Aviation’s Carbon-Neutral Future Could Begin in Korea’s Fields

The oil discarded after frying chicken can now help power an aircraft. Restaurants collect used cooking oil, which is refined and hydrotreated into sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF.

Aviation faces a harder path to carbon neutrality than cars or factories. Batteries cannot yet lift large aircraft carrying hundreds of passengers across oceans, so fuel that works in existing aircraft while significantly reducing emissions has emerged as the industry’s practical alternative.

The global market is moving quickly. The European Union began requiring SAF use last year and plans to raise the share to 6 percent in 2030 and 70 percent in 2050. The United States is expanding production through tax incentives and government investment while supporting low-carbon feedstock crops. South Korea is preparing to require SAF blending from 2027.

Used cooking oil is currently the most realistic feedstock, but its supply is limited. Even collecting cooking oil from restaurants around the world would not meet rising aviation demand. Using food crops at scale would create competition between food and fuel for limited farmland, undermining the claim that the transition is sustainable.

The article points instead to oilseed crops grown in empty winter rice fields and other short gaps between crops. Such cultivation could provide oil without competing directly with food production. The resulting material could serve not only as aviation fuel, but also as biodiesel, biodegradable lubricant and a naphtha substitute for plastics. One agricultural feedstock could therefore connect energy and chemical production in a broader bioeconomy.

This is presented as a particular opportunity for South Korea, a major aviation-fuel exporter with strong refining and petrochemical capabilities. Extending those capabilities into SAF and bio-based industries could help preserve the country’s competitiveness in a changing fuel market. But technology alone will not create the industry. Korea will need supply chains linking cultivation, harvesting, storage, transport, refining and aviation, as well as systems that track and certify emissions reductions.

Mandating a SAF share would open the market, but the central question remains what will fill it. The author argues that Korea needs a concrete strategy for domestic feedstock production and for securing alternatives after used cooking oil. Aviation’s carbon-neutral future, the article concludes, may begin not with the aircraft engine, but with empty winter fields.