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Europe’s Airbus Group and Finland’s Neste announced Wednesday an agreement to produce sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and promote its use in the industry.
In the agreement, presented at Airbus headquarters in Toulouse (southern France), the two parties emphasize that the PBS is “a key solution to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from air transport.”
Currently, this sustainable fuel, made in part from frying oils and other biofuels, represents less than 1 % of that used in the aviation sector, where kerosene, a petroleum derivative, overwhelmingly dominates.
Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury recalled that all aircraft now leaving its assembly lines are prepared and certified to use up to 50 % PBS as fuel and that the aviation industry’s roadmap for meeting 2050 net zero emissions would require raising the weight of PBS to 10 % by 2030.
Faury said that aircraft technology “is not a limiting factor,” but that there are a variety of issues, starting with the availability of the necessary volumes of PBS and at an affordable price (it is now much higher than kerosene).
The head of sustainability at Airbus, Nicolas Chrétien, stressed that “the biggest challenge is to accelerate the provisioning of SAF, and also to advance the ability of aircraft to use more of this sustainable fuel.”
Because, he stressed, the aircraft delivered at the end of this decade will still be flying on the 2045-2050 horizon.
