Suggested Citation:
Uría-Martínez, Rocío, Jin Wook Ro, Julie Witcover, Colin Murphy, Pedro Liedo (2026)

Modeling U.S. Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) Deployment Trajectories with a Transportation Fuel Market Model (BioTrans)

Scaling up SAF production in the United States (U.S.) will require large, sustained investments throughout the biofuel supply chain. Multiple types of analyses (e.g., biomass resource assessments and mobilization strategies, technoeconomic and lifecycle analyses of biofuel conversion processes, transportation fuel market analysis) can help inform those investment decisions. This report offers an example of biofuel market analysis that tracks relevant substitution and complementarity relationships across transportation fuel markets as well as the effectiveness and interactions among various policy programs and incentives that affect biofuel production and use volumes. The report describes BioTrans—a market equilibrium model that covers the supply chain for biofuels and captures competition with petroleum products in the road, aviation, and marine segments—and summarizes illustrative results regarding SAF deployment trajectories under different scenarios. The BioTrans model offers a platform where key uncertainties such as oil price levels, farmer adoption of energy crops, rate of technological progress in biofuel conversion processes, or uptake of other alternative fuels in different transportation segments can be explored through scenario analysis. The model description presented in this technical report is a snapshot as of September 2025. Results should be considered as illustrative and their discussion emphasizes explanation of the mechanics of the model. Additional work will be needed to improve calibration of the model results to observed magnitudes for some of the variables. 

Prepared by Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the US Department of Energy

ORNL/TM-2025/4094