On 17 September EASA published the first ReFuelEU technical report that covers a mandatory year. Fuel suppliers told the agency they put 39.3 million tonnes of aviation fuel into Union airports in 2025. Of that, 1.1 million tonnes, 2.8 percent, was sustainable aviation fuel. The law asked for 2 percent. Volume was nearly six times the 193,000 tonnes of 2024. SAF reached 121 Union airports in all 27 member states, 79 percent of the designated field list, against 33 airports the year before. EASA put the lifecycle greenhouse-gas saving at 3.77 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent, a weighted cut of about 89 percent versus fossil jet. Florian Guillermet called the mandate met and exceeded. That sentence is true and incomplete. The 2 percent bar was a first-year floor. Most of the molecule that cleared it is still used cooking oil, refined in Europe from feedstock that did not grow in Europe, poured into a handful of hubs, and claimed on paper in a system that can move the environmental credit farther than the fuel.
Follow one tonne. It begins as used cooking oil, most likely in China, which supplied 61 percent of the imported feedstock EASA counted, Malaysia and Indonesia add another sliver. Eighty-five percent of the feedstock behind the 2025 SAF was imported. About 80 percent of the finished SAF was aviation biofuel, overwhelmingly HEFA from that oil. The tonne is refined at an EU plant. EASA says most of the finished fuel, on the order of 84 to 86 percent, was produced inside the Union which then moved by barge or truck into a tank farm. The Netherlands took 320000 tonnes, 29 percent of all reported SAF. The Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Italy and France together took three-quarters. Schiphol or another large hub can physically blend the tonne into Jet A-1. A smaller Union airport on the 121-airport list may have received a symbolic uplift, or none that week. ReFuelEU lets suppliers meet the share across the system. The aircraft that departs from a thin field can still be a fossil departure. The certificate does not have to sit in that wing.
The airline pays the premium at the fuel desk or in a book-and-claim contract. Operators reported 43.1 million tonnes uplifted and about 1 million tonnes of SAF purchased, a slightly different ledger from the suppliers’ 1.1 million tonnes supplied, which is how markets look when tickets, flexibility and timing do not match a tank. The environmental credit then splits. Some of the tonne is aimed at ReFuelEU compliance. Some is flagged for an ETS allowance or a CORSIA claim. EASA’s dashboard even asks how much SAF operators intend to put into a market-based measure. One physical tonne cannot honestly clean two inventories. The premium accrues to the refiner and the trader who aggregated the UCO. The passenger pays it in a fare that has barely moved. The climate ledger records 3.77 million tonnes saved against a European jet market that still burned on the order of 38 million tonnes of conventional kerosene at Union airports in the same year.
That is why flying stays hard to decarbonise after a target is beaten. Used cooking oil is finite and already contested by road biofuel. Advanced biofuels and recycled-carbon fuels are still a minority of the 1.1 million tonnes. Synthetic aviation fuel, the e-SAF the 2030 and 2035 steps will need, had no large-scale final investment decision in the report year. EASA’s production cases for 2030 run from 1.5 million tonnes of capacity that already exists, to 3.7 million if plants under construction and post-FID projects appear, to 5.5 million plus 0.6 million synthetic if high-credibility announcements become steel. The 6 percent 2030 blend is within reach only if those cases are not press releases. A tonne that starts as imported UCO cannot be multiplied by a mandate. It can only be rationed, certified and, if the bookkeeping is loose, claimed twice.
The useful next report is not another victory on 2.8 versus 2.0. It is a map of which airports actually tanked SAF, which feedstocks can grow without eating the same oil twice, which e-SAF projects reached FID, and whether an airline’s purchased tonne and a supplier’s supplied tonne are the same molecule. Until then Europe has enough paper fuel for a small target and a long-haul sector that still leaves on kerosene.