Fossil-fuel phaseout 'too late' to meet aviation industry's net-zero goals

Sustainable fuels, more efficient engines and improved aircraft design will not be enough to decarbonise the sector by 2050, experts tell Farnborough Airshow

CFM International LEAP engine on the opening day of the Farnborough International Airshow, which runs from 22 to 26 July.

It is one of the hot topics at this year’s Farnborough International Airshow – how do you decarbonise the aviation industry?

Aviation is what’s called a hard-to-abate industry, meaning reducing or removing carbon emissions at source, in other words aircraft, is difficult.

In October 2021, the industry adopted the long-term climate goal of achieving net zero by 2050, which would mean employing a whole range of measures and solutions, including new aircraft designs and materials, new fuels such as hydrogen and SAF and better efficiency in aircraft movement and air traffic management.

But to get to net zero, Prof Myles Allen from the University of Oxford told a panel at the Farnborough International Airshow, we need to go way beyond carbon reduction and seriously back carbon removal.

“We’ve left it too late to meet our targets by just phasing out fossil fuels," he said.

"One day we will stop using fossil fuels, unquestionably.

“But we have to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming before we stop using fossil fuels. We’ve left it too late to just stop using fossil fuels entirely.”

The Farnborough International Airshow 2024 - in pictures

Carrie Harris, director of sustainability with British Airways, agreed that net zero for aviation was not going to happen without carbon removals.

“It’s critical that we get into action as soon as possible,” she said.

Last week, a report from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) said new aircraft models that emit net-zero carbon will need to be commonplace by the mid-2030s if the aviation industry is going to reach its 2050 goal.

“A typical aircraft is in service for about 25 years,” said ICCT researcher Supraja Kumar.

“If airlines are going to be net zero by 2050, we need planes that burn zero fossil fuels throughout their lifetimes, starting around 2035.”

The aviation industry is being pro-active on net zero. Aerospace manufacturer GKN has had its net-zero targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, the global body responsible for enabling businesses to set ambitious emissions reduction goals.

“Our science-based targets provide a clear pathway to net zero, said Peter Dilnot, chief executive of GKN.

“By addressing our entire value chain, we emphasise our commitment to being the most trusted and sustainable partner in the sky.”

Removal and reduction

But experts agree that even if all these measures are employed successfully, aviation will still be a carbon-positive industry. So, many companies, including Airbus, have been embracing the concept of direct air capture (DAC) to sequestration.

This involves huge facilities sucking the CO2 out of the air, essentially operating like enormous trees. The process is relatively simple: air is drawn into the plant by large fans, passes over thin plastic surfaces with a non-toxic potassium hydroxide solution flowing over them. That traps the CO2 as a carbonate salt.

The carbonate salt is then separated from the solution and the resulting pellets are heated in order to release the CO2 as pure gas.

That gas can be stored or sequestered far underground, and the pellets can be reused.

There are not a great number of DAC facilities in operation but many more are planned. The first large-scale operation, called Orca, was opened in 2012 by Climeworks in Iceland, and is capable of removing 4,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

Many more direct air capture facilities are planned in North America where Canadian company Carbon Engineering is partnering with Airbus to build large DAC operations in the region.

Japan’s All Nippon Airways and the European low-cost airline easyJet have signed up with US company 1PointFive to purchase carbon removal credits, through its Stratos DAC plant in west Texas.

“This isn’t just a science project,” Anna Stukas, vice president of strategic partnerships with 1PointFive, told the Farnborough Airshow on Monday.

“This is something that is real, that we are actively working to deploy today. Stratos, when fully operational, is targeted to capture approximately 500,000 tonnes [of carbon] per year.”

“That does the work of about 20 million trees and is roughly the size of about 13 football pitches.”

Passenger education

Dr Gabrielle Walker, co-founder of CUR8 and Rethinking Removals, feels the air-travelling public need to be educated about carbon removal.

“People say: ‘I didn’t know you could do this,’" she said at the Farnborough Airshow.

Hemant Mistry, director of Net Zero transition at the International Air Transport Association (Iata) said there is a growing recognition by airlines about the importance of carbon removals and that “we need to build the awareness with passengers”.

Ms Harris noted that in surveys conducted by British Airways and others, many passengers had heard about carbon offsets “but almost none had heard about carbon removals”.

For Prof Allen, the scaling up and growth of the carbon removal industry was a matter of some urgency, simply because net zero targets, especially in aviation, will not be achieved by the introduction of more fuel-efficient engines and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) alone.

“If you don’t have a way of getting rid of CO2 as you approach net zero, your only opportunity left is to actually ban the activities that generate carbon dioxide in the first place, and that’s the point at which climate policy becomes incredibly expensive and, almost certainly, incredibly unpopular.

“There’s still a tendency [among some politicians] to think in a sort of pre-2009 mentality that we can do this by just reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we generate.

“We can’t. It’s too late for that.”