It’s not easy flying green

A Sydney Morning Herald report explains why airlines want alternative fuel as badly as their customers.

Behind the news about oil prices and climate change, the airline business is fighting a rearguard action to save its reputation.

Somehow – and the industry doesn’t understand why – the aviation industry has earned a reputation among environmental groups as one of the dirtiest and most dangerous polluters on the planet.

The Greens movement in Europe wants airlines grounded. People should holiday at home – anything but travel by air, which is just a pastime for the rich, they say.

The strength of the Greens lobby is Europe’s radical emissions trading scheme, which singles out airlines for punishment, the industry says.

“The uneducated general public finds us an easy target to shoot at,” Scott Carson, the chief of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, lamented recently.

“What we need to do is stop talking to ourselves and reach out.”

Standing alongside him in a rare show of unity on the climate-change issue, Tom Enders, the chief of Carson’s biggest competitor, Airbus, is more blunt.

“Politicians and environmentalists have a choice,” he says. “They can continue to launch misguided proposals (such as the European emissions trading scheme) and return aviation to the elitist status airline travel had 50 years ago.

“Or they can work with us … taxes don’t make airlines more efficient.”

The aircraft makers and airlines are in a jam.

On the one hand, their greenhouse emissions are relatively insignificant. Air travel contributes just 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse emissions (and only 1 per cent of Australia’s emissions), a fraction of the emissions of land transport, which contributes about 14 per cent.

According to figures that Qantas produced for Australia’s Garnaut Review on Climate Change earlier this year, air travel on average uses 3.5 litres of fuel per passenger per 100 kilometres, the same as for a small, ultra-fuel-efficient car, but at eight to nine times the speed.

However, air travel is growing rapidly, tripling in volume every 20 years on average.

And, unlike the alternative fuels now emerging for land transport, the airline industry is stuck with kerosene because none of the alternatives tested so far has the energy output required to power jet engines.

Carson and Enders got together at last month’s Farnborough air show in Britain to plead with governments planning to raise billions of dollars in environmental taxes to sink at least some of that into research on new fuels.

In the past year, driven as never before by oil prices, the entire aviation industry – airlines and plane and engine makers – has ratcheted up the search for new fuels to fever pitch.

In February, Boeing for the first time flew an experimental light plane powered only by hydrogen fuel cells, which are emission-free, producing only heat and water as byproducts.

Fuel cells aren’t yet seen as the solution for big aircraft but, in the past year, airlines and manufacturers have also tested in-flight various biofuels and low-emission liquefied gas.

Qantas’ chief risk officer, Rob Kella, told the Garnaut Review: “Over the past 40 years, noise has been cut by 75 per cent, CO2 intensity has improved by 70 per cent and hydrocarbon and soot emissions have been almost eliminated.”

But that’s pedestrian compared with what the airlines want new technology to deliver in the next decade. Purely out of economic necessity – to wean themselves off the oil curse that has sent dozens of carriers to the wall in the past six months – the airlines want green flying as badly as their customers. 

A report by The Mole from The Sydney Morning Herald