Eleven Sustainable Aviation Trends for 2023

INTRODUCTION

We’re now into 2023, which means that we’re 27 years away from the industry net zero goal agreed by ICAO.

We’re also only seven years away from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) target of halving emissions by 2030

All this comes as the sustainability spotlight is increasingly on aviation.

With environmental campaigners seeing overconsumption as a root cause of global warming and perceiving air travel as a symbol of so-called ‘luxury emissions’, we expect to see climate activists increase the pressure on the industry in 2023.

More direct action - disruptive protests at airports - is, in fact, one of our predictions for 2023.

But there are others, which give reasons for optimism as the industry starts to decarbonise. For example, advances in battery technology should help make regional electric aviation a reality.

We also expect to see more airlines get involved with emerging carbon capture technology, be it through buying carbon storage credits, or investing in companies that turn CO2 into E-Fuel.

Read on for our full list of eleven sustainable aviation trends for the next year.

And if you want to find out even more, head over to our Green Hub for a range of industry reports or get updated with our weekly newsletter

Dirk Singer Head of Sustainability, SimpliFlying dirk@simpliflying.com

WE EXPECT 2023 TO BE...

A November episode of RTE’s “Hot Mess” podcast claimed that contrails are “at the centre of a conspiracy of silence about the climate damage that aviation is doing.”

While that may have been the case in previous years, contrails and non-CO2 effects are now extensively talked about.

In her end-of-year blog post, for example, Transport & Environment aviation director Jo Dardenne called CO2 emissions only “the tip of the iceberg”, with non-CO2 effects accounting for two-thirds of aviation’s climate impact.

In 2022 we saw the first airlines look at contrail mitigation.

For example, on a November flight from Washington to Abu Dhabi, Etihad worked with SATAVIA on contrail prevention.

In October, Delta Air Lines announced that it is collaborating with MIT on research to prevent persistent contrails, which are roughly 10% of all contrails.

Meanwhile, the Rocky Mountain Institute is at the head of a contrail impact task force

that includes Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy as well as airlines such as Alaska, American, Southwest, Virgin Atlantic, United, Google Research and Imperial College London.

Many more airlines will now get to grips with non-CO2 effects and contrails.

The good news is that solving the contrail problem is, compared to other challenges, potentially easier to solve.

In May, after working with KLM , SATAVIA CEO Dr Adam Durant said - “By implementing small changes to a minority of flights, eco-conscious operators can eliminate the majority of their non-CO2 climate footprint with minimal impact on day-to-day operations.”

As well as contrails, expect to see a bigger focus on nitrogen oxides. It’s worth noting that Amsterdam Schiphol’s 2023 flight cap is being justified on the basis of curbing noise and NOx.

Taxes being introduced in Brussels on shorthaul and private jet flights similarly take NOx as well as CO2 emissions into account.

THE SUBJECT OF AVIATION’S NON-CO2 IMPACT, SUCH AS CONTRAILS, WILL MOVE FRONT AND CENTRE IN 2023.

I n a New Year’s LinkedIn post, SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam showed how he had reduced his pre-COVID quota of 45 annual flights down to 15.

He’d done so by thinking carefully about whether he needed to be at conferences in person (in almost every case, the answer has been no), combining family vacations with business trips and taking the train on shorter routes (for example, London to Edinburgh).

He also made a point of flying direct where possible, which is better both for the airline and the environment, while offsetting every flight.

Shashank calls this “intentional flying,” a trend we expect to see more of in 2023. This also ties into a number of other trends:

In the business travel world, many corporations are targeting travel as a way of reducing their Scope 3 emissions.

For example, KPMG told Reuters that the firm has an internal carbon price to encourage employees to think twice about flying. That price then funds green investments.

According to KPMG’s Gavin Geminder, business travel “should be reserved for the inperson moments that matter.”

Meanwhile, big four accountancy firm EY ‘nudges ’ employees to choose greener options in its internal travel engine, or not to fly at all.

Quoted in the Financial Times, EY’s Global Vice Chair Steve Varley says, “For example, if they are booking a flight which is returning on the same day, we start to nudge them to turn the meeting into a Teams [online] meeting rather than a physical one.”

