Aviation industry is fighting climate change with new tools
One key technology will be Sustainable Aviation Fuel
As aviation struggles to emerge from the historic, pandemic-driven downturn, another longer-term challenge already looms. Concern about air travel’s contribution to climate change threatens to curtail growth of an industry that has expanded steadily for decades, shrinking the world for travelers and connecting the global economy. h The airline industry, contending with growing political pressure in Europe and recently even in Seattle for new restrictions on flying, this month formally committed to a target of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.
To achieve that, governments and industry will have to invest billions of dollars in infrastructure in the coming decade. Further out, Boeing and Airbus will have to develop dramatically new airplane designs.
For the flying public, all outcomes in the years ahead point to an increase in the cost of flying.
Yet that distant net-zero emissions target is so radical, and the proposed technology solutions so uncertain, that aviation risks falling far short.
Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury recently warned if the industry’s new push for climate sustainability fails, governments could force a reduction in air travel by banning some of the flying that is routine today – a major step back after more than 100 years of passenger flights.
“Aviation has a very important role on the planet to connect people and to contribute to prosperity,” he said at a two-day aviation sustainability summit convened by Airbus in France last month. “We are at a point where this is in danger if we don’t manage to transition and succeed in the decarbonization of the sector.”
This is “the number one matter of discussion in the industry, even more than COVID now,” he added.
Under pressure, the world’s major airlines have firmly committed to one key technology that will dominate aviation’s environmental push in the coming decade: Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF.
For the plane manufacturers, the major costs and big risks will come later.
In the coming decade, Airbus and Boeing will make money from the airlines’ push for sustainability by promoting the sale of new, more efficient jets to replace older planes that burn more gas and produce more carbon emissions. But further out, the plane builders will need to develop dramatically new technologies.
Airbus is already aggressively pursuing research to develop by 2035 a zeroemission, short-haul airliner powered with hydrogen. That research is largely
funded by European governments.
Boeing contends hydrogen-powered aircraft won’t be realistic until as late as 2050. But as Mike Sinnett, Boeing vice president of product development, recently said, “whatever the next airplane is, we recognize sustainability is going to be a driving factor.”
After the world’s airlines announced the new “net zero by 2050” goal at this month’s annual conference of the International Air Transport Association, IATA Director General Willie Walsh demanded a big technology leap from Airbus and Boeing.
“It’s not good enough that we get incremental change in efficiency with the aircraft,” Walsh said. “To get to net zero we’re going to need a fundamental change.”
Climate campaigns
The latest definitive scientific study estimates aviation contributes a net 3.5% of total human-induced climate impact. Cleaning it up has become a focus of those who see an existential crisis in climate change.
“There is a limited time for a life-altering change for my generation and my children’s generation,” said Sarah Shifley, a lawyer who volunteers on the aviation team of climate activist group 350 Seattle.
This summer, 350 Seattle mounted a campaign opposing a planned expansion of flights at Boeing Field, where corporate jets and cargo aircraft, as well as Boeing delivery and test flights, fly in and out.
Locally, the Puget Sound Regional Council that makes long-term decisions about transportation needs – and is weighing the need for one or more new airports – projects takeoffs and landings in the region will double by 2050 to over 800,000. In similar fashion, Boeing projects the world’s fleet of airliners doubling by 2040, driven by growth in emerging economies.
That’s an appalling prospect to Shifley.
“After the summer we’ve had, of heat
domes and hurricanes and floods and fires, it’s unfathomable to me to be considering doubling” air traffic, she said.
Elsewhere, particularly in Europe, flying is already being curbed by government policy. France in April banned domestic flights between cities with a train connection of less than 2.5 hours. Various government agencies and organizations around Europe have imposed similar bans on short-haul flights for employee business travel.
At the Airbus sustainability summit, Andrew Murphy, aviation director at Transport & Environment, a nonprofit that campaigns for clean transportation, said planned expansion of airports in Europe should stop.
He called for mandates with strict timelines to spur the decarbonization of aviation. “What would drive innovation and drive focus in the sector is if we were to say, by 2035, we will end the sale of jet aircraft for short-haul flights in Europe,” Murphy said.
Ross Macfarlane, a vice president at both the Sierra Club and the Clean Energy Transition Institute, which seeks to cut carbon emissions out of the Pacific
Northwest economy, said the U.S. needs to look at high-speed rail and other alternatives to flying.
He said the COVID-19 lockdown has demonstrated there are “ways to do business that are frankly more efficient than jumping on a plane at the drop of a hat.”
Yet he acknowledges how critical aviation is to modern life and the global economy. “It’s both unrealistic and not in society’s interest to take a stance of simply advocating for aviation to go away. It’s not going to happen,” he said.
Science and uncertainty
Jet airplane engines burn a lot of fuel. Alaska Airlines alone burns 750 million gallons per year.
Alaska provided data for a Boeing 737-900ER flight Oct. 6 from Seattle to Philadelphia: It burned 4,388 gallons of jet fuel, or about 24 gallons per passenger, counting bags and some extra cargo.
Yet driving that 2,800-mile trip in a typical family car would use about 112 gallons of gas, making it less fuel efficient even with four people in the car.
The most recent comprehensive scientific analysis of aviation’s impact on the atmosphere over time – published in January in the journal Atmospheric Environment and cited by both climate activists and the industry – estimated the sector’s contribution as 3.5% of total human-induced climate change based on 2011 global flight data.
That’s the same percentage calculated by the U.N.’S Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change more than two decades ago based on 1992 flight data.
Though aviation grew enormously between 1992 and 2011 as the world’s fleet of airliners more than doubled, the increasingly efficient airplanes burned less fuel. Meanwhile, other human-induced climate impacts grew as fast so that percentage contribution was constant.
Sean Newsum, director of environmental sustainability strategy at Boeing, said one can infer “that aviation emissions are growing at a rate no greater than the global emissions overall.”
The Atmospheric Environment analysis estimates only a third of aviation’s 3.5% net contribution to climate change is from its CO2 emissions, with the largest contribution coming from airplane contrails.
A jet contrail – the line of what looks like white smoke that sometimes trails an airplane – is not an emission from the airplane. It’s water vapor that is already in the air around the plane that’s triggered to condense, forming ice particles.
The most recent comprehensive scientific analysis of aviation’s impact on the atmosphere over time – published in January in the journal Atmospheric Environment and cited by both climate activists and the industry – estimated the sector’s contribution as
3.5% of total human-induced climate change based on 2011 global flight data.