Shell says trust will decide SAF market growth
Shell says SAF growth will hinge on trusted carbon accounting, feedstock checks, pricing and supply commitments, not just more volume.
World Economic Forum figures show Shell Aviation injected more than 18 million gallons of SAF into Avelia from 2022 through September 2024. Shell Global on July 1 argued that trust, not chemistry, will decide whether SAF can scale toward ICAO’s 23 million-tonne 2030 target. The aviation market has more than doubled in demand since 2000, the IEA says, while emissions in 2023 climbed to more than 90% of their 2019 pre-pandemic peak.
Marieke Verhoeven, Shell Aviation’s senior manager for decarbonisation solutions, has spent more than 23 years across corporate, operations and climate strategy roles, including work supporting assets in Australia and Canada and helping shape Shell’s net-zero strategy. She was also selected as a 2026 SAFTAs Exceptional Woman in SAF finalist.
Where the trust gap sits
The biggest credibility problem is not whether SAF can cut emissions, but whether buyers can trust the claim attached to each gallon. Book-and-claim is one of the chain-of-custody models in IATA’s SAF handbook, and it only works if the buyer trusts that the environmental attribute has been counted once, transferred once and not sold twice.
That is why ICAO and IATA announced enhanced cooperation on June 2, 2026, to improve transparency and integrity in tracking SAF development and deployment. The issue is broader than accounting software, because the market also wants assurance on feedstock sustainability, carbon intensity and the rules governing transferable claims. ISCC’s 2026 draft guidance for book-and-claim systems is built around integrity, transparency and credibility, while RSB and World Energy launched a demand-signal recognition pilot in 2024 to show proof of additionality and give lenders a cleaner signal that SAF demand is bankable.
Pricing transparency sits in the same bucket. When the fuel moves in one place and the claim moves somewhere else, corporate buyers need a clear way to see what they are paying for, what volume is tied to the claim and how the environmental value is verified.
Avelia is Shell’s working example
Shell, Accenture and American Express Global Business Travel launched Avelia as a blockchain-powered book-and-claim platform, giving corporate buyers a way to support SAF use even when the fuel is not physically delivered to their departure airport.
The launch pool was still modest, about 1 million gallons, enough for nearly 15,000 business flights between London and New York.
Why Shell keeps linking trust to supply
Shell had an ambition to produce around 2 million tonnes of SAF a year by 2025, and it says its SAF can reduce lifecycle carbon emissions by up to 80% compared with conventional jet fuel. It also says electric and hydrogen propulsion are unlikely to have a scale impact on aviation emissions until 2050 or beyond. That leaves liquid fuels, and the accounting around them, at the center of near-term aviation decarbonisation.
SAF has the greatest potential to reduce CO2 emissions from international aviation, and ICAO’s Global Framework targets 23 million tonnes of cleaner energies used in international aviation by 2030. That target is far above the volumes in today’s voluntary systems, which means the sector still needs long-term offtake, credible certification and supply commitments that extend beyond one-time purchases. For suppliers, feedstock choice and delivery schedules matter as much as headline capacity.
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