REFUELLING sustainability

As airlines encourage us to pay additional fees towards sustainable aviation fuel, how successful is the initiative to wean air travel off fossil fuels?

- TOM OTLEY

In recent months many airlines have started to offer corporate customers the opportunity to partner with them in sourcing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). For companies looking to lower their carbon emissions (20 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have set a climate commitment for 2030), it is a way of reducing the emissions caused by their employees travelling. For airlines it means they can reduce their Scope 1 emissions – meaning those stemming directly from its core business – while the corporate reduces their Scope 3 emissions caused by travel. But what effect will buying small amounts of SAF have on the overall emissions that aviation creates, and should you be pushing your company to do the same, or perhaps topping up those contributions by buying SAF as an offset for your own travel?

Aviation accounts for 2-3 per cent of global carbon emissions today, but there is a risk that this could rise to more than 20 per cent by 2050. At present, these emissions are small compared to transport as a whole (around 25 per cent in the European Union), but proportionally they will rise as those other industries reduce their emissions through electric vehicles and biofuels.

Sustainable aviation fuel is seen as the mid-term future for commercial aviation, until new technology – both electric and hydrogen – is brought into mainstream commercial use. At present, SAF makes up only 1 per cent of fuel used worldwide. As the International Air Transport Association (IATA) puts it: “Insufficient supply and high prices limited airline uptake to 120 million litres in 2021– a small fraction of the 350 billion litres that airlines would consume in a normal year.”