Carbon Emissions from Aviation

Air travel today is the prefered means for passenger and freight transport around the globe owing to its fast pace. It has made possible physical commodities’ exchange faster and easier, delivering to faster realization of globalization tenets. Air travel, similarly, has become an innate part of the global business environment, for the global workforce. Along with that, it is also prefered means of transport for travelers for domestic, leisure, medical and other reasons.

As COVID19 creeped into every aspect of our lives in 2020, it affected the aviation industry too severely. During the COVID pandemic the passenger air traffic fell by about 60%.Despite losing a huge chunk of business it still proved to be indispensable, we still relied on freight planes for carrying  products like food supply, vaccines and emergency medical resources including teams of doctors, investigators and scientists safely.  Among fossil fuel intensive industries, aviation is considered one of the hardest to abate, all airplanes operate on oil, little progress has been made in developing commercial solar or electric planes.

Jet fuel or kerosene emits about 3.16 kg of carbon dioxide per one kilogram. Where on one hand, after Greta Thunberg’s speech people are being ‘flight shamed’ in some parts of Europe,  airlines are operating without passengers just to keep airport slots! Last year, Lufthansa– Germany’s largest flight operator– became the first company to disclose that it flew 21,000 empty flights around the world just to keep the airport slots last year. A shocking if not outright absurd fact!

Modern commercial airplanes use about 3 liters of jet fuel per 100 passengers according to Air Transport Action Group(ATAG) statistics. It may seem less but with thousands of flights flying across the globe everyday, the effect of the emissions is compounded. Carbon dioxide is the biggest  contributor to global warming among the GHGs emitted by human activities and it spreads evenly irrespective of where it was emitted. Emissions are measured by ICAO(International Civil Aviation Organization) methodology, it takes into account various factors such as distance, aircraft type, fuel type, load of baggage, no. of passengers. 

Aviation contributes a mere 2.5% to the global carbon dioxide emission, and although the number of planes circling the globe has increased many folds and so has the number of flyers; the emission has not increased that much, owing to the increase in efficiency of aircrafts. The concern however remains as to how aviation emissions can be curbed, because there is no solution in sight, road transport is also a major contributor to pollution but solving on road pollution is just a problem of scaling now, with electric cars, where the electricity comes from can be solved because technology exists.

Following table shows elements of emission and their effects. Different oxides of Nitrogen have different effects on the atmospheric composition. Some result in an increase in Ozone, some decrease it, they also decrease the amount of methane. And then there are Sulfates, aerosols and carbon soot. Some components of aviation emission have a slight cooling effect which of course is more than offset by other GHG emissions. 

Last year at COP26 Twenty countries launched the International Aviation Climate Ambition Coalition (IACAC), and committed to a goal of net-zero aviation by 2050, with help of more efficient planes and the use of SAF (Sustainable Air Fuel) which is a less carbon intensive form of fuel. SAF can be used with current jet fuel engines with 50% kerosene blend and possibly with advancements in technology we can achieve 100% SAF based engines which can cut emissions by 80% compared to traditional jet fuels. But it’s not all smooth, SAF is expensive to manufacture and right now contributes less than .1% to global fuel supplies, so there is a lot of work to be done by policymakers and by industries to promote SAF and make it economically viable. 

There are some joint initiatives for countering aviation related emissions, like the CORSIA(Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation) program, which is created by ICAO( International Civil Aviation Organization), whose members include 107 countries . Under the CORSIA initiative, member countries have promised to keep their aviation emissions at 2020 levels by increasing efficiency. Many major airline companies have already signed the net zero by 2050 commitment with Air Transport Action Group (ATAG), airlines have also committed to increasing the efficiency by 1.5% every year. The US in its 2021 Civil Aviation Action Plan has also committed to net zero emissions by 2050 for domestic flights, it’ll also allocate $300 million to increase efficiency of aviation by 30% by 2030 and to increase the output of SAF by a billion gallons per year by 2030.

According to a  report presented in the Indian Parliament, airlines in the country emitted 84,322 kilotonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere between 2016 and 2020. In march this year speaking at CII conference, Union Minister for Civil Aviation Jyotiraditya Scindia said  “I have very clearly mandated that we need to do a carbon-mapping exercise to understand what are our emissions — both direct and indirect emissions would be co-located services — ground handling, airplanes and others. So, I think we need to do carbon mapping of every airport. And post that carbon mapping, look at adaptation…and form short-term goals, medium-term goals and long-term goals”. This is a good initiative by the government but newer technologies like SAF will surely push the ticket prices up and in  a country like India where flying is still a luxury, making tickets expensive may not be the way to go.