From Bloomberg News and iHeartRadio. It's the big take. I'm West Kasova today, how to build a cleaner airplane? We all know airplanes are big polluters, and with so many people choosing to fly more, especially now after being cooped up during the pandemic, it's a problem that's only getting worse. As is often the case, Europe is taking the lead to encourage or you might say pressure, the airlines and airplane makers to clean up their act.
It's a really multifaceted problem. It's not just the technical or business side. There's these big societal questions and big economic questions for some she's in Europe.
Bloomberg reporters sit at Phillip in London and William Wilkson Frankfurt. That's who you heard just there cover the industry's efforts to build a plane that can fly long distances without burning fossil fuel. For a sense of just how far we have to go, I asked Sid to tell us the environmental cost of a typical commercial flight today.
So a flight from Frankfurt to New York on a Boeing seven for seven, which is rare now but it's still used. Emits about the same amount of carbon dioxide as heating four hundred and forty German homes for about a year. That is about two thousand kilograms or four hundred pounds per passenger, which is a massive amount of carbon dioxide. Airlines are flying hundreds and thousands of planes at any given time, and so the scale of the problem is massive.
Will I guess that really sets up what we're talking about today, which are these efforts to try to make planes less carbon intensive, cleaner to fly.
Yeah.
Indeed, European countries, especially bringing in quite stringent climate targets and aviations, had something of a free pass up until now, but looking forward, countries like Germany or France can't hit their climate targets without now tackling this problem. And then this really fiendishly difficult problem of reducing emissions from aircraft without destroying the aviation sector and without damaging transport connections within Europe.
It's a really difficult problem.
It's also the airline industry itself has said itself net zero targets by twenty to fifty, so it's not just the airline industry coming under pressure from the government, but they've also set their own targets, which are crucial in order for them to sort of decalbanize the net zero by twenty fifty.
So when you say net zero by twenty fifty for the entire industry, what exactly.
Does that mean?
When it's in nets zero, it basically means that they're not putting any new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But essentially they're using methods to try and reduce carbon emissions which are already in the air, bringing back that carbon without adding any more, so you don't add any more carbon into the air, but also not flying truly zero.
And will how do you do that? Because we're not really talking about planes no longer polluting at all. It's kind of they're offsetting it elsewhere. Is that right?
There are several ways airlines and plane manufacturers talking about doing it. One cruiser one of these things called sustainable aviation fuels, and they basically recycle carbon that is already above ground and turn them into fuels, so you're not taking any more carbon from below the ground. So examples are things like biofuels, where you kind of turn animal
fat into a combustible feel. There are even more kind of sci fi ones like synthetic fuel where you would extract carbon from the atmosphe and combine it with hydrogen, and then you make a synthetic hydrocarbon that's very similar chemical properties to normal jet fuel, but because the carbon's being drawn out of the atmosphere, it's not taking any more carbon from below the air. Of course, those fuels do generate carbon dioxide when they're burned, and.
We're going to talk a little bit more about sustainable aviation fuel later in the show. What are some other ways that plane manufacturers are trying to lower how much these planes pollute.
There has been a lot of technology developments in terms of reducing fuel burn with the existing engines. So as planes get newer and newer generations, engines tend to emit less CO two because they burn less fuel, and improving efficiency is one way of doing it. The other way they've been talking about is improving efficiency in terms of
air navigation. So instead of having planes that are hovering for a while, you have the plane's flight direct routings and essentially allows you to negate the carbon impact from planes circling endlessly waiting to land. We've been clear for landing.
The issue with those kind of approaches is to get like marginal improvements in how much carbon a flight or a per passenger emits. And the problem is is aviation, as countries get richer, is just growing so fast that it really just negates any of these really piecemeal approaches
that get you these marginal environmental benefits. So, yeah, engines get better with each generation, but so many more people fly, the environmental benefit is only really there in a kind of an abstract per person measure, and that's not how carbon's polluted. I think environmentalists and academics would say, you have to focus on the absolute amount of carbon emissions coming from aviation, and that is continuing to arise, unabated by minor improvements and technology.
And one of the things you write about is one reason why so many more people are flying is that for a long time, flying got really really cheap. It's expensive now, but we all got used to such cheap faars that people started flying who never flew before and started flying more often than they ever flew before.
More people flying more often is basically what drove the aviation industry, but it's also been the sort of source of a lot of the carbon emissions and wild planes that you fly these days are way cleaner than what they used to be twenty years ago or fifty years ago.
The number of planes that are in the sky are also far greater than they used to be twenty years ago and fifty years ago, which sort of creates this new problem where you're trying to reduce emissions on a per plane basis, but if there are more planes flying in the sky, then you're not really addressing the core issue as a whole.
It's not just people that are flying more.
If you think about how our contemporary world works, you've got kind of next day delivery. So much freight is done by n now because we want things so quickly, and that's another change that's happened, and that's causing more flights.
Economies grow and people get rich. There's an increase in how much stuff they order online, things like medicines and food like that's just getting moved around the world at such a fast paced by aviation now, and that's another huge change that we've seen maybe over the last thirty years as well.
Why is flying so much cheaper than it used to be. I mean, obviously fuel is more expensive now, but does that account for all of it?
So a lot of that is because of Europe essentially in the nineteen nineties opened up the skies to competition and allowed airlines like Ryanair and others to thrive where you could be an operator running services from your base in Ireland, but you can operate services across the continent, and that's spurred a lot of other discount carriers like easy Jet and Whizzer, who all operate on the same model, where you have planes that are based across different countries
flying to different countries without having to get bogged down in If you're an airline from the UK, you can only fly to and from the UK, and within the UK it's only restrict to flying in the UK. Similarly for Germany and other countries, where now you can have airlines that are not based in your country but have local units or just have bases in those countries and they're sort of flying routes that would normally be reserved for the one or two dominant carriers.
