Electric Aviation Won't Kill Jet Fuel, But It Will Take the Best Routes

Aviation is often treated as one of oil’s safest remaining markets. In 2026 that still looks like a reasonable assumption. Airlines are expected to consume around 104 billion gallons of fuel this year, sustainable aviation fuel remains below 1% of total use, and virtually every commercial passenger aircraft in service still depends on liquid hydrocarbons.

The attraction is not simply that an electric aircraft has no tailpipe emissions. It is that electricity is a remarkably efficient way to produce motion. NASA is developing aviation electric machines with efficiency above 98%. Electric propulsion also offers fewer mechanically complex combustion components, lower noise and the possibility of using locally generated electricity instead of a globally traded refined oil product.

That last point looks more valuable in 2026 than it did a year ago. Middle East disruption has pushed IATA’s expected average jet-fuel price for this year to $152 per barrel, around 70% above 2025, adding roughly $100 billion to the industry’s fuel bill. Electricity is not immune to energy shocks, but an aircraft charged from a diversified domestic power system is not directly exposed to crude prices, refinery margins, tanker routes or a closure in the Middle East.

This is where the comparison with electric cars becomes relevant. Hydrogen and synthetic fuels can technically power road vehicles. Biofuels can technically replace gasoline and diesel. But battery-electric cars increasingly won the efficiency argument because converting electricity into a fuel and then converting that fuel back into motion throws away energy and adds infrastructure. I suspect the same will happen in aviation – but only within the range envelope where batteries work.

The industry is moving fast. In 2025, EASA certified Safran’s ENGINeUS 100, an electric motor platform intended to extend into applications of up to 19 seats. Heart Aerospace is developing its 30-seat ES-30, with a claimed 200-kilometre all-electric range and type certification targeted for 2031. Archer, meanwhile, is pushing the completely different eVTOL model into supervised real-world operating environments. Archer’s all-electric Midnight aircraft flew from Salinas to Monterey and back, taking roughly nine minutes each way.

Jet Fuel Still Has One Enormous Advantage

The strongest objection to battery aviation is also the correct one weight. Jet fuel contains vastly more energy per kilogram than today’s batteries, and an aircraft becomes less efficient every time extra mass must be carried into the sky. A NASA study of a notional 19-passenger electric aircraft found that roughly 600 Wh/kg at cell level would be needed to achieve a 250-nautical-mile mission with reserves – more than twice the capability assumed for then-current lithium-ion cells.

That is why sustainable aviation fuel will not follow hydrogen cars into irrelevance. Long-haul aviation needs dense liquid energy, and SAF has the huge advantage of working with aircraft and infrastructure that already exist. In 2026, however, global SAF supply is expected to reach only 2.4 million tonnes, or 0.8% of aviation fuel use. It also remains expensive.

So the likely outcome is not batteries versus SAF across all aviation. It is batteries taking the routes where electricity is technically sufficient, while SAF and eventually e-fuels fight for the much larger aircraft and longer routes where batteries remain impractical. On those short routes, liquid fuels may eventually find themselves in the same uncomfortable position as hydrogen in passenger cars technically possible, but economically hard to justify.

Electrifying just 1% of that fuel demand would displace about 68,000 barrels per day. At 10%, the arithmetic becomes roughly 0.7 million barrels per day. That is not a forecast, and today’s eVTOL market will displace only a fraction of it. It simply shows why oil markets should watch regional electric aviation long before electric aircraft appear at major international gates. Electric aviation does not have to conquer the sky to matter for oil. It only has to become the obvious choice on the routes batteries can reach.