Passenger plane makes first trans-Atlantic flight powered only by sustainable aviation fuel. But, is this really the future of flying?
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This week saw some potentially big environmental news. Jumbo jet sized news in fact.
A Boeing 787, operated by Virgin Atlantic, became the first large passenger plane to cross the Atlantic using only sustainable aviation fuel. Flying from London Heathrow to New York’s JFK, the flight, which was part funded by the UK government and was carrying no paying passengers, was used to show that there was a cleaner way to fly.
The aviation industry is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. According to an EU report if global aviation were a country it would rank in the top 10 greenhouse gas emitters and that someone flying from Lisbon to New York and back generates roughly the same level of emissions as the average EU citizen does heating their home for an entire year.
Although the use of increasingly fuel-efficient, modern aircraft has meant that the amount of fuel burned per passenger has dropped by 24 per cent between 2005 and 2017, the huge worldwide growth in air traffic, and the ease with which we now fly, means we are all on average flying further and more often.
So, while large passenger planes crossing the Atlantic using only sustainable aviation fuel sounds like good news for the environment. It seems that you shouldn’t get too excited about conscious-free flying just yet. Sustainable aviation fuel is made from non-petroleum feedstocks such as forestry and agricultural waste, used cooking oil, carbon captured from the air and green hydrogen. They do not use food crops (such as palm oil), prime agricultural land or freshwater. In the case of this flight, it was powered by 88 per cent waste fats and 12 per cent the wastes from corn production. Although this was the first commercial sized passenger aircraft to cross the Atlantic using only sustainable aircraft fuel, planes have been partially using sustainable aviation fuel for some years now by utilising a blend of between 10 and 50 per cent sustainable aviation fuel with traditional petroleum fuels. Even so, sustainable aviation fuel still only accounts for 0.1 per cent of the total amount of aviation fuel used around the world.
One of the reasons for this slow take up in sustainable aviation fuel is because we simply don’t have enough of it to power thousands of planes in the sky at any one moment. It’s estimated that the production of sustainable aviation fuel reached 285 million litres in 2022. This sounds like an impressively big number but in fact this yearly production total almost equals the daily jet fuel consumption in just the US. To reach the net zero by 2050 goals that the aviation industry is aiming for we would have to produce a staggering 450 billion litres of sustainable aviation fuel annually. To do so at least 10,000 production facilities are required. Currently we have just eleven such sites around the world, although many countries are building or planning on building such facilities.
In addition to a lack of sustainable aviation fuel there’s also the cost. Currently sustainable aviation fuel costs three to five times that of traditional petroleum-based aviation fuel and this means consumers would have to pay notably more for aeroplane seats (though as production increases so prices are likely to fall).
Another problem is that despite the name, sustainable aviation fuel is not carbon-free. Instead, it reduces carbon emissions by around 70-80 per cent, which of course is still a big reduction, but it doesn’t yet bring us into the realms of carbon-free flying.
Many experts agree that although the current generation of sustainable aviation fuels are a step in the right direction, they are merely a stepping stone towards eventually getting to conscious free, completely green flying.
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