Abstract
With rising concerns over commercial aviation’s contribution to global carbon emissions, the aviation industry faces tremendous pressure to adopt advanced solutions for reducing its share of CO2 emissions. One near-term potential solution to mitigate this global emissions situation is to operate existing aircraft with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF); this solution requires almost no modification to current aircraft, making it the “quickest” approach to reduce aviation carbon emissions, albeit the actual impact will be determined by the degree to which airlines adopt and use SAF, the ticket price impact of SAF, and the future growth of travel demand. This article presents results that estimate the expected fleet-wide emissions of future airline operations using SAF considering various projected traveler demand and biofuel penetration/utilization levels. The work demonstrates an approach to make these predictions by modeling the behavior of a profit-seeking airline using the Fleet-Level Environmental Evaluation Tool (FLEET). Considering five future SAF scenarios and two future passenger demand projection scenarios, FLEET estimates future fleet-level CO2 emissions, showcasing the possible upper and lower bounds on future aviation emissions when SAF is introduced for use in airline fleets. Results show that the future fleet-level CO2 emissions for all scenarios with SAF are lower than the baseline scenario with no SAF, for all demand projection scenarios. The passenger demand served and the trips flown for a given SAF scenario depends on the SAF price and the biofuel penetration levels. This shows that even if airlines serve a higher passenger demand for some future scenarios, the carbon emissions could still be lower than the current baseline scenario where airlines only use conventional jet fuel.
Highlights
The Paris Agreement, a multinational treaty that intends to confine the temperature growth to 2°C from pre-industrial levels by the year 2050 (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2021), impacts all industries
The Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) scenarios are based on a combination of different biofuel prices and different biofuel penetration levels; the future demand projection scenarios use a combination of different passenger demand recovery possibilities and different GDP growth rates
The results indicate that the introduction SAF for use in airline fleets and the projected demand scenarios could notably impact the future fleet-level aviation CO2 emissions
Summary
The Paris Agreement, a multinational treaty that intends to confine the temperature growth to 2°C from pre-industrial levels by the year 2050 (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 2021), impacts all industries. The ICAO CORSIA monetizes the carbon emissions from international routes and it creates incentives for airline operators to use SAF with a premium price (Chao et al, 2019a; Chao et al, 2019b) to confine the carbon emissions from the aviation sector to the 2020 level (IATA, 2016; International Civil Aviation Organization, 2016; Chao et al, 2019c) Achieving these goals will require technological improvements as well as policy changes. There exist about 19 biofuel production facilities in the U.S, including those that are already producing biofuel for commercial usage and those that have plans to begin commercial operations soon, with an expected combined production capacity of about 1 billion gallons per year (CAAFI, 2018) With this backdrop, airlines are looking at SAF as a feasible option for meeting the Paris Agreement and ICAO CORSIA emission goals. By exploring different future scenarios of SAF utilisation and travel demand, the results provide bounds on potential future fleetlevel emissions and the ability of airlines to reduce emissions by the year 2050
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