Europe wants to be climate neutral by 2050 and, as an intermediate step, aims to have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 55% in eight years compared to the levels of the 1990s. In this ambitious path towards decarbonisation, the The European Union focuses on the transport sector, to which it attributes almost a quarter of the total greenhouse gases that are discharged on the continent, and establishes the objective of reducing its impact by 90% by mid-century , always with 1990 as reference. The challenge is enormous and in fact some subsectors such as aviation are not currently prepared to meet the requirements dictated by Brussels.
According to the European Commission, aviation accounts for 13.9% of transport emissions and 3.8% of the community total. From Enaire, the body that manages air navigation in Spain, and the Sepla pilots’ union, they point out that the sector has spent years designing more direct and efficient routes and varying the live flight plan according to the weather to reduce emissions. But it will not be enough to meet the demands.
All the agents in the industry agree that new technologies are necessary for this, but aviation does not currently have any sufficiently mature to reach either the flying goal of 2030 or the checkered flag of 2050. There are only two realistic ways to do so : biofuels -for the short and medium term- and hydrogen -the most disruptive route but not expected until at least the middle of the next decade-. It is a business that has always strived to innovate, but the combination of climate urgency and still-nascent technologies has sparked a race for research in aeronautics.
Green hydrogen is the same and there is hardly any production of sustainable fuels due to low demand due to its high price, about 2,500 dollars more expensive per ton than kerosene. And here lies the second brake on research: airlines barely have the financial capacity to pay for innovation, extremely expensive in this industry, after being hit hard by the pandemic. According to the vice president of IATA in Europe, Rafael Schvartzmannthe airlines have had to assume 220,000 million euros in debt to survive the crisis.
carrot and stick
In an attempt to speed up this process, Brussels is negotiating the imposition of a tax on kerosene to force airlines to use a minimum percentage of biofuels, something that the airlines reject, preferring to speak of “incentives” to the use of the SAF. Flor Diazthe head of the European Commission’s Aviation Policy Unit, was clear last week at a forum on sustainability in aviation organized by Air Nostrum: “We have to be pragmatic. Today there is not enough production of SAF ( ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’). [que estudia la CE] they go for 2026 onwards, because today it is impossible”.
And to work “not only with the stick but also with the carrot,” the president added that she is working with the European Investment Bank “so that it is open to financing these aerial initiatives and ensure that we bridge that valley between research and investment ” now going through the industry.
Biofuels for aviation, obtained from waste such as used cooking oils, animal fats or biomass, “allow partial or total replacement of fossil kerosene without affecting the behavior of the engines or the elements involved in the aircraft such as the tank, the pumping systems, etc. The definition is from the head of business development for Cepsa’s biofuels area, Javier Criado. This company is one of those that is leading investment in R&D to replace oil-derived fuel and plans to allocate “between 7,000 and 8,000 million” between now and 2030 to consolidate the SAF. From the Spanish Association of Petroleum Product Operators they point out that the Refuel Aviation regulation establishes that by then the operators must refuel “a minimum volume of 90% of SAF in EU airports”. Today the percentage does not reach 1%.
About the scarcity in the market, Raised defends that “it is given by the absence of a clear regulation that guarantees consumption and that allows to ensure the amortization and profitability of the investments required to be able to undertake production” since “today significant investments are necessary to produce SAF at 5% , or very relevant to produce 100% SAF”, adds Raised, who sees it as “essential” that a “direct public economic support be implemented that allows for the investments required to be able to guarantee the amortization of the investments”, a point on which the entire sector agrees. Cepsa aspires to produce 800,000 tons of the 3.5 million tons of SAF that it calculates aviation will need in 2030. Repsol and BP are the big competitors in this area.
The SAF, “the realistic way”
This same Thursday, the Platform for the Promotion of Ecofuels, an organization that includes 27 employers (airlines, oil companies, automobiles) which in turn represent 340,000 companies, claimed the need for public aid for a technology with the capacity to “achieve a reduction of emissions” and also lessen the energy dependency of the EU on third countries such as Russia.
Mixing percentages vary depending on the type of SAF. There are six families authorized by the international standards organization ASTM for use in aviation, which, depending on the level of dissolution they accept with kerosene, allow a reduction in emissions of between 30 and 94%. A) Yes, Raised insists that “today it is the most realistic way to develop the decarbonization” of commercial aviation, since “the electrification of aircraft is a very complex challenge due to the low energy density of the available batteries”.
The path to zero emissions
Airbus is immersed in this challenge. The European manufacturer wants to be the first to put a plane in the air with zero emissions both in flight and in fuel production in 2035. The director of technology development at Airbus, Silvia Lazcanodefends that the objective is “ambitious” but “absolutely realistic and feasible” and claims that the firm’s experience in “turning R&D into innovation and applying it to real products”.
Lazcano stresses that innovation is not new for Airbus, but rather its “reason for being”, and highlights that in 2021, in the midst of a pandemic, the consortium allocated 2.7 billion dollars to R&D. But the road is long and the company is in fact still in an early phase of developing green hydrogen for aircraft. “We are not developing any product that we are going to launch in the next few years. This means that the engineering that used to work on the development of programs is now developing technologies with a lesser degree of maturity. In other words, we are dedicating more resources to the technology that is necessary to later launch a new program,” he says.
Related news
Although hydrogen is still a distant project, Lazcano highlights that it is the “only technically viable way” to decarbonize this industry. “97% of Airbus’ emissions are generated in the flights of the aircraft we sell, and that is where we are making the greatest effort,” says the European giant’s head of innovation, adding that in the last 50 years it has reduced its emissions by 80% thanks to improved efficiency.
However, he agrees that the SAF is necessary in the meantime and asks to promote it: “We need it in the short term and also for the long haul.” And he demands a roadmap to implement it: “We can give more than what is asked of us. We have 10,000 aircraft with the capacity to fly with 50% SAF and reduce emissions by 40%. But there is no availability. We must understand that it is necessary to reduce emissions and that should be encouraged”, he concludes.