Expect to see more companies adopt this philosophy in 2023, especially as campaigns

like ‘Travel Smart’ want businesses to reduce their travel by 50% compared to 2019 levels.

Then the trend of “bleisure” travellers continues - people who combine business and vacations as Shashank has done, with not every segment of that trip being made by plane.

Shashank himself took the train on a trip from London to Scotland, choosing it over a domestic UK flight.

Train companies are pitching themselves as more sustainable alternatives to short-haul flights; one example is Trainline’s “I came by Train” campaign.

In fact, as we show in another one of our trends, legacy airlines are seeing some advantages in cooperating with their local rail network.

Finally, the backdrop to all this is a growing awareness by the travelling public that flying drastically increases an individual’s carbon footprint.

In Ipsos-MORI’s 2022 international climate study, 52% said they avoid taking flights at least from “time to time”, which is an increase over the past year of 11%. So, on some level, the messaging about aviation is hitting home. This comes as 2022 saw celebrities being panned for taking short private jet flights. YouTuber “Mr Beast” was criticised for flying a student to Paris to buy him a baguette, a stunt that emitted as much CO2 as the average Pakistani does in a year.

Of course, flights will still be full in 2023. But businesses and individuals will be thinking more carefully about their flight choices.

AWARENESS IS GROWING ABOUT THE CLIMATE IMPACT OF AIR TRAVEL. AS A RESULT, IN 2023, WE EXPECT TO SEE MORE PEOPLE MAKING MORE CAREFUL FLIGHT CHOICES, SUCH AS CHOOSING THE LEAST CARBON-INTENSIVE ROUTE, COMBINING BUSINESS TRIPS AND VACATIONS, OR EVEN SWAPPING SHORT FLIGHTS FOR THE TRAIN.

© Marten van Dijl / Greenpeace

According to Andreas Malm, a Swedish academic, climate activist and author of ‘How to blow up a pipeline’ , hardly any transformative social movement has succeeded without an element of non-peaceful protest.

As a result, Malm says that to be effective, the climate change movement will need to shift to acts of sabotage, especially against what he calls sources of ‘luxury emissions.’

Whether or not we will see actual damage or sabotage at airports, we do expect there to be an increased level of activity by climate change groups when targeting aviation.

2023 will be a year of direct action. There will be high-profile, disruptive protests targeted against air travel, designed to generate maximum publicity.

We expect this to be the case despite the announcement by Extinction Rebellion (XR) in the UK, that in 2023 they will shift away from disruptive tactics.

First of all, this announcement is UK specific, and secondly, more radical groups such as ‘Just Stop Oil’ have since emerged - Just Stop Oil, for example, was responsible for throwing soup at the Van Gogh painting, which made news headlines worldwide.

As a result, expect to see the blocking of runways, as happened in Munich in December, and sit-ins in private jet terminals, similar to the global protest that took place in Amsterdam and other cities in November.

In fact, a good indicator of what to expect comes from 2019 and early 2020 before the pandemic caused the air travel shut down and so a stop in aviation-focused protests.

Before COVID hit, protests stopped fossil fuel delivery trains reaching Stockholm’s Arlanda airport. Meanwhile, at London Heathrow Airport, activists threatened to disrupt flights by flying drones around the perimeter of LHR.

We also expect to see more court cases against Governments’ perceived failure to tackle aviation emissions, as happened in the UK and Sweden , and legal action against airlines seen to be engaged in so-called greenwashing (see our greenwashing report ).

Why are climate change groups taking these steps? We’ve explored this in a long article on our website

But there’s a belief that we are facing a global emergency, and so drastic measures are needed.

This is then combined with a feeling that ‘big aviation’ is engaged in greenwashing talk instead of action, while carrying on with fossilfuel burning growth.

WE WILL SEE MORE DISRUPTIVE CLIMATE CHANGE PROTESTS AT AIRPORTS, FOR EXAMPLE, RUNWAY OCCUPATIONS.

In July 2022, airline group Star Alliance welcomed German rail company Deutsche Bahn as its first intermodal partner.

In a statement, the group said that from now on, you’d only need one ticket to travel from (for example) the Southwest German town of Freiburg to Singapore.

The Deutsche Bahn / Star Alliance is a taste of things to come. 2023 will be a year of deeper railway and airline cooperation.

