China is one of several contributors to the sustainable aviation fuel used by Britain’s forces and represents a small proportion of it, Luke Pollard, Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, has said, according to an answer given in Parliament.
Richard Holden, the Conservative MP for Basildon and Billericay, asked what proportion of the inputs into sustainable aviation fuel used by the Army, Royal Navy and RAF came from Argentina, Afghanistan and China in each of the last two years.
Pollard said: “No Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) from either Argentina or Afghanistan has been provided to Defence. China is one of several contributors to the global supply of SAF and represents a small proportion of the SAF used by UK Defence. Because aviation fuel is subject to the UK SAF Mandate, which legally requires fuel suppliers to blend a growing percentage of sustainable aviation fuel into conventional jet fuel, each Service receives the same proportion of SAF as part of that supply. The proportion of SAF is currently 3.6% of volume and scaling up linearly to 10% in 2030 and 22% by 2040.”
In a separate answer, Pollard told Holden the department cannot accurately determine how much the RAF spends on sustainable aviation fuel or its average price per litre, because “aviation fuel is purchased as a mandate-compliant product rather than as separately identifiable SAF and conventional fuel.”
The Ministry of Defence confirmed in January 2025 that all aviation fuel it buys would contain sustainable fuel from the start of that year, and said then that it does not track which flights use blended fuel. RAF Lossiemouth took delivery of more than nine million litres of blended fuel in 2024, and an RAF Voyager flew the first flight powered entirely by sustainable fuel in 2022.
