with supply chain costs rising by 0.5% relative to the uniform scenario. Two diurnal strategies - one targeting flights after 16:00 local time and another adding a constraint of selecting flights with >250 km of persistent contrails - have lower benefit-to-cost ratios (0.2-2.4) and higher abatement costs (€42-675/tCO₂e). Their 1-2% rise in supply chain costs relative to the uniform scenario outweighs the additional contrail climate benefits, as annual EF_contrail reductions only rise from 7-8% (uniform scenario) to 9-17%.