THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE I 39 The Review THE GREEN WATCH ➔ Aviation ups the ante on biofuels


IT WAS good to see at the recent Farnborough International Air Show that the green agenda is very much alive and well, writes Roger Gardner. The green credentials of new products were being pushed hard. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the first commercial airliner to be built with a carbon composite fuselage, made its European debut appearance and many manufacturers were vaunting their fuel saving technologies. Boeing and Airbus – with the


A350 due to enter service in three years time – both confirmed major orders. New technology is catching on fast and will continue a trend towards ever more fuel- efficient aircraft. So, that’s the environment catered for. Well, no, not really. These new aircraft will certainly help, but aviation is continuing to grow faster than the boffins can bring new technologies on stream. How then can the sector meet


our desire and need to travel by air without aviation continuing to take an ever-bigger slice of the carbon cake? The international aviation industry has committed itself to carbon neutral growth by 2020 and to carbon free flight by 2050. Meeting these tough challenges will require additional step- change technologies. The fairly new kid on the block


is the move to develop another type of technology, bio and other


alternative fuels. If even a fairly modest percentage of total fuel used by airlines could be ‘low carbon’, that could help to reduce the overall carbon intensity of flying and the aviation sector. But is that a realistic possibility? There have now been many


trials of different fuel stocks, ranging from blends with coconut oil to plants like Jatropha or third generation solutions like algae. The essential requirement is not to use feedstocks that compete with food crops or that encourage deforestation. Achieving the balance between ethical


sourcing of alternative fuels and finding the space needed to grow them at a commercial scale for aviation is the challenge. This is where algae comes in as


it requires far less land, though it has its own challenges in terms of needing supplies of carbon dioxide to help it grow. Perhaps current efforts to turn wastes into aviation fuel will also make a worthwhile contribution. British Airways is following this


course to help meet some of its fuel needs through a planned waste-to-energy plant in the UK and


“Aviation should pull out all the stops to make biofuels work and bring on new technology as quickly as possible”


other airlines are getting interested. Although there is ongoing research, the availability of bio and alternative fuels for aviation, as predicted by the UK’s Climate Change Committee, would only reach ten per cent of the total requirement by 2050. Useful, but not


enough to really ease future aviation carbon pressures. The aviation community is now committing a lot of effort to alternative fuels and this was a new feature at the Farnborough Air Show. Lets hope research into this technology shows it to be a practical commercial proposition – there is certainly a powerful incentive on the aviation sector to follow this route as the recent spate of biofuel flight trials shows. This is an exciting new


area and one to keep an eye on. If these different technology solutions start to control net carbon growth from aviation, how then can the promise of carbon- free flight be realised? This is where the debate moves beyond technology or operational advances – and the latter is also something that has a way to go – into ‘market based’ measures that will affect the cost of air travel. With aviation joining the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in 2012 and with wider international interest in this method of reducing carbon, the sector will become a significant buyer of carbon credits as other industries clean up at lower cost. ETS is certain to become a major strand in low carbon strategies for aviation and that will, over time, affect the cost of flying. With ETS looming, increases in taxation upon aviation and talk of levies upon flying to support carbon-reducing action in developing countries, there are good reasons for the sector to pull out all the stops to make biofuels work and bring on new technologies as quickly as possible. If ever there was a need to maintain the push forward on research, now is the time – despite the pressures of lean economic times. • Roger Gardner is an aviation environmental specialist with a regulatory and research management background.


46 I THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE


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