Green aviation fuel: a food security threat?

September 18, 2024

The airline industry burns a hundred billion gallons of fossil fuel each year and flaunts its presence by smearing contrails across the sky. This makes it an easy target for environmentalists, writes GUY LEITCH.

The global airline industry is trying hard to show that it can be environmentally friendly. But it is making promises it seems unwilling – or unable – to keep.

If the industry is to meet its environmental targets, flying will become exponentially more expensive. And in a great example of the law of unintended consequences, this will probably drive up the price of basic foods. Attacking food security will make it an even bigger target for those who resent its profligacy.

Responding to pressure from climate change activists with their flight-shaming tactics, the International Civil Aviation Organization (Icao), which agrees on standards, has set a target of “Net Zero” by 2050.

Note, though, that in aviation, because of the massive reliance on fossil oil-based fuels, Net Zero doesn’t mean zero carbon emissions, as this is almost certainly impossible – even by the seemingly distant 2050. Net Zero’s more modest aim for aviation is to get carbon emissions back down to below 2019 levels.

Icao and the International Air Transport Association (Iata) have agreed on a roadmap of how they hope to get there. The first target is a net carbon emissions reduction of 5% by 2030. It is now apparent that even this modest goal will not be achieved.

The two big hopes for a technological breakthrough in the airline industry are hydrogen- and electric-powered planes. But even with the most optimistic assumptions, these are just not feasible for long-haul flights.

Iata has therefore agreed that its member airlines (which is almost every airline) will replace a large proportion of oil-based jet fuel with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). This is a “drop in” fuel produced from plants and sources such as recycled cooking oil.

The airlines cannot get enough of it. A product with almost insatiable demand has to be a great business opportunity, and Iata reckons South Africa should be a prime source of SAF. The country already has vast tracts of suitable land for growing SAF feedstocks and the transport infrastructure to get it to refineries.

Sugarcane comes into play

Even better, South Africa has mothballed oil refineries which could be converted to produce SAF. Notable is the defunct government-owned Sapref refinery in Durban – which is conveniently close to the lush KZN sugarcane fields.

Iata says that using South African sugarcane for SAF should be a good idea; it turns out it’s not so. Sugarcane produces ethanol and Dr Thomas Funke, of the SA Canegrowers Association, says it is impractical to change ethanol into SAF.

The big problem is cost. SAF currently costs R75/litre, which is about five times more expensive than oil-based JetA1. Airlines spend around 30% of their operational costs on fuel, so a 500% increase in fuel will double the airlines’ costs, and this will be passed on to the ticket price.

Economies of scale production are essential if SAF is to have any chance of competing with JetA1. And this is where Iata’s targets become wishful thinking.

There have been several attempts at large-scale SAF production. In 2016, SAA and Boeing (in retrospect not a promising partnership) conducted a high-profile project using a tobacco plant-based feedstock called solaris. SAA was pressured by the Zuma administration into accepting a target of using 500 million litres (400,000 tonnes) of solaris-based SAF by 2023. That would have required a vast number of farmers to produce a lot of solaris.

The numbers are scary. One hectare of solaris can produce six tonnes of seed, which makes 1.6 tonnes of JetA1. Hence 400,000 tonnes JetA1 would require 250,000 hectares. This six tonnes per ha is very optimistic and, in the Boeing/SAA pilot study, was not achieved, even on irrigated land.

The big unknown is the effect of turning over high-quality agricultural land to jet fuel production. If 250,000ha of solaris was planted, the fear is that it would threaten South Africa’s already precarious food security and drive up food prices even more than Covid did.

For large-scale SAF production, a refinery would have to be built or modified near the feedstock production fields. At the time of the solaris project, the cost was estimated at an eye-watering R10 billion: a huge capital cost to recover from SAF sales.Globally, even just growing half the current demand for jet fuel would require 100 million hectares of prime agricultural land, which is almost the whole of South Africa’s land area, or twice the size of France.

In a media briefing earlier this year, Iata Director-General Willie Walsh acknowledged that Iata’s decarbonisation goals would drive up ticket prices. Because airline seat prices are intensely competitive, carriers will have to be compelled to use SAF. Yet the industry has no alternative but to rely on this vastly expensive SAF. So if you’re thinking of long-haul travel, do it sooner rather than later.