Airliners powered by sustainable fuel remain a distant goal

LONDON (NYTIMES) – One day late in 2023, an almost-empty commercial airliner is expected to lift off on a trans-Atlantic flight between Britain and the United States that Prime Minister Boris Johnson casts as a once-in-a-generation breakthrough for aviation and the battle against climate change.

With characteristic boosterism, Mr Johnson has compared the event to the brave first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by a Vickers biplane in 1919, when British World War I veterans Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown struggled from St John’s, Newfoundland, to Galway, Ireland .

British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps says next year’s flight will be nothing less than the dawn of “an era of guilt-free flying” for passengers worried that the aviation industry has contributed little to the scramble to reach anything like a “Net-Zero” world .

The flight will be powered solely by sustainable aviation fuel or SAF, jet fuel that is made from greener processes and raw materials that range from cooking oil, solid waste and crop residue to synthetic kerosene made from hydrogen and recycled carbon.

Pollution will still spew from the jet’s engines but the fuel is considered sustainable because much of the carbon it emits – often up to 80 per cent of the carbon emitted from normal fuel – has already been absorbed from the atmosphere by the raw material or would have been released anyway if it had not been turned into jet fuel.

The British government is labeling it a “net-zero” flight, although there will probably still be need to be some purchases of carbon offset credits to make the numbers add up.

And for the flight to signal a true change in the effect of air travel on the environment, the production of sustainable aviation fuels would have to ramp up to levels that are extremely ambitious and distant, goals requiring an enormous investment in production and infrastructure by fuel manufacturers.

For this and other reasons, some critics dismiss the flight as a headline-chasing gimmick.

“To claim we can fly guilt-free any time soon is a misleading and dangerous message to give to the public,” said Mr Tim Johnson, the director of the British campaign group the Aviation Environment Federation, who sits on the government’s “jet zero ” advisory council.

Besides unrealistic projections of the availability of fuel, the government and industry both plan to continue expanding the number of passengers and miles flown without taxing aviation fuels or making other tough policy and technology changes to reduce emissions, he said.

Dr Dan Rutherford, a program director at a Washington-based research body, the International Council on Clean Transportation, noted that the flight is not as nearly groundbreaking as being projected: United Airlines has already flown an airliner from Houston to Washington, DC using 100 per cent sustainable fuel in one engine; Airbus has done the same thing in France; and the main hurdle for the trans-Atlantic venture will be securing a one-off exemption to fuel regulations that limits the total amount of sustainable fuel an aircraft can use to a 50 per cent blend with normal jet fuel.

The International Air Transport Association industry group has laid out a hugely optimistic pathway to net-zero aviation in 2050 under which 65 per cent of the anticipated emission reductions would come from the use of sustainable fuel. That would require an exponential expansion of the fuel’s production and investments in refineries estimated at trillions of dollars.

A transport association said last week that the group expected 125 million liters of sustainable fuel to be produced this year, up from 100 million liters last year, but still well under 1 per cent of total consumption.

In October 2021, the association projected that its 2050 goal would require production of 7.9 billion liters of sustainable fuel by 2025, rising to 23 billion liters in 2030 and 449 billion liters in 2050.

The acknowledged last week that the 2025 output was now likely to fall short, reaching 5 billion litres, but insisted that the transport association still believed the 2050 target of more than 3,700 times this year’s output remained achievable “with appropriate government policy support”.

Even the reduced 2025 estimate of 5 billion litres still requires a 40-fold increase in output in just three years, and with each new refinery taking from three to 10 years to come online there is little sign of the required surge of investment, especially from the giant oil firms.

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