Global Biofuels Alliance targets SAF corridors, advances methanol for marine sector in International Shipping News 29/04/2026 The Global Biofuels Alliance is in active negotiations with the governments across the world to establish a sustainable aviation fuel corridor linking global airports, a framework designed to drive SAF policy harmonization and standardization across jurisdictions and position India as a global aviation bunkering geography, GBA Director Joshua Wycliffe said at an industry event in New Delhi. “GBA is in very active talks with the governments of the Netherlands and Singapore to work on a SAF corridor between airports — between let’s say Amsterdam-Delhi, Amsterdam-Mumbai, Singapore-Mumbai, Singapore-Delhi,” Wycliffe said at the Indian Federation of Green Energy’s Green Transport Conclave in New Delhi from April 23-24. “What it does is it not just promotes SAF, it promotes standardization, brings governments together, brings policy mandates together, and also helps defragment policy differences and standards differences,” he said. Standardization at core Wycliffe framed the corridor initiative as a response to a structural problem in the global SAF market, a widening mismatch between carrier-level SAF commitments and the absence of binding national policy mandates in many jurisdictions. He cited an instance of flying on an international flag carrier whose crew announced the flight was operating on SAF, only to discover on landing that the carrier’s home country had no SAF mandate in place. “Everybody is looking at SAF with or without the mandate. But one of the key things we would need to emphasize if leapfrogging is being able to regularize the policy mandate and have frameworks that will then have the uptake. Why would someone invest in technology? Why would they invest in SAF or for that matter in biofuel unless there’s a policy mandate that would create an uptake?” he said, drawing a parallel to India’s solar power trajectory where a combination of mandates and incentives drove the price from Rupees 18/unit to Rupees 2/unit ($0.2-$0.02). The corridor model is designed specifically to address the policy fragmentation problem by creating a bilateral or multilateral framework that anchors SAF volumes, blending standards, and certification requirements across participating country pairs, creating a replicable template for other routes. Wycliffe said it would also help position India as a “global bunkering geography” — a strategically significant designation given India’s refining capacity, ethanol surplus, and geographic location on major international aviation corridors. Methanol outlook On the technical side, GBA Technical Director Dr. Santanu Gupta identified methanol as the most commercially near-term solution for the marine sector among hard-to-abate fuel applications, citing direct engagement with the International Maritime Organization last month and confirmation from engine manufacturers that commercial methanol marine engines have been developed and are moving into production. “We had interactions where the engine manufacturers have already developed methanol-based engines and almost 200-plus ships are also coming out, so it’s going to take a very good commercial shape in the marine sector,” Gupta said. He flagged the CO2-to-methanol pathway as particularly attractive in a marine context given the availability of carbon price mechanisms to absorb the cost differential. “That’s a sector which is hard to abate