Got My Mind SAF on You: Avalon, NWABF and the New SAF Horizon

If there’s one refrain running through this week’s sustainable aviation fuel headlines, it’s that Rudy Clark had it right all along in Got My Mind Set on You, which most of us remember from the George Harrison cover version:

It’s gonna take time
Whole lot of precious time
It’s gonna take patience and time, mmm
To do it, to do it, to do it, to do it, to do it
To do it right, child

Two stories, in particular, show why some SAF projects quietly advance while others stall in the valley of good intentions.

Over at Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels

First, the team at Northwest Advanced Bio-Fuels (NWABF) has unveiled what may be the most consequential SAF financing innovation in years: an insurance-backed guarantee to de-risk the engineering development capital (DEVCAP) phase that has kept so many renewable fuel ventures from getting off the launch pad. It sounds arcane, but it’s foundational.

For decades, major infrastructure lenders have been prohibited from funding pre-construction engineering and design. Projects would get tantalizingly close to reality—feedstock secured, offtake agreements inked, sites selected—but they’d stall for want of the working capital needed to finalize engineering and secure final investment decisions. NWABF, in classic Pacific Northwest style, didn’t make a lot of noise about it. They just worked the problem.

The company partnered with a global insurance underwriter to create a repayment guarantee instrument that effectively eliminates default risk for DEVCAP financiers. Lenders can now fund early engineering work with confidence that if something goes wrong, their principal and interest are insured. The implications are enormous: billions of dollars of delayed SAF projects—some languishing for years—can now clear the runway.

As NWABF’s Dave Smoot put it, “Someone had to do it.”.

This is the kind of GTESI-inflected persistence that matters. When you look across decades of advanced biofuels, you find that it’s not necessarily the most glamorous technologies that survive. It’s the teams that align incentives for all stakeholders. In this case, NWABF aligned risk tolerance, return expectations, and policy mandates into a coherent financing architecture.

Contrast that to projects that have faltered. Too often, companies expect financiers to bear outsized technical and regulatory risks without meaningful protection, or they fail to anticipate the timing mismatch between capital cycles and policy incentives. That’s when you see the press releases fade, the websites stop updating, and the same projects resurface five years later with a new logo and the same structural weaknesses.

Over at Avalon

Consider the Avalon project in Uruguay. If it feels like déjà vu, it’s because Camelina has been on the radar a long time. Back in March 2010, our team published a comprehensive report titled Camelina Aviation Biofuels: Market Opportunity and Renewable Energy Report. Even then, Camelina was identified as an oilseed crop from the mustard family that thrives in semi-arid temperate regions, possessing numerous traits that made it a high-potential feedstock for sustainable aviation fuel.

The promise was real:

• Camelina proved in yield trials to be a hardy, low-input crop, requiring far less fertilizer and irrigation than soybeans or canola.

• It performed well on marginal land, germinated in near-freezing temperatures, and offered agronomic benefits as a rotation crop.

• Lifecycle modeling estimated GHG reductions of 75% or more versus petroleum—a figure that has largely held up.

Yet the report also underscored challenges rarely acknowledged in headlines:

• Camelina was “relatively novel” in North America, with limited breeding and no large-scale seed supply chains.

• Crushing and refining capacity simply didn’t exist at the necessary scale; capital costs for drop-in jet fuel far exceeded those of biodiesel.

• Even as field trials expanded across more than a dozen states, contracts and guaranteed offtake commitments lagged behind.

• The report concluded that “millions of acres of Camelina, and 100 million gallons per year of Camelina fuel, is still years away.”

In other words, you can’t skip the developmental rhythm. It takes time to scale seed genetics, prove yields, and build the logistics backbone. Rushing the oven doesn’t help. As any baker knows, turning up the heat just scorches the crust and leaves the middle raw.

All of this context is why Avalon’s work today is so significant. It isn’t just a fresh licensing agreement—it’s the culmination of fifteen years of patient progress: breeding improvements, policy development, and supply-chain experiments that laid the groundwork for this moment.

It also highlights a broader lesson running through both Avalon and NWABF’s projects. Whether it’s a novel financing structure to unlock engineering capital, or a new technology platform to process Camelina oil efficiently, success has required a willingness to do the quiet, unglamorous work for as long as it takes.

Looking at these projects through the GTESI persistence lens

In a GTESI frame, it’s a classic example of evolutionary persistence. While hype cycles around algae and miscanthus came and went, Camelina retained a clear value proposition: a low-carbon oilseed that could be grown without displacing food crops. Now, with Sulzer’s BioFlux technology—a proprietary liquid-full reactor that optimizes hydrogenation without vapor recirculation—the process economics have finally matured into something bankable.

It’s worth underscoring that this isn’t merely an incremental tweak. BioFlux significantly improves yield, extends catalyst life, and cuts costs. That’s how you get from “promising pilot” to real project finance.

And again, it circles back to the song refrain:

It’s gonna take patience and time to do it right.

Consider the through-line between NWABF and Avalon. Both teams recognized that no amount of technology hype can paper over weak fundamentals. You need feedstock security, robust engineering, de-risked financing, and credible offtake. You need alignment across growers, processors, airlines, and investors—and the humility to keep building while the spotlight drifts elsewhere.

If there’s a cautionary note this week, it comes in the proliferation of partial measures and symbolic gestures. We’re seeing airlines adopt tiny SAF blends—1% here, 2% there—and while every molecule matters, the question remains: what’s the pathway to 10%, 50%, or 100%?

The same goes for carbon capture pilots at airports and domestic SAF supply announcements. These are good steps, but the industry must guard against the illusion of progress. When partial measures get over-celebrated, they risk crowding out the full-stack efforts that can actually scale.

So how do you tell the difference? Which SAF efforts will persist and reshape the industry, and which will fade into footnotes?

GTESI suggests four questions worth asking:

1. Is the feedstock strategy resilient and scalable? Camelina, woody biomass, waste oils—these are credible, proven resources.

2. Is the process technology mature and differentiated? BioFlux is a great example of how core innovation can unlock cost and yield advantages.

3. Is the financing architecture robust? NWABF’s insurance-backed DEVCAP model removes a structural bottleneck.

4. Is there a clear path to offtake at meaningful volumes? Without buyers committing long-term, everything else is theory.

When you find projects answering all four, pay attention. That’s where persistence lives.

If this week proves anything, it’s that the path to sustainable aviation fuel is a slow train coming—but it is coming. Whether in the forests of Washington, the fields of Uruguay, or the labs in Dublin, the pattern holds:

It’s gonna take money.
And patience.
And time.

But when all three line up, the industry moves forward. No amount of hype can substitute for that alignment.