Context

Our client, a clean energy producer with a mission to decarbonise transport, had been developing plans to enter the Sustainable Aviation Fuel [SAF] market, including technical plant feasibility studies. They required a thorough independent assessment of the market opportunity and investment case in order to finalise and agree the strategy. The review would include bottoming out the market entry strategy, developing go-to-market recommendations against the favoured options, and building the financial model to support the agreed strategy.

Our team was led by a senior consultant with over 30 years’ experience in the Energy sector.

Approach

Our team began by crafting the market outlook for SAF across Europe and globally, including drivers of supply and demand and cost benchmarking across alternative technlologies and producers. We developed future SAF market pricing scenarios, coupled this with a cost curve developed for our client (based on assumptions about yield, capex and freight costs) and framed four potential market entry options, taking into account access to customers, feedstock sourcing, distribution considerations, technical viability and market entry timing.

The preferred option was developed into a business case, including detailed capability and investment requirements and risk mitigation approaches.

Impact

Our assessment, developed in close collaboration with internal stakeholders and experts, provided the Board with a clear framework to evaluate the decision as to whether and how to move forward.

This included detailing the risks, range of returns, capabilities and staged investments that the strategy would require, as well as a proposed decision-making framework.

The work enabled the Board to prioritise investment across different core and adjacent market projects. We were subsequently asked to conduct a similar detailed assessment of a biodeiesel project for the same client.