The jets that deliver delegates to the annual UN climate summit are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions -- and an embarrassment for conference-goers seeking to shrink the world’s carbon footprint.
Enter Etihad Airways PJSC and US biodiesel producer World Energy, which are selling an alternative for delegates to next year’s COP28 climate negotiations in the United Arab Emirates.
Under a memorandum of understanding to be signed at the UN climate summit on Thursday, the two companies are committing to effectively decarbonize some air travel by powering aircraft flying out of Los Angeles International Airport with bio-based sustainable aviation fuel made at a nearby World Energy plant.
The collaboration underscores the potential for sustainable aviation fuel but also the commercial challenges in reaching net-zero flights.
Fuel on other Etihad flights -- like a regular route from the Washington, D.C.-area Dulles International Airport to Dubai -- will still be petroleum-based because transporting the greener alternative from California to supply the aircraft would boost its overall lifecycle emissions and eviscerate some of the environmental benefits.
The program is a way for travelers to mitigate their aviation emissions, said Gene Gebolys, the chief executive officer of World Energy. “It has never made sense for us to fly our SAF so somebody else can have a low-carbon movement,” he said. “It’s a true displacement of fuel” which means “people can get to a COP or any gathering and do the important work of collaborating without the obvious contradictory impact on climate.”
The aviation sector is a challenging frontier for decarbonization. Current sustainable aviation fuel is generally biofuel derived from fats and other feedstocks with intensive requirements for nitrogen, land, and water. And relatively little of the world’s biofuel is going to aviation.
The strategies for paring the sector’s emissions “are in large part still theoretical,” said Jonathan Lewis, senior counsel and director of transportation decarbonization for the Clean Air Task Force. “There are commercial investments being made but very little has changed on the ground in terms of the fuels that are actually going into planes and the requirements around aviation emissions and aviation fuel use,” he said Wednesday during a COP27 event hosted by the task force.
