Will we ever be able to fly planes on fuel made from fat and cane sugar?
As the politician next to Virgin Atlantic chairman Richard Branson pulled out his phone for a selfie, Richard peered into the camera, smiling and giving a thumbs-up.
This was because the flight used 100% biofuel and became the world’s first commercial airliner to cross the Atlantic Ocean, landing in New York at the time.
Virgin Atlantic’s Boeing 787 was powered by fuel made from plant sugars (such as sugarcane) and waste fat instead of gasoline. This fuel is a form of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
The UK MP posted a smiling selfie of himself with Branson on social media site X (formerly Twitter), along with calling the flight a ‘significant achievement for British aviation’. (The flight was partially funded by the UK government.)
But not everyone is so sure that this represents the pure biofuel flight of the future.
Biofuels require a wide range of biological sources, including plants, perishable foods and even algae. When biofuels are burned, they release carbon dioxide. Some scientists consider them a sustainable option because they are renewable and when biomass grows, they work to reduce some carbon from the atmosphere.
The problem is the volume of biomass needed to power the fuel-intensive aviation industry.
An academic paper published in August estimated that 125 million hectares (482,000 square miles) of land would be needed if you were to grow and use sugarcane to make biofuel for commercial aircraft. It will be equal to the total area of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Louisiana or say more than the entire area of Pakistan.
This means a lot of land. Some experts say that even if you try to use only biomass waste sources, the world’s waste will not be enough to keep all the world’s planes in the air.
The airline industry is currently responsible for about 3.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the emissions of a country like Japan, and is one of the world’s highest carbon-emitting sectors.
“What they’re doing is pretty significant,” says David Lee, professor of environmental science at Manchester Metropolitan University. They are just saying that the flight is perfectly safe, there is no problem with the fuel.
David Lee has studied the impact of aviation on climate and is co-author of a paper on the feasibility of switching to SF fuel.
“By switching to SAF, you can reduce carbon emissions by about 70 percent,” Lee says. However, it also depends on which biofuels you are using.
Lee noted that international regulations currently do not allow flights using more than 50 percent SAF as fuel, and for this Virgin Atlantic received special permission from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. Permission had to be obtained.
All these are evidences of the successful concept of this fuel but today it would be difficult to fuel more than one flight with 100% SAF.
“You can’t get that fuel easily,” Lee says. Even if you want to test the engine, it is difficult to buy this fuel.
This is a problem that Virgin Atlantic also acknowledges. Only 0.1% of all aviation fuel used is SAF fuel.
The International Air Transport Association has predicted that the airline industry will need 450 billion liters of SAF fuel by 2050, compared to only 300 million liters of SAF fuel produced in 2022.
To date, however, the SAF has helped fuel hundreds of flights, at least partially.
U.S. SAF production is projected to reach 2.1 billion gallons (7.9 billion liters) annually by 2030, well short of President Biden’s goal of producing 3 billion gallons (11.3 billion liters) of fuel annually by that year.
Scaling up SAF production is difficult. In a Royal Society report published earlier this year, Lee and colleagues analyzed the UK’s ability to produce its own SAF for commercial flights.
“We concluded that there really wasn’t enough land for it,” he said.
Management consultant McKinsey & Company estimates that competition for land is fierce worldwide and we will need an additional 70-80 million hectares of land globally by 2030, an area larger than the US state of Texas.
The majority (70 percent) of this new cropland is needed to grow crops for livestock feed. According to McKinsey, only 10 percent of the total required acreage will go to biofuel production.
For example, some of the SAF comes from waste fat and some from the food manufacturing process. Reliance on such sources could theoretically reduce the need to expand crop cultivation to produce biofuels.
But there is little waste available for this, says Hannah Daly of University College Cork in Ireland. He says that if you were to add up all the biomass waste available in the Republic of Ireland, it would account for only about four percent of the fossil fuels used in the country.
She says that the situation will be similar in other countries as well.
“There is a substantial risk that this ‘useless cooking oil’ could be fraudulently re-labeled as virgin palm oil and sold,” says Daly. It can contribute to deforestation.
However, some alternatives to SAF include hydrogen fuel and electrification, but these are currently not viable options for large commercial flights.
Chelsea Baldino, senior researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), and her colleagues estimate that UK waste-based SAF could account for up to 15% of UK jet fuel demand by 2030. will be able to fulfill
ICCT also estimates that only 3.3 to 4.2 billion gallons of SAF can be domestically produced in the US by 2030, compared to 23 billion gallons of jet fuel used by US airlines in 2019. .
Josh Moss, an economist at Leeds Beckett University in the UK, described Virgin Atlantic’s SAF flight as ‘greenwashing’.
“It would be better to reduce the demand for global flights,” he says, perhaps by taxing frequent flyers or increasing taxes on the airline industry.
Mr Moss admits such measures are ‘politically and socially unpalatable’ but both he and Daly suggest they may be necessary if we are to achieve net zero carbon emissions targets.
A Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said: ‘We are committed to achieving the 2050 goal of net zero and have set interim targets to get there, including 10 per cent sustainable aviation fuel by 2030. ‘
He said the 100% SAF flight from London to New York was completely dependent on waste biomass and that the flight was an “important step” in the firm’s efforts to increase the use of SAF in the coming years. is but not the ultimate goal.’
Some people are still skeptical and Dali is one of them. She points out that even if SAF replaces an increasing proportion of fuel for aviation purposes, the overall benefit could be offset by the fast-growing airline industry.
Eurocontrol, the European aviation safety agency, predicts that by 2050, the total number of annual flights worldwide will reach 16 million, a 44 percent increase from 2019 figures.
“I would love to fly guilt-free, but that’s not possible,” says Dali.