Can the Aviation Industry Finally Clean up Its Emissions?

by John Vidal (The Guardian) With biofuel potential limited and emissions rising, the need for industry to act is urgent. Hopes rest on a global UN carbon offset scheme to be negotiated at the ICAO summit this week - but critics remain unconvinced --- When a South Africa Airways scheduled flight flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town last month, it carried nearly 300 passengers. Neither the passengers or the pilots would have noticed any difference between that flight and any other.

But instead of the usual petroleum-based jet fuel, the plane was burning thousands of litres of a clear liquid derived from the oil of nicotine-free tobacco plants grown by farmers on acres of under-used land in the country’s Limpopo province.

Boeing, KLM, South African Airways, the Dutch government and others who partnered in the trial were cock-a-hoop with the results, which came as part of something called Project Solaris.

It appeared that the fuel was not only efficient, but it was also more or less “sustainable”, because it did not take up farmland needed to grow food or lead to deforestation or ecological problems.

“No credible scenarios exist for large-scale production of biofuels at present,” said Carlos Calvo Ambel, an energy analyst with Brussels-based watchdog group Transport & Environment. “So far, only a handful of companies produce renewable jet fuel on a commercial scale, and a single airport , Oslo, is set up to provide it.”

Instead of relying on biofuels, governments are pinning their hopes on a UN global carbon offset scheme.

But there are grave reservations among NGOs that an offset scheme, which could see other industrial sectors cutting emissions to allow aviation to continue growing, is not ambitious enough and may not even work.

“Offsetting is not a new concept,” he (Michael Gill, director of the Aviation Transport Action Group (ATAG)) says. “Indeed, a large number of airlines already offer offsetting to passengers on a voluntary basis.

The coalition also fears that if the offsets used to achieve the goal of the UN scheme are also credited to other climate goals, emissions will increase while countries and airlines appear to meet their pledges.

Instead they want to see ambitious states and regions allowed to go further in reducing their emissions and clear language introduced to avoid double counting.

The environmental coalition prefers an expansion of the EU emissions trading system (ETS), which controversially included aviation for 10 months in 2012. The scheme involved the EU imposing a cap on carbon dioxide emissions for all planes arriving or departing from EU airports, while allowing airlines to buy and sell “pollution credits” , rewarding low carbon-emitting aviation.