Could 2023 see a rail network like Thalys (which operates high speed) trains from Paris to Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne) join Skyteam?

This comes as there are moves to curb shorthaul flights in Europe. In France, that resulted in a small number of domestic routes being banned in order to entice travellers to take rail services instead.

The response by some airlines has been to turn what could have been a problem into a potential opportunity.

For example, in a December Financial Times interview , KLM boss Marjan Rintel encouraged more train travel, saying that rail companies should be seen as collaborators and not competitors.

There are benefits for airlines in getting on board with the idea, a point made by another Financial Times piece - “Favouring trains over planes may be smart for legacy airlines.”

Of course, it gives them a chance to polish their environmental credentials.

But where capacity is tight, for example, in Amsterdam due to the 2023 flight caps, it frees up slots to be used for more profitable long-haul routes. It also extends their reach

to smaller cities/regions, which often have an airport served by a single LCC competitor. Finally, it’s another way of potentially generating those all-important ancillary revenues, via ticket commissions.

The train/airline cooperation is, of course, only applicable in places where there is a developed rail network. That’s largely in Europe, but not exclusively so. For example, Japan is one example of a non-European country that has high-speed railways.

COOPERATION BETWEEN AIRLINES AND RAIL COMPANIES WILL DEEPEN, INCLUDING POTENTIALLY ANOTHER RAIL NETWORK JOINING AN AIRLINE ALLIANCE.

In her excellent ‘Sustainability by Numbers’ newsletter, our World in Data’s Hannah Ritchie worked out that an EV battery in today’s Nissan Leaf would have cost half a million dollars in the 1990s (had the car hypothetically existed). Today it costs $6000.

Hannah’s article shows that the trajectory of electric batteries is following that of solar power, with costs falling by more than 98% since 1991 and a 3.4x increase in energy density.

Though her article was car specific, the relevance for aviation is obvious.

Electric and hybrid-electric companies like Eviation and Heart Aerospace have attracted a lot of attention over the past year.

Yet questions remain about battery technology. In particular, sceptics wonder if it really will be able to power a 30 or 50-seat regional aircraft for any meaningful distance.

Hannah Ritchie’s figures are a reminder that battery technology has advanced considerably, and will continue to do so.

As a result, in 2023, we expect to see advances in battery technology to make this more of a reality.

Look out for projects spearheaded both by NASA, as well as by a number of startups in the climate tech space.

As opposed to relying on lithium-ion batteries, NASA is currently researching solid-state batteries with a specific focus on aviation via its SABERS project.

SABERS has already demonstrated the ability to generate 500 watt-hours per kilogram, more than double the 260 wh/kg of the best cars and higher than the 480 wh/kg required for regional flight.

At the same time, there are startups looking at electric aircraft battery technology.

This includes Belgian start-up Solithor, which last year raised €10 million in seed funding to develop new solid-state lithium battery cells. Another company developing solid lithium batteries is Cuberg, whose founder Richard Wang was featured by Time Magazine as an ‘eco-preneur.’ Cuberg claims that once developed, his batteries can fly an all-electric regional aircraft for 300 miles.

Over the next year, look out for more news from projects like SABERS as well as other startups aiming to produce a workable electric aircraft battery.

THIS YEAR WE EXPECT TO SEE FURTHER ADVANCES IN BATTERY TECHNOLOGY, TURNING ELECTRIC REGIONAL AVIATION FROM A FLIGHT OF FANCY TO A REALITY.

Transitioning to net zero aviation means a new infrastructure will be required at the airport level. While that was already being developed in 2022, the establishment of this will accelerate in 2023.

With both Airbus and Rolls Royce betting on hydrogen combustion aircraft, airports are preparing for it.

For example, New Zealand’s airports could become a hydrogen cluster, while Christchurch Airport in New Zealand and Hamburg Airport in Germany are cooperating on green hydrogen development

Meanwhile, electric aircraft will require charging facilities. And here, instead of drawing on the electricity grid, some airports are creating their own energy sources.

AIRPORTS WILL PLAN FOR NEXT-GENERATION AIRCRAFT, AND THERE WILL BE INCREASING DECARBONISATION OF GROUND OPERATIONS.

