Jet fuel incentive sparks criticism around Hanscom

See original post here. 

By Dakota Antelman — [email protected]

State officials are seeing green — in more ways than one — in “sustainable aviation fuel.” 

Legislators and community advisers at Hanscom Field are seeing red.

“It’s a fraud,” state Rep. Carmine Gentile told The Concord Bridge.

Sustainable fuels can be made from materials like food waste or corn. A new three-year set of $10 million tax credits seeks to help establish Massachusetts as a hub for the industry.

Backers say promoting SAFs could cut pollution from planes. Gov. Maura Healey’s team says credits will also “support innovation and create good-paying jobs.” 

Critics call SAFs a form of “greenwashing” in which groups use sustainability claims for political or economic gain — and some see ties to proposed Hanscom hangars. 

SAFs and possible new development are “politically connected,” because the developers have cited sustainable fuels as “part of their argument why this is a good thing,” Hanscom Field Advisory Commission member Christopher Eliot said this spring.

Amber Goodspeed, Hanscom’s manager of airport administration, said they’re “completely different things.” 
Gentile, whose district includes Concord’s share of Hanscom, isn’t sold on the science and said sustainable fuels are like “clean coal,” technology that purportedly captures some emissions released from burning fossil fuel.

“There is no clean coal,” he said. 

‘A placebo’

Companies have promoted systems to capture carbon from the air and create SAFs. 

Proponents such as the International Air Transport Association trade group say SAFs are already in use, don’t require aircraft modifications, and can cut carbon emissions by roughly 80%.

SAF’s biggest challenge “isn’t whether it works,” Massport spokesperson Jennifer Mehigan told The Bridge this month. “[I]t’s producing enough of it and making it more affordable so it can be adopted at scale.” 

Making the opposite case, a 2025 report co-authored by MIT board member Neil Rasmussen, a Concord resident, argued that SAFs actually increase greenhouse gas emissions because of how much energy it takes to produce them.

Eliot, who helped with the report, told HFAC that tax credits are a “$30 million mistake.”
SAFs are “kind of like a placebo,” he said. “If you give somebody a placebo medicine, it distracts them from pursuing a real treatment.”

Credits came in a larger $1.56 billion supplemental budget bill that Gov. Maura Healey signed into law June 12. State Sen. Michael Barrett told The Bridge he’s happy SAF efforts didn’t get direct state funding through the bill. The Democrat, who represents Concord, said he’s “not so pleased” that the industry still got a tax break. 
A recent 10-year strategic plan from Massport, the quasi-public agency that operates Hanscom, prioritized sustainable fuel adoption at the airfield.

Barrett said he suspects “Massport’s buzz about SAF is all about shifting attention away from private jet hangars for billionaires and the other embarrassing things they’re up to.”

Pros and cons 

Kati Winchell of the Statewide Coalition to Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere told reporters that Massport is “aggressively pushing” sustainable fuel “because it appears to justify the expansion of private jet travel.”

Asked about claims that SAFs are political cover, Mehigan said Massachusetts has 37 public-use airports that stand to benefit from Beacon Hill efforts, and “Hanscom is just one.”

She said Massport supports sustainable fuel as “one of the most practical tools available” to lower aviation’s climate effects while maintaining safety and reliability. 

Concord HFAC representative Terri Ackerman told The Bridge she can see both sides of the SAF debate.
“There could be a technology that we don’t know about yet that could be developed,” she said — but she doesn’t want to expand Hanscom’s hangar capacity based on that possibility. 

Gentile, like Barrett, voted for the supplemental budget with the SAF credits. He nonetheless slammed the program in comments to The Bridge. 

The argument for SAFs is “totally bogus,” the Sudbury Democrat said.
Whether it’s SAFs or hangars, advocates have warned about the effects of more emissions entering the sky above Concord.

Asked how the state’s SAF embrace affects the hangar project, Gentile replied: “It certainly doesn’t hurt them.”