Wednesday 27 August 2025

By Scott Charlton, CEO, Sydney Airport

When you fly into Sydney, you're arriving at an airport that accounts for nearly 40 per cent of Australia’s aviation fuel uptake. Today, that fuel mostly comes from overseas.

In the years ahead, Australian farms — like the canola fields of regional NSW — could produce the fuel that powers our aircraft, creating jobs, boosting the economy, and keeping more of the value here at home.

That’s the opportunity we have with Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). Globally, aviation has committed to net zero by 2050, and SAF can help us get there. It has the potential to cut emissions by up to 80 per cent compared to conventional jet fuel and unlike other future technologies, can be used in today’s aircraft and pumped through existing fuel infrastructure.

The potential feedstocks are everything from used cooking oil to household rubbish. But the real opportunity for regional NSW lies in canola.

NSW produces almost a third of the national canola crop — and Australia is the fourth-largest producer in the world. More than 70 per cent of that crop is exported, with the vast majority of exports going to Europe, where up to 80 per cent is used to make biofuels like SAF.

Our farmers are already growing the crops that power the world’s biofuel industry — but the jobs and economic benefits are being realised overseas.

We can change that. With the right policy settings, we could establish a SAF refinery at Kurnell, connected directly into Sydney Airport through existing pipelines. This would be a nation-building project: creating new markets for farmers, high-value jobs, and a new home-grown industry.

So how do we do it? The first step is to scale up both demand and supply, which will need industry working with government to establish supportive policies. Managing transport and logistics costs will be critical, so production facilities should be located as close as to the point of consumption as possible. That’s exactly why NSW, as a leading canola producer, alongside Kurnell’s fuel infrastructure and Sydney as Australia’s global aviation hub, makes so much sense as the home of a domestic SAF industry.

The economics are strong. A Qantas report found a domestic SAF industry could contribute $13 billion to GDP, support nearly 13,000 jobs in the feedstock supply chain, and create another 5,000 jobs to build and run the facilities.

It’s also about fuel security. Australia imports 90 per cent of its liquid fuels and holds just 17 days of aviation fuel in reserve. In a world where supply chains are increasingly uncertain, building a domestic SAF industry could make us more resilient and self-reliant.

At Sydney Airport, we’ve already shown it works. Earlier this year, with Qantas, we imported nearly two million litres of SAF — the largest commercial shipment in Australian history — and delivered it to aircraft through existing infrastructure.

What’s needed now is partnership between industry and government. With the right policy support, Australia can build a world-leading SAF industry.

That’s the vision we’ll be putting forward at this year’s Bush Summit: a future where our skies are powered by the hard work, ingenuity, and resources of regional Australia.

This article first appeared in The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday 26 August as part of the national Bush Summit campaign.