Top aircraft lessors sow doubts over green fuel silver bullet

The world's two largest aircraft lessors said governments will need to invest huge sums of taxpayers' money if they want the fleets of the future to fly mainly on greener fuel, and the head of AerCap doubted whether it would be worth their while. Aviation is not an easy industry to decarbonise compared with other forms of transport and the industry has long argued that incentives will be needed to massively ramp up the production of fuels made from organic material or waste. Lessors, bankers and airline executives meeting in Dublin this week said environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns had fallen down the agenda for investors, partly due to pressing challenges such as the acute shortage of new more fuel-efficient aircraft, seen as the other main carbon saviour for the sector. "If governments want airlines to burn sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), they're going to need to devote extraordinary sums of taxpayers' money to make it happen," Aengus Kelly, CEO of the world's number one lessor AerCap, told the Airline Economics conference. SAFs, which have lower CO2 emissions than fossil fuel kerosene, are for now far more expensive to produce than conventional aviation fuels. The aviation industry estimates it will take between $1.45t and $3.2t in capital development to bring SAF's share of the fuel market to the 65% needed to reach a goal of "net zero" emissions by 2050. It currently accounts for 0.2%. Kelly said that given aviation accounts for an estimated 2-3% of global carbon emissions, the scale of investment could amount to "a poor use of a scarce resource".<br/>