BUSINESS NEWS Carrier flew first 100% SAF transatlantic flight last week. Ian Taylor reports
‘The message to politicians is getting through’
Corneel Koster, Virgin Atlantic chief customer and operating officer, hailed the carrier’s completion of last week’s Heathrow to New York flight using 100% SAF as fulfilling “a big ambitious goal”. Speaking on the flight, Koster
said: “This is as safe as any Virgin Atlantic flight and the fuel can just be dropped in. That is a big
Sir Richard Branson with Virgin cabin crew
message. It shows SAF can help to start decarbonising aviation. We want to fly it. But we need 150 times what we have today.” He insisted: “Politicians fully
understand what is needed. The message is getting through.”
The government is committed
to a ‘SAF mandate’ requiring 10% of UK aviation fuel to be SAF by 2030. But airlines want the government to move quicker on introducing a price-support mechanism for UK SAF production, which is currently not expected until 2026. Asked about alternative fuels,
Koster said: “Hydrogen is exciting but very challenging. It needs a fuel tank three times bigger [than kerosene]. With electric batteries, the issue is the weight. SAF can be done now. We need aviation and this is the way to do it. It’s a matter of getting more serious about this.”
Virgin says milestone flight is ‘stepping stone’
Virgin Atlantic’s flight to New York using 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) last week marked “a step change” and showed “how far we’ve come”. That is according to Virgin
Atlantic head of sustainability Luke Irvine, who noted the airline first flew a biofuel test flight to Amsterdam in 2008, using a 20% blend of biofuels in a single engine. Speaking on last week’s flight,
Irvine insisted: “Being able to fly on 100% SAF is a step change. We wanted to send a signal that 100% drop-in SAF is safe, but also send a demand signal. We’ve shown the technical capability to produce SAF. What we need now is a price support mechanism and the SAF mandate [promised by the government] so investors can be confident there will be demand for SAF. “The government is committed
to having five UK SAF plants in construction by 2025. But we’ll need more. The UK will need 1.25
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million tonnes of SAF by 2030. It produced 16,000 tonnes last year.” Alastair Blanshard, sustainable
aviation lead at consultancy ICF, which carried out the carbon lifecycle analysis on the flight, agreed saying: “SAF requires a whole industry to be built. The fossil fuel industry is huge and has been developing for 100 years. “At the end of 2021 we produced
0.3 million tonnes of SAF globally. By the end of this year there is expected to be two million tonnes of SAF. It has increased sixfold, and we expect an additional two million tonnes in 2024. That is the amount of aviation fuel used in Switzerland. Germany alone uses 10 million tonnes. But we’ve built the foundation to start using this at scale.” Most of the SAF on the flight
was produced from used cooking oil, with the remaining 12% made from corn waste. Responding to criticism that the flight released the same CO2 emissions as a fossil-fuel flight, Blanshard pointed out the plants to
Celebrating arrival in New York last Tuesday
produce the oil and corn “sucked carbon out of the atmosphere”, making a carbon cycle. He acknowledged: “It’s not a
100% reduction because of the emissions in the fuel production process.” But he insisted: “It’s a case of doing the best we can with the resources we have. There is a trade-off between [being] perfect and [making] progress. No one thing, such as used cooking oil, is the solution. But this is not the end. Cooking oil is a stepping stone. It’s about developing technologies.”
Airline credits government for £1m challenge
The government and then transport secretary Grant Shapps issued a challenge to operate the first transatlantic flight using 100% SAF in May 2022, offering up to £1 million in funding. Virgin Atlantic led the
consortium which took up the challenge. The airline’s head of sustainability Luke Irvine said: “We worked on this for 16 months, but in earnest since April. “We knew we could solve it, but
it has taken the whole value chain working in partnership to make sure it is not just possible from a technical perspective but that we build and share research [data]. We need industry collaboration. “The biggest challenge was
ensuring it all came together – the fuel, the approvals, the testing, the partner contributions, making sure the fuel was in the right place and bringing the two different fuel components together in time.” He noted: “Rolls-Royce and
Boeing have been involved in similar projects before, including an RAF flight using SAF in November 2022. They brought that learning to the table.” Virgin Atlantic’s Corneel
Koster said: “Kudos to the DfT for setting this target. It triggered us to think about what’s possible.”
Transport secretary of state Mark Harper with Virgin Atlantic founder Sir Richard Branson and chief executive Shai Weiss
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PICTURES: Virgin Atlantic
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