Edmonton Airport (YEG) in Canada is establishing a 627-acre, 120-megawatt solar farm. When completed, Airport City Solar is slated to be the largest airport solar farm in the world.

However, electric aviation is a particular opportunity for smaller players. And so, we’ll see more regional airports start to create their own microgrids with the help of organisations such as Clear Skies.

The final and possibly most immediate piece of the airport infrastructure puzzle will be the ongoing decarbonisation of airport operations in 2023.

This comes as United Airlines invested in sodium-ion battery maker Natron as a way of electrifying ground equipment, as well as providing charging capacity for electric aircraft.

Similar to the Natron / United deal, we expect to see more of these strategic investments taking place in 2023.

A FEW AIRLINES DIPPED THEIR TOES IN THE CARBON CAPTURE SPACE IN 2022. MANY MORE WILL FOLLOW IN 2023. WE ALSO EXPECT TO SEE CO2 CAPTURE BEING USED IN CONSTRUCTION AND INFRASTRUCTURE.

2022 saw the first airlines get involved in the carbon capture space; for example, Air Canada, United and easyJet now see it as part of their net-zero strategies.

With carbon capture being discussed much more in the media and with the US Inflation Reduction Act making it more mainstream, we’ll see more examples of this in 2023. This will take a number of different forms.

Some will team up with direct air capture (DAC) companies like Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive as an alternative or supplement to carbon offsetting.

Those two organisations are working with a consortium of aviation companies, which has involved the purchase of 400,000 tonnes of carbon removal credits .

Then 2022 saw companies like Air Company and Twelve ink deals with airlines for the eventual production of SAF made from captured CO2. Among others, Air Company is

working with JetBlue and Twelve with Alaska Airlines.

Expect further agreements like this to be signed over the coming months.

Finally, we predict that aviation companies will start to integrate carbon capture into their physical infrastructure.

One example of that is the runway being built by Indianapolis Airport.

With the concrete provided by Canadian carbon capture company Carbon Cure, the runway will take out the equivalent CO2 of planting 1.2 million trees .

In addition to CO2-absorbing concrete, 2023 could be the year when an airport retrofits its cooling towers to become carbon-capturing units. Both Noya In the US and NeoCarbon in Germany have developed technology to make that possible.

Want to know more? Take a look at our carbon capture power list .

Image via Carbon Engineering

WITH CONCERNS MOUNTING ABOUT FEEDSTOCK

AVAILABILITY AND THE COST OF BIOFUELS, EXPECT TO SEE AN ACCELERATION OF E-FUEL DEVELOPMENT.

Right now, almost all Sustainable Aviation Fuel is a biofuel made out of feedstocks like waste cooking oil or agricultural material. But long term, the industry is placing a lot of bets on so-called E-Fuels, made from renewable energy sources.

E-Fuels (or power to liquid fuels), in theory, aren’t restricted by limitations of feedstock quantities. And by using renewable energy, they are also cleaner.

However, one of the biggest issues around E-Fuels is that as things stand today, their production would require a huge amount of power.

A paper by Ben James and Craig Douglas of World Fund estimated that replacing 8% of European aviation fuel in 2040 with E-Fuels would use the equivalent of “the entire electricity consumption of Sweden or the Netherlands.”

As a result, expect to see a number of players in 2023 try to resolve what would otherwise be an E-Fuel dealbreaker.

One example is the Swiss company Synhelion, which is working with the Lufthansa Group. The company uses solar fuel cells in E-Fuel production, without needing to produce electricity first.

Similarly, there are companies that seek to bypass the conventional, almost 100-year-old Fischer-Tropsch method of making synthetic fuels.

Prometheus Fuels, for example, seeks to create thousands of modular E-Fuel production units, where the fuel is made via an ethanolbased pathway.

Image via Air Company

Meanwhile, Air Company, which is working with JetBlue, says it has turned a multi-stage process (the case with Fischer-Tropsch) into a single-step process.

E-Fuel companies to look out for in 2023 are Air Company , Dimensional Energy , Prometheus Fuels , Synhelion , Twelve .

