Beat Crude with Altitude: Why Cascadia Needs a Place Where SAF Risk Can Clear
Editor’s Note: This is part II of a four-part series on the Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator and opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. Part I is here: Notes from Peanut Butter Lake: Why SAF Is Moving Slower Than It Should — and What Cascadia Teaches Us About Real Take-Off. Part III is here: Speed, Baby, Speed: How Washington State’s Cascadia Accelerator Turned a Launch into Lift
I. The Moment After the Diagnosis
In Part One, we reached a moment of clarity.
The Pacific Northwest region of British Columbia, Washington and Oregon known as Cascadia is rowing hard when it comes to sustainable aviation fuels. The technology works. The demand is real. The talent is here.
And yet—progress feels sticky. Projects move, but slowly. Capital circles, but hesitates. Every deal feels bespoke. Every failure disappears into silence. What we’re facing isn’t a shortage of innovation. It’s friction—systemic, cumulative, and invisible until it isn’t.
History tells us what comes next in moments like this. Not automatically. Not inevitably. Only if regions choose to build what comes next. That choice is the subject of Part Two.
II. The Repeating Pattern
This story has played out before.
Maritime trade didn’t scale because ships improved. It scaled because insurance pooled risk, contracts standardized, and ports became trusted clearing points. Electricity didn’t scale because generators improved. It scaled when interconnection rules and settlement systems made electrons legible across regions. Oil didn’t scale because drilling advanced. It scaled when pricing hubs, pipelines, and contracts stabilized uncertainty between producers, refiners, and financiers.
Innovation opens the door. Clearing determines who walks through it—and who captures the value. Regions that built clearing kept margin, memory, and momentum. Regions that didn’t became suppliers.
III. What “Clearing” Actually Means
Before going further, let’s define the term—plainly.
Clearing is where:
- contracts become standardized
- risks are named and priced consistently
- disputes resolve without freezing projects
- lessons persist beyond individual failures
- capital stops treating every project as a bespoke gamble
Think of it like high-speed rail. Trains don’t run faster because engines improve. They run faster because tracks are standardized, stations are predictable, and schedules synchronize risk across the system. Without that infrastructure, even the best trains idle. Clearing plays the same role in markets: it doesn’t invent motion—it gives motion somewhere to land.
Clearing does not mean owning assets. It does not mean running projects. It does not mean regulating production. It means reducing uncertainty between participants so markets can move faster than any single actor could alone. Clearing makes markets legible.
This is the bioeconomy version of the $6 box of Corn Flakes problem: without a Cascadia Commission, Cascadia supplies the ten-cent corn—the molecules—while distant financial and insurance hubs harvest the remaining $5.90 of intelligence and margin, all while the region convinces itself that value is being created locally.
IV. Why SAF Has Reached the Clearing Threshold
Sustainable aviation fuel is no longer speculative.
Feedstocks exist. Conversion pathways exist. Policy scaffolding exists. Demand signals exist. And critically, interoperability has begun to emerge.
This isn’t theoretical. The SAFc Registry, Chooose, and Alaska Airlines partnership already demonstrates interoperable tracking in practice—where SAF attributes, airline procurement, and corporate demand reconcile through shared digital infrastructure. That integration functions as a proto-clearing mechanism: not running the market, but making it legible enough for trust to scale.
When interoperability appears, it’s a signal. The market is ready to clear—if someone builds the venue. This is not a critique of the existing ecosystem. It’s a recognition of its success. Project enablement got us here. Market infrastructure is what comes next.
V. A Concrete—but Careful—Proposal
One possible institutional response is now visible. Call it, provisionally, the Cascadia Commission. Working definition:
The Cascadia Commission would be a neutral, regional body focused on standards, arbitration, and market interoperability for the bioeconomy—a place where risk can clear without government owning assets or picking winners.
Properly built, it wouldn’t just support a regional SAF market. It would function as a first-in-the-world trust anchorfor the bioeconomy—not a fuel strategy, but a marketplace invention regions quietly copy once it works.
