S3:E3: United Airlines Flies Towards Greener Skies

by Dan Bresette and Emma Johnson (Environmental and Energy Study Institute) The aviation industry will be one of the toughest sectors to decarbonize. Yet, most of the major airlines have announced net zero emissions goals by 2050. So how are they going to get there? Dan and Emma talk with Aaron Robinson, Senior Manager of Environmental Strategy and Sustainability at United Airlines, about how United is investing in more efficient aircraft, sustainable aviation fuels, and carbon capture and storage facilities to get to net zero - without buying offsets. He also discusses the global collaborations and partnerships that are needed to bring down carbon emissions from aviation worldwide. READ MORE (transcript) LISTEN PODCAST

A few of those levers include looking at what is there we can do beyond just a regular conventional jet engine, do we need to be using jet fuel, where can we find other cleaner sources to power the aircraft. So electric and hydrogen are certainly the sources that are getting the most attention these days, we actually have investments in both of those spaces. The challenge to those is that we need a lot of new infrastructure to be able to power those aircraft, both to generate the electricity and clean hydrogen, but then also to get it to those aircraft and essentially refuel them or recharge them at the airport. So that takes a lot of time and money. That also has another challenge of those not being yet energy dense enough. So those technologies can help power, let's say a shorter-range aircraft or a smaller aircraft, but it can't get us across an ocean anytime soon. And so for that, the next lever we have, and actually one we've been working on here for over a decade is called sustainable aviation fuel or SAF for short. And this is jet fuel, still using jet fuel to power the aircraft. But the difference is where that fuel is made from. So instead of coming from fossil fuels and being extracted from the ground and emitting new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it's actually avoiding greenhouse gas emissions in the production process, or perhaps removing them from the atmosphere as let's say a crop is being grown to ultimately produce that jet fuel. So SAF today gets about an 80% reduction in the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions compared to a conventional jet fuel - a lot better than that 17 to 20 from buying the new aircraft. So that's the biggest lever we have. It's one that's going to take a lot of time, money, and energy to scale up. But we know that we're also not going to be able to get to that universally everywhere, every airport we fly to. And so we need more beyond that. What caused us to ultimately increase our ambition level in 2020 and set a new, even deeper carbon reduction goal was finding and recognizing and being confident of a new pathway. And that's actually carbon capture and sequestration available to us. So actually removing the CO2 from the atmosphere directly. And that's kind of that final piece for us. Uniquely among airlines, our goal of decarbonization is actually to do so without offsets. So some airlines today have said, We're carbon neutral already, we're buying a lot of offsets, they don't necessarily have to do the hard work then to truly, ultimately, change their operations. We believe and what we're hearing from our customers is that ultimately, that's what they want to see, they want to see some real meaningful change, not just going and paying our way to carbon neutrality directly, but doing the hard work to actually truly achieve it in our operations. And carbon capture is actually that final piece that lets us take care of any of that remainder.

So one of the companies we partially own called Fulcrum Bioenergy, their plan is actually to make SAF for us using landfill waste. And for them, one of our co-investors actually in waste management, waste management normally has to pay a landfill to take the garbage collects. But with Fulcrum, instead, they can send that that landfill waste to Fulcrum directly. And Fulcrum would either pay very little for it certainly a lot less than growing the crop where maybe even potentially get it for free. So there's a real big economic win there that gets it to scale a lot sooner and makes it more affordable at the same time. To answer your question on where we're doing this today. Today, ever since 2016, every single flight we have from Los Angeles International Airport is partially powered by SAF. So our production for that is a partner called World Energy. They're based in the town of Paramount, California, which is right next to Los Angeles. And it's about a 15 mile drive from their facility to LAX, where the fuel is delivered. So it's really in fact, the shortest supply chain of SAF in the world. And they're using not landfill waste, but they're using used cooking oil and other waste fats, oils and greases, in fact, to produce that SAF for us. So we know that solutions like that on the waste side, they're not going to last forever. They're not going to be able to scale up forever. But there are other solutions that are kind of next in the pipeline for us and for airlines in general. Things like actually using the CO2 from the atmosphere, but that's going to take, I think, a few more years in fact to develop and come to fruition. READ MORE