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 .

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.

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.