Colombia emerges as Latin America's SAF leader with new roadmap
Colombia locked in a 100 million-gallon SAF target for 2035 and joined ICAO's ACT-SAF programme, pulling ahead in Latin America's SAF race.
Colombia joined ICAO's ACT-SAF programme after a July 9-11, 2025 mission to Medellín set a 100 million-gallon SAF target for 2035. Resolution 00090 of 2025 also set 450 million gallons by 2050, putting Colombia alongside Brazil and Chile as the only Latin American countries with a strategic SAF plan at the time.
ICAO Secretary General Juan Carlos Salazar opened F-AIR Colombia 2025's academic agenda and led a regional roundtable in Medellín with civil aviation authorities, fuel producers, aviation associations and multilateral financial institutions. ICAO's 2026 policy guidance says SAF could provide the largest share of the emissions cuts aviation needs to reach net zero by 2050, but high production costs, limited sustainable feedstock, limited investment and competition for incentives still define the market.
Colombia's ministries launched technical working groups on October 5, 2023, with transport, agriculture, defense, science, finance, environment, DNP, Ecopetrol, the Air Force and Fedebiocombustibles at the table. Aerocivil later signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with Ecopetrol under the SAF Vuela programme to push research, development, regulation, commercialization and environmental planning.
The project pipeline now includes a BioD alcohol-to-jet plant and a separate plan to refurbish and convert the inactive San Lorenzo refinery into a biorefinery for SAF production. Across the border, Petrobras chose Honeywell UOP's Ethanol-to-Jet technology for the REPLAN refinery in São Paulo, a proposal with up to 10,000 barrels per day of SAF if approved. Petrobras had earlier licensed Honeywell UOP HEFA technology for SAF and renewable diesel at the Presidente Bernardes refinery, using soybean oil and beef tallow.
MIT researchers found Latin American aviation emissions could more than triple by 2050 as air travel grows, and that if SAF supplied 65% of the region's aviation fuel use, emissions could fall about 60% against a weaker-policy scenario. IATA expected global SAF production to reach 2 million tonnes in 2025, or 0.7% of airline fuel use, and about 2.4 million tonnes in 2026, or 0.8%, at an estimated cost of $4.3 billion.
ICAO's global tracker relies on public announcements and certification data, but a significant share of announced capacity may never become SAF or may be diverted to other fuels.
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