Airliners powered by sustainable fuel remain a distant goal

One day late in 2023 an almost-empty commercial airliner is expected to lift off on a trans-Atlantic flight between Britain and the United States that Prime Minister Boris Johnson casts as a once in a generation breakthrough for aviation and the battle against climate change. With characteristic boosterism, Johnson has compared the event to the brave first nonstop flight across the Atlantic by a Vickers biplane in 1919, when British World War I veterans Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown struggled from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Galway, Ireland. Johnson’s transport secretary, Grant Shapps, says next year’s flight will be nothing less than the dawn of “an era of guilt-free flying” for passengers worried that the aviation industry has so far contributed little to the scramble to reach anything like a “Net-Zero” world. The flight will be powered solely by sustainable aviation fuel or SAF, jet fuel that is made from greener processes and raw materials that range from cooking oil, solid waste and crop residue to synthetic kerosene made from hydrogen and recycled carbon. Pollution will still spew from the jet’s engines but the fuel is considered “sustainable” because much of the carbon it emits — often up to 80 percent of the carbon emitted from normal fuel — has already been absorbed from the atmosphere by the raw material or would have been released anyway if it had not been turned into jet fuel. The British government is labeling it a “net-zero” flight, although there will probably still need to be some purchases of carbon offset credits to make the numbers add up. Story has more.<br/>