Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/30/air-new-zealand-drops-climate-goals.html
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I doubt that this will be the last big emitter to give up on its goals. Meanwhile, the international target for “this can’t happen or we’re screwed” degree-rise continues the creep upward by fractions .
But, hey, Mr. and Mrs. Individual, you’re the ones to blame for the problem, because you threw that plastic water bottle in the regular trash instead of the overflowing recycle container.
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That’s okay. It wasn’t such a great planet anyway.
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ectera…
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Disappointing, but also they’re not entirely wrong. The market for SAF is almost uniquely distorted by the regulations designed to promote decarbonization in aviation. The EU mandates a percentage blended into kerosen fuel, and the US and several states offer subsidies that make it much more affordable. So everyone in that space is trying to ramp up production as fast as possible (which is great!), but they’re mainly trying to ship it to a handful of airports in the US to sell (at least by book-and-claim accounting) to airlines to credit towards flights to and from and within the EU. There are a lot of companies having a hard time getting physical delivery to anywhere in Asia, Australia, or really that whole region of the world. Australia is trying to become a major producer of clean/sustainable fuels (a way to export solar power, basically), but that’s going to take many years to really scale.
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That’s not even the whole picture, though. Even if an airline would only use SAF as a fuel for their jets, it would not fly climate neutral, because the combustion process adds, beside CO_2, also substantial amounts of water vapour to the atmosphere at altitude, which acts as a potent greenhouse gas there. It is estimated that the non-CO_2 effects are about twice as much as the CO_2 effects alone, such that in aviation you need triple the amount of CO_2 for the full greenhouse effect. With jets or other combustion engines, there is no way to climate neutral flying, whatever the fuel.
No, it’s not great, because some types of SAF actually end up being more carbon-intensive than fossil aviation fuels. It’s a scam, really, like most of those carbon offset projects. There’s no way around flying less and eventually stopping it, sorry.
Your facts are right, but your conclusions don’t follow. That’s the impact of a single flight, sure, but water has a dwell time in the atmosphere of less than two weeks, and CO2 stays up for millennia. Even on a timeline of just a few years, well over 99% of the cumulative impact of aviation is from CO2 not water. Yes, if we could magically make all flight CO2-free (and of course we can’t) there would still be some greenhouse effect compared to a world without it, but it would plateau almost immediately and not worsen over time.
And yes, there’s some very carbon intensive SAF out there, which just barely meets an inadequate regulatory definition instead of actually helping with anything real. But that is very much the exception. Biomass derived SAF, mostly HEFA these days, is usually from waste biomass that was going to end up releasing its CO2 anyway. CO2-derived fuels are very energy intensive, but like HEFA are required to account for the CO2 intensity of inputs including electricity. Average SAF ends up being about 80% lower CO2 intensity than kerosene, with a few suppliers managing to be carbon negative. In California, in particular, the LCFS subsidy for SAF is tied directly to carbon intensity. It’s far more regulated than scammy offsets. The lower carbon intensity SAF suppliers end up getting better margins and growing faster because of how the subsidies are structured, which is exactly what you’d want.
In practice SAF is usually blended into kerosene at just 10% today, to hit a minimum regulatory standard and because there’s so little being made in total. And most SAF can’t yet be safely used above 50% blend, because ti isn’;t quite identical to kerosene. But those are not hard rules, and a number of successful engine tests and test flights have been done with 100% SAF by blending the right kinds (for example, you need a minimum proportion of aromatic hydrocarbons to prevent leaking, since the engines rely on seal swelling caused by those compounds).
Is it good enough? Of course not. Is it useless or worse than useless? Also no.
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