![]() ![]() “We would need to hugely increase our supply of renewable energy to be able to make these fuels in meaningful quantities, and airlines would need to be prepared to pay a lot more,” she says.Īn Emirates Airbus A380-800 aircraft flew with one of its engines powering entirely by SAF on November 22, 2023. However, Hewitt adds that these “e-fuels” are “very expensive and very energy intensive to produce.” She adds that while most SAF is currently produced from waste, the only truly sustainable option is to make a synthetic fuel produced using captured carbon combined with green hydrogen. Hewitt says that while advocates argue that using a fuel made from plants offsets the plane’s tailpipe emissions, if the fuel is made from waste products, the carbon dioxide would have been captured regardless, “So we’re not convinced there’s really any carbon reduction associated with this fuel.” “One flight on 100% alternative fuel isn’t going to change the fact that 99.9% of aviation fuel is fossil fuel and there’s no great option for feedstock (raw materials) that can be scaled up sustainably,” she says. However, according to Cat Hewitt, policy director at the Aviation Environment Federation, a UK non-profit that monitors aviation’s environmental impact, the flight is more of a gimmick than a game changer. The goal of Virgin Atlantic’s flight and those before it is to provide data about technical feasibility, as well as bring attention to these new sustainable fuels in a bid to scale up their production. However, it is currently more expensive - up to 6 times - than regular kerosene, and represents just 0.1% of all jet fuel in use globally, meaning its impact is currently very far from the levels needed to meet IATA’s future projections. ![]() SAF can be made in several different ways, including using exclusively renewable energy rather than plant waste. That CO2 is released back into the atmosphere when the SAF burns, whereas burning jet fuel made from fossil fuels emits carbon that had been locked away. According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), SAF will play a major role in the industry’s path to net zero, which it hopes to achieve by 2050: by then, up to 65% of the reductions in emissions will come from it.Īlthough SAF burns like normal jet fuel and produces the same amount of emissions while the plane is flying, it has a lower carbon footprint during its entire production cycle, because it’s usually made from plants that have absorbed carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere when they were alive. SAF is a big bet for commercial aviation, which produces about 2.5% of global carbon emissions but is facing a harder path to decarbonize than other sectors. ![]() Virgin Atlantic says that the SAF alone will cut the flight’s emissions by 70%, but it is also adopting other measures to limit environmental impact and increase efficiency, such as operating the taxi phase (when the plane goes from gate to runway) with just one engine, and limiting the amount of potable water onboard to what is strictly necessary, reducing weight. The flight will use a total of 70 tons of SAF, mostly made from waste cooking oils and animal fat, plus a small portion coming from corn waste used to produce animal feed. Large twin-engine jets have performed flights using 100% SAF on both engines before, but these flights involved military aircraft. Days earlier, business jet maker Gulfstream completed what it billed as the world’s first transatlantic flight using 100% SAF. Last week, Emirates powered one of the four engines of an Airbus A380 superjumbo with it. The flight is the latest in a series of recent tests involving 100% SAF. To operate the flight, a special permit was issued by the UK Civil Aviation Authority, which came after a series of technical reviews including ground tests with 100% SAF on the same type of engines used during the flight. However, while Virgin Atlantic says that using SAF will reduce the aircraft’s emissions by 70%, critics say the flight is little more than a gimmick, and that the kind of SAF used by the plane will do little to clean up aviation’s climate impact.Ĭurrent regulations prohibit airlines from using a blend of more than 50% SAF on commercial flights, as engine manufacturers and aviation authorities work together to ensure that these new fuels are safe to use in higher concentrations. Traveling from London Heathrow to New York’s JFK, the flight, which is meant purely as a demonstration and will not carry any paying passengers (although it will carry scientists and media), is operated by Virgin Atlantic using a Boeing 787, with both its engines running on the fuel. For the first time, a transatlantic flight operated by a commercial airline will be powered by 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) - a type of plane fuel that bears the promise of a much lower climate impact than traditional ones.
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