Month: December 2022

Did you know that companies have been taking CO2 from the atmosphere and turning it into vodka, perfume, dresses, sports shorts, sunglasses, sneakers and car parts – to name just a few examples?

Many of the same companies are also looking at turning carbon into Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF), or E-Fuels.

Carbon removal and transformation is a growing area. It includes some innovative players who could help aviation move to net zero, and so it’s the subject of our latest power-list.

This comes as the industry is slowly starting to get to grips with the carbon removals space.  For example, at the Farnborough Air Show, Airbus and a group of airlines signed an MOU with Canada’s Carbon Engineering.

Supersonic aircraft company Boom is working with Climeworks, which has the world’s largest Direct Air Capture (DAC) facility in Iceland, as well as Prometheus, which is looking to develop a revolutionary new

European LCC easyJet has been an early mover in the airline sustainability space. It was one the more proactive airlines when climate change concerns started appearing on airline radars pre Covid.

Yesterday it released an accelerated road-map to net zero.  This includes three bets, which mark a departure from its previous plans. We’ll look at each of them, and what it means:

1 – A bet on Zero emissions aircraft over SAF

Yesterday’s Sustainability in the Air newsletter talked about the EASA report, which showed that Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) will need to do much of the heavy lifting on the road to net zero.  

This mirrors similar findings in earlier reports such as that published by the ICCT.  easyJet is however making a different bet.  Its 2050 roadmap shows almost half the target will be met by Zero Carbons Emissions Aircraft.

2 – A bet on hydrogen over

This article originally appeared in our Sustainability in the Air Newsletter.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Assembly is currently taking place in Montreal, with a key focus being on sustainability.  As part of that, controversies around the industry’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) programme are emerging, with one group accusing it of being a “climate fraud.”

CORSIA is seen by the industry as a key tool in the journey to netzero. Under the scheme, emissions were originally meant to be capped at 2020 levels, with carbon offsets accounting for any increase.

Of course, 2020 turned out to be an abnormal year due to COVID travel restrictions. And so, IATA had suggested to ICAO that the baseline be set at full 2019 levels. The compromise that looks to be adopted is that the boundary will lie at 85% of 2019 levels.

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