In this May 12, 2016, photo, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian poses for a portrait in his office at ... [+]
Delta Air Lines made an aggressive commitment Friday to go carbon neutral as of March 1, raising the ante for an industry shadowed by flight shaming, which has begun to reduce air travel in Europe. But CEO Ed Bastian stated plainly in a television interview that the principal means by which his airline will likely achieve carbon neutrality in the near term is rife with efficacy concerns.
Delta pledged to spend $1 billion over 10 years to mitigate the greenhouse gases that its airplanes pump into the atmosphere by burning jet fuel. One prong of its plan: it aims to reduce its fossil fuel usage through improving the efficiency of its fleet and operations, cutting weight and using sustainable aviation fuels. However, over the next 10 years, experts say such efforts will likely only result in incremental reductions in Delta’s carbon dioxide emissions, which amounted to 37.7 million metric tons in 2018, second most of any airline in the world.
Delta’s announcement doesn’t mention them, but to achieve neutrality, it’s going to have to buy hundreds of millions of dollars a year in carbon offsets, programs designed to allow companies to invest in environmental projects, often in developing countries, to counterbalance for specific quantities of pollutants they emit.
Carbon offsets have a mixed record. A 2016 European Union study found that 85% of the offset projects it reviewed that were established under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism didn’t produce additional carbon emissions reductions to what would have occurred without the investments.
Bastian acknowledged as much in an interview with CNBC, stating that his focus was on investing in new technology. “Carbon offsets are not the solution,” he said.
That’s a welcome development, says Brad Schallert, who works on climate policy for the aviation sector at the World Wildlife Foundation, and will raise the bar for the many companies, including airlines, that have seemed content to simply balance out the ledger with carbon credits.
But if the $1 billion budget includes Delta’s offsetting program (Delta didn’t respond to a request for clarification), buying carbon credits could exhaust much of it. Assuming average spending of $100 million a year, that would suggest Delta is planning on buying relatively cheap offsets in the range of $2 per metric ton, says Dan Rutherford, director of the marine and aviation program at the International Council For Clean Transportation.
The airline said that an unspecified portion of the $1 billion will be invested in developing methods to remove carbon from the atmosphere. That apparent embrace of funding decarbonization research is a positive, says Rutherford, “but at this moment the time scale and the numbers don’t really line up.”
Schallert says investment in technologies under development to pull carbon from the air makes sense for airlines since it could be used as a feedstock to create more sustainable aviation fuels than biomass-based ones. “I think we’ll start to see more airlines looking into this ... because it could be part of the supply chain of their future.”
Development of biomass-based alternatives to jet fuel are further along, but they’re still in their infancy and cost two to three times as much. There were 360 billion liters of conventional jet fuel used in 2018, the latest year for which figures are available, and 7 million liters of sustainable aviation fuels. That amounts to about 10 minutes of annual jet fuel use, says Rutherford.
The airline industry group IATA has stated a goal of having sustainable fuels account for 2% of fuel use in 2025. ”That’s going to be pretty ambitious,” says Rutherford.
Battery-electric airliners, seen as the best hope long-term for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, may be decades away. Current batteries contain only a 73rd the energy of liquid fuels, and energy densities aren’t improving fast.
“If you were to change all the fuel in a 737 for batteries of an equal weight, the range of that 737 would be 160 nautical miles,” notes Pat Anderson, director of the Eagle Flight Research Center at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida.
All that means that for the near term, airlines aspiring to achieve carbon neutrality will have to engage in heavy offsetting.
Delta is the first major airline to aim for that goal. U.K. low-cost carrier EasyJet said in November it would offset all its flights, and British Airways began doing so for its domestic flights on Jan. 1. Last month, JetBlue pledged it would go carbon neutral on its domestic flights.
Delta ranked eighth out 11 domestic airlines for fuel efficiency in 2017 and 2018, according to a study by Rutherford’s ICCT. New airplanes with more efficient engines will likely be one of the most meaningful ways Delta reduces its emissions. Delta will add 95 Airbus A220s to its fleet through 2024. The plane, powered by Pratt & Whitney’s geared turbofan engine, promises a 20% reduction in fuel burn per seat over previous generation aircraft.
Air travel accounted for 2.4% of global carbon dioxide emissions in 2018, but with passenger numbers expected to double by 2037, the industry is expected to account for an outsize portion of increases going forward.
A voluntary U.N. agreement coming into force this year would have airlines cap emissions from their international flights at 2020 levels through offsetting.
Carbon credit prices have been rising on increasing participation in the market, says Nancy Bsales, an offset advisor based in the New York area who focuses on aviation. More commitments like Delta’s will hasten the point at which it becomes more economical for companies to invest directly in reducing their environmental footprint and technology development, she says.
