The European Commission (EC) has its policy this week published on how the European aviation sector should achieve its environmental and climate goals. The European Parliament approved this policy last Wednesday as part of the broader Green Deal of former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans. Earlier this year, the European Union signed an agreement to promote the use of sustainable fuels in aviation.
In practice, this new policy means that minimum requirements are imposed on the use of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF). However, the purpose of this policy goes further than simply linking percentages to years. The EC mainly strives to create a level playing field for all airlines and airports in Europe to prevent so-called “tankering”. Refueling is the phenomenon in which extra fuel is taken at an airport where refueling is cheap, so that less or no refueling is required at the next, more expensive airport. This leads to flights with more fuel and therefore more weight on board, which, according to the EC, results in higher fuel consumption than necessary and therefore also more emissions. This undermines fair competition in the European Union's air transport market.
The EC therefore wants to ensure that airlines refuel at airports where more sustainable but also three to six times more expensive SAF is mixed.
Ambitious
The goal of using at least 2050 percent SAF by 2050 sounds ambitious given the current status of the industry. At the same time, it remains to be seen whether this will be enough to achieve the International Air Transport Association (IATA) target of completely emission-neutral flying by XNUMX. The current types of SAF reduce emissions by approximately seventy to eighty percent and are mainly produced from (residual) products from the food industry. Although this type of SAF cannot yet be produced on a larger scale and at low costs, the EC wants to invest in more technologically advanced variants.
This concerns synthetic fuels that can be produced based on CO2 capture and sustainable energy. The EC writes: “Synthetic aviation fuels have the potential to reduce emissions by at least 85 percent compared to fossil aviation fuels. When these fuels are produced from renewable energy and carbon captured directly from the air, the potential emission reductions can be as high as 100 percent.” The use of this type of fuel should also avoid burdening the food chain, which is the case with the current generation of SAF.
Even with large-scale use of synthetic fuels, a lot of CO2 will still have to be captured to achieve the targets for CO2-neutral flying by 2050. Electric flying can of course contribute to reducing emissions. However, because the electric aircraft that will come onto the market in the coming years are relatively small, they will not directly contribute to reducing emissions in large aviation. Using sustainable, synthetic fuels therefore appears to be the only method to meet the climate objectives in the short term.
Source: Upinthesky
