Canada possesses the key factors to place it at the cutting edge of sustainable jet fuel, making it all the more “bizarre” that Canada lags behind the United States and Europe on the green-flying front, says Airbus Canada’s chief executive.
Benoit Schultz said the country’s long history of resource development, renewable energy, agriculture, and aircraft manufacturing should put it in the pilot’s seat on developments around sustainable aviation fuel, also known as SAF.
“In a country like Canada, with the natural resources that it has, with the competences in the industry that it has, with the many players of the industry … it would be really bizarre in my view if we couldn’t make sense out of the sustainable aviation fuel roadmap,” Schultz said in a video chat from Toronto.
However, Canada has yet to commercially produce a drop of the stuff, often derived from used cooking oils or organic waste.
Meanwhile, the US has embarked on an ambitious incentives program and the European Union has set a timeline for green fuel thresholds – at least 2% of the bloc’s jet fuel must be sustainable by 2025, climbing to 6% in 2030, 20% in 2035 and 70% in 2050.
New Airbus planes can handle up to 50% sustainable fuel, with the other half coming from old-fashioned kerosene-based fuel, Schultz said. The goal of the France-based giant is to be 100% SAF-compatible by 2030.
“It’s not a major deal, technically speaking,” Schultz said of the transition. “The real challenge is producing sustainable aviation fuel in volume.”
Production rates for SAF amount to roughly 1% jet fuel demand. The green alternative, which shaves off about 80% of a plane’s emissions, costs at least four times more than the petroleum-derived kind.
The prohibitive cost of sustainable fuel – along with the rising urgency to deploy it amid stricter government rules and a heating planet – mean the aviation industry faces an “existential threat”
if it does not work to decarbonize quickly, said Deborah Flint, who heads the Greater Toronto Airports Authority.
“It’s pretty jarring,” she told attendees at a recent panel on clean aerospace at the Canadian Club in Toronto earlier this month. “The threats of reducing the (aerospace) business or making the business too expensive are very real and imminent for us.”
Big players such as Air Canada are on board with the drive toward greater fuel efficiency, buying a raft of new cost-saving planes such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 737 Max and the Airbus A220 (formerly the Bombardier-conceived C Series).
In April, it announced the purchase of 9.5 million litres of SAF from Finland-based oil refiner Neste. But the amount totalled less than 0.2% of the 5.71 billion litres of fuel Air Canada consumed in 2019.
“If you took the entire supply of sustainable aviation fuel that is available globally, in 2021 Air Canada would have flown nine days of its schedule,” said Valerie Durand, head of corporate sustainability at Air Canada. “There is hope, because in 2022 it was 41. But that gives you an idea of the scale of what we’re dealing with right now.”
Meanwhile, electric or hydrogen-power planes – particularly on long-haul flights, which demand much more energy – remain far on the horizon, a reality that makes the aviation sector “really difficult” to decarbonize, Flint said.
Nonetheless, the industry has set a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 through bodies such as the International Air Transport Association trade group and the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency.
It is calling for more international co-ordination to establish standards and fund improvements on SAF as well as technology around electric batteries and green hydrogen – gas produced using renewable energy.
Earlier this year, the federal government pledged $350 million to support decarbonization of the aerospace sector.