What it would not be:
- a regulator
- a fund
- a project developer
- a climate authority
What it would be:
- a standards-setter
- a convener
- a dispute-resolution venue
- a reference point for contracts and insurers
- a trust anchor
Think less agency, more infrastructure.
VI. What It Would Actually Do
Institutions earn credibility by doing specific things well. A Cascadia Commission could focus on four functions:
- Standard-setting
Model contracts, offtake templates, SAF attribute definitions, interoperability norms. - Arbitration and dispute resolution
Fast, expert resolution so conflicts don’t freeze capital. - Risk translation
Common definitions insurers, lenders, and investors can rely on—reducing interpretation risk that quietly inflates cost of capital. - Market memory
Ensuring lessons from failures don’t vanish when teams dissolve.
It wouldn’t run the market. It would make the market legible. Concretely, this means resolving known bottlenecks:
- blend-limit uncertainty, including implications of the current 50% cap
- fragmented book-and-claim systems
- attribute durability across transactions
These aren’t theoretical problems. They’re where deals slow, premiums widen, and capital pauses. Crucially, this work would be grounded in Cascadia’s existing technical trust anchors. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Washington State University already lead national efforts in lifecycle analysis, fuel performance, and SAF certification. Their empirical rigor would inform standards—ensuring claims reflect physical reality, not negotiated assumptions.
VII. Why This Is a Regional Advantage Play
This brings us back to Cascadia—and to the warning from Part One.
Without clearing, Cascadia’s forests risk becoming ten-cent corn: abundant, essential, and under-priced by markets that settle value elsewhere.
More than 50 million acres of managed forest across Washington and Oregon already supply the molecules the aviation transition will depend on. Without regional clearing, those timberlands risk falling into a classic commodity trap—where physical work happens locally, but margin is priced and captured by distant insurers, registries, and financial centers.
The difference between a region that clears and one that merely extracts is not incremental. Capturing clearing-level value determines whether Cascadia participates in a $500 billion total economic impact opportunity or watches that value consolidate elsewhere. At scale, the return profile approaches 14-to-1—not because the molecules change, but because the market structure does.
The communities carrying this risk are not abstract. They are Tribal Nations and rural towns stewarding land, labor, and logistics. Today, many are rowing in peanut butter—contributing real value while watching margin slip away. A regional clearing enables a circular model where durable regional margin settles back into the communities carrying the operational and environmental burden.
The cost of inaction is tangible. Airport-adjacent communities—often lower-income and disproportionately Tribal or rural—face up to four times higher asthma risk and reduced life expectancy. SAF promises a 20–70% reduction in soot and NOx, but without clearing, those benefits risk being exported as paper credits while the health burden remains local.
Clearing aligns the credit with the combustion—ensuring cleaner fuel displaces dirtier fuel where people actually breathe the air. The choice isn’t whether Cascadia produces SAF. The choice is whether Cascadia keeps the value SAF creates.
VIII. Relationship to Existing Efforts
This distinction matters. Project-focused organizations help things get built. Market-focused institutions help systems endure. The roles are complementary, not competitive.
If the Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator builds the high-speed train and lays the tracks, the Cascadia Commission builds the universal ticketing and settlement system that lets that train cross borders without stopping.
IX. A Reality Check
Some guardrails matter. States shouldn’t run markets. Governments shouldn’t own risk. Legitimacy matters more than authority.
Any serious clearing effort would need to be lightly staffed, credibility-driven, standards-first, politically modest, and operationally sharp.
No charters yet. No proclamations. Those details come later—if the case is earned.
X. Looking Ahead
Later this week, leaders from across the region will gather at Paine Field in Washington state to celebrate the Cascadia Sustainable Aviatino Accelerator’s progress —it’s a place built to move ideas into the air. Cascadia has the chance not just to produce the fuels of the future, but to invent the marketplace they trade in.
Regions have faced this moment before. In the 18th century, maritime insurers learned how to turn existential storms into manageable premiums—transforming chaos into commerce. Cascadia now faces its own version of that choice.
In Part Three, we’ll examine what those early architects understood—and what that lesson means for the bioeconomy now.
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