FLIGHT SEARCH ENGINES ALREADY PROVIDE CO2 FIGURES. THE NEXT STEP WILL BE THE LAUNCH OF EASY-TO-UNDERSTAND ENVIRONMENTAL LABELS FOR FLIGHTS, ALLOWING CONSUMERS TO MAKE MORE SUSTAINABLE CHOICES .

When booking hotels, you are often shown how ‘sustainable’ a property is. For example, booking.com has its ‘travel sustainable’ badge.’ But while flight search engines like Google and Skyscanner show CO2 emissions for a given route, there is still a lack of easy-tounderstand labels telling a passenger that a flight on (say) a newer A321LR is less carbon intensive than on an old A340.

We believe that this will change in 2023. In fact, EASA has been working on a consumerfriendly labelling scheme.

EASA found that three-quarters of passengers would welcome a kind of ‘environmental label’, that’s easy to understand.

As a result, EASA is looking at three different labels - a flight label, an airline label and an aircraft label.

Project lead Kai Bauer has published a presentation where the concept seems to follow the easy-to-understand energy labels you see when buying white goods.

It’s worth mentioning that regional airline flybe did this fifteen years ago when it put an ‘eco label’ on its aircraft (see above image).

With the evidence being that the travelling public wants to make more sustainable choices, except more of this.

At the same time, 2023 will see a green rating for airline suppliers, such as catering, amenity kits and blankets.

This comes as industry body APEX/IFSA announced that this year it would be launching a green rating scheme .

Image via The Points Guy

A passenger can’t tell the difference between a flight operated with Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), or normal fuels. But s/he does notice what goes on in the cabin.

When an airline like Alaska Airlines substitutes plastic bottles for boxed water, it’s immediately visible.

As a result, in-cabin sustainability is the headline that trails other environmental initiatives. It signposts that there is more going on in other areas.

In 2023 we expect to see more of a focus on this area.

This comes as different countries are penalising the use of single-use plastics. For example, France has initiated what’s been called a “fast food revolution” by banning single-use plastic restaurant tableware.

Airlines will follow suit and increasingly phase out single-use plastics. Also, expect to see sustainability become a big factor in amenity kits, an area we covered in an article in the Autumn .

Overall this trend will be given a boost by the introduction of the APEX/IFSA green supplier rating, which we mentioned in the previous section.

The other element of in-flight sustainability relates to airline seats. This was a topic covered in the Sustainability in the Air podcast when SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam spoke to Dr Mark Hiller , the CEO of Recaro Aircraft Seating.

Lighter seats can save CO2, and materials such as E-Leather are increasingly being used in their manufacture.

THE TREND OF SINGLE-USE PLASTICS BEING PHASED OUT OF AIRLINE CABINS WILL CONTINUE. IN CABIN SUSTAINABILITY AS A WHOLE WILL GROW IN IMPORTANCE.

We’ve added this final trend as a wild card. It relates to solar geo-engineering. The radical idea is that as the planet heats, and we are no closer to 1.5 degrees, we’ll have to undertake what are called “climate interventions.”

This would most likely involve releasing particles in the atmosphere that then reflect sunlight.

To say that this topic is controversial is almost an understatement.

Nevertheless, Michael Campos of Energy Impact Partners sees it as evolving from an idea that raises serious concerns to one that’s starting to gain traction.

Indeed, human intervention in the climate is already happening right now. For example, in 2021, Forbes reported that the UAE Emirate of Dubai was using “laser drones to shock rainwater out of the sky.”

One start-up has already carried out trials where sulphur particles were released into the atmosphere from a balloon in Mexico. Make Sunsets , which has almost $1 million in seed funding, intends to carry out further flights and is selling so-called “cooling credits,”

Costing $10, each credit will allow for the release of a gram of particles into the atmosphere, which the company says is enough to offset the warming effect of a ton of carbon a year.

We’re aware that Make Sunsets is interested in working with airlines and selling them credits.

Whether carriers find this idea too controversial and early stage or not, we’ll be hearing more about solar geo-engineering in 2023. Make Sunsets also won’t be the last startup like this offering these kinds of credits.

WE’LL BE HEARING A LOT MORE ABOUT SOLAR GEO-ENGINEERING IN 2023. FOR THE FIRST TIME, THERE IS NOW A START-UP WANTING TO SELL ‘COOLING CREDITS’ TO AIRLINES.