IN Brief:
- DHL and IAG Cargo have signed a new five-year SAF agreement through 2030.
- The arrangement supports about 240 million litres uplifted at Heathrow and around 640,000 tonnes of CO2e reductions for DHL Express cargo.
- A wider framework with DHL Global Forwarding could take the group total beyond 1 million tonnes.
DHL Group and IAG Cargo have expanded their sustainable aviation fuel partnership in a move that gives the airfreight market another sign that decarbonisation is shifting from pilot-stage purchasing to longer-term fuel procurement. The new five-year agreement, announced on 14 April, runs through 2030 and will support approximately 240 million litres of SAF uplifted at London Heathrow Airport for DHL Express cargo carried on British Airways flights.
DHL said the agreement, together with a previous renewal completed in 2025, is expected to deliver lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions reductions of around 640,000 tonnes of CO2e for DHL Express shipments. The company added that a further framework agreement between DHL Global Forwarding and IAG Cargo could push the total lifecycle reduction across the wider DHL Group to more than 1 million tonnes of CO2e, extending the deal beyond an express-only lane into a broader group strategy.
The fuel used in the arrangement is certified by International Sustainability & Carbon Certification and is derived from feedstocks including used cooking oil. DHL said the SAF achieves lifecycle emissions reductions of roughly 90% compared with the fossil jet fuel it replaces. In practical terms, the deal gives the group access to a known SAF volume at Heathrow, one of Europe’s most important cargo gateways and a key point in transatlantic and intercontinental express networks.
That matters because the air cargo sector has spent the past several years talking about emissions reduction while contending with the harder problem of fuel availability. Multi-year agreements of this kind suggest that major buyers no longer see SAF as a marginal premium product used to support one-off customer programmes. Instead, it is becoming part of network planning, procurement, and product design, particularly for operators trying to offer lower-emissions freight options at a meaningful scale.
The Heathrow focus is also notable. Large hub airports are where fuel infrastructure, airline partnerships, and customer demand can be brought together quickly enough to move beyond symbolic volumes. Where SAF agreements were once framed mainly as corporate sustainability signals, they are increasingly being tied to route economics, freight product differentiation, and the need to provide more consistent carbon-reduction pathways for shippers facing their own Scope 3 pressure.
For the cargo market, the next question is not whether more SAF agreements will be signed, but which operators can secure enough volume, for long enough, to turn them into durable commercial products. In that respect, longer-tenor deals at major hubs are starting to look less like experiments and more like early infrastructure for a different kind of airfreight market.