In This shift has been really important for Europe's economic cohesion.
In Europe, you roughly have a very wealthy Northern Europe with advanced manufacturing and world class services economy, and then you have like a southern Rim that's always traditionally had like higher unemployment, less industry, and those places kind of in Greece, parts of Spain, parts of southern Italy are really dependent on cheap aviation to bring wealthy tourists from northern parts, from those kind of wealthy areas of Northern Europe and to get them spending money in poorer parts
of Southern Europe. This is another challenge that the aviation sector in European society faces in trying to cut missions.
You really starting to unpick kind.
Of the economic fabric of some relatively vulnerable countries if you move too quickly on this, and if you increase taxes or try and just do things to then demand for cheap aviation. It's a really multifaceted problem. It's not just the technical or business side. There's these big societal questions and big economic questions for some countries in.
Europe, and we're starting to see now exactly that a lot of pressure from governments to cut down on these short routes. Europe has really good train travel, and like say the United States, where it's almost impossible to get long distances by training, Europe it's easy to do it. And so it seems that governments are starting to crack down on some of these shorter routes.
There is a massive crackdown, I mean we saw that during the pandemic when a lot of the aid to the airlines was died to decarbanization goals, and essentially there was a lot of pressure on governments to say that airlines are taking bailout should also be forced to scrap routes that are easily sort of duplicated on short train journeys. And we have seen a sort of rise in areas where there is a train alternative that's convenient. We have seen a rise in train travel. I mean London Paris,
for instance, is one of the busiest sectors. They used to be sort of dominated by the airlines and now we've seen the Eurostar taking them as much as seventy or eighty percent of traffic.
So we talked about how there is this industry goal of reaching net zero by twenty fifty that's coming up pretty fast. Where are we How close to that goal is the industry right now?
It isn't very close at the moment. They're working on a multiple measures, but the aviation industry is one that has very very very long lead times, and it also has very stringent safety requirements, so you can't have technology adoption as quickly as say the auto industry, where we have electric vehicles grading prominence far more significantly and fundamentally. This is also the problem of physics, so problems that are easily sold on the ground that much harder to solve.
When you're in the air looking.
At twenty to fifty, it's very, very difficult to see how the industry reaches net zero without some kind of unexpected, almost like miraculous breakthrough in technology.
When we come back, how about a plane that runs on hydrogen sid Right before the break, Will was talking about how hard it will be to reach this net zero go about twenty fifty without some sort of really big breakthroughs, and airplane manufacturers are working on some pretty far.
Out stuff absolutely, so Ebus is promising to build a hydrogen powered plane that enters into commercial services sometime in the mid twenty thirties, and so that's only fifteen years away. They're working on couple solutions. One of them is fuel cell powered, so essentially think of it like a fuel cell powering your hydrogen cars. So you have a little bit of hydrogen that essentially generates electricity that powers electric motors. That power is a plane. That is the basic of
fuel cell technology. You also have hydrogen combustion, where it works more like a traditional jet engine, where instead of burning kerosene, a jet engine burns hydrogen. And at the moment they're working on both solutions. Air Bus is sort of throwing its weight more towards fuel cell technology because it does seem to be the solution, especially for smaller planes that fly shorter distances. It does seem to be
something that could be attainable. We've also seen startups like zero Avia and Universal Hydrogen also approaching the same fuel cell technology solution. It's really a question of how we get there. Rolls Royce is also working on hydrogen combustion. So depending on which technology works, the beat, I mean, we may see one or two of these solutions actually working on planes that fly in the sky. Is by twenty thirty five, if you.
Look at the automotive sector, by kind of Chinese regulations and also the force of Tesla's rise, the whole industry is kind of swung behind more or less completely to battery electric vehicles. There's this big need to scale up these solutions quickly to hit the twenty fifty target. Got lots of different companies are working on lots of different technologies, and there's not really kind of an industry consensus about
what the solution is. And that's obviously something you would need to have to hit these twenty to fifty.
Goals, especially if you want to get the infrastructure in place, because flying an airplane the spowered by hydrogens one solution, but then you also need to fuel up the aircraft.
You need to be able to handle the aircraft that airport's around the world, So you need to build up an infrastructure that is capable of supporting those aircraft across the world, not just in Europe or the US or any You have to be able to sort of scale up that solution and deploy it and ensure that there sufficient supply of hydrogen around the world, and so that's all going to take some time to develop.
Hydrogen is now being seen as a kind of silver bullet for several so called hard to abate sectors. Companies want to use it to get to zero emissions. In the steel sector, companies want to use it to get to zero emissions in the chemical sector cement as well.
So you have the world going from a kind of tiny.
Negligible, almost non existent green hydrogen production capacity suddenly needs to have enough hydrogen to kind of decarbonize vast ways of industry and aviation will if it goes down a hydrogen path, be competing with those industries for that fuel. Even if you can solve the technical challenge, there's a major business economic challenge there.
I suppose. Also, if they were able to build these planes and they flew successfully, there's still thousands and thousands of the current aircraft that would have to be phased out over many, many years. So we're looking at probably decades right before you would even be able to convert the fleet absolutely.
I mean, most aircraft have a service life of about twenty five years, and so we're still going to be seeing conventional aircraft being delivered into the twenty thirties, so twenty five years from that is into the twenty sixties.
So that's hydrogen, which sounds like it's a while away, but you report that is not the only renewable feel that playmakers are looking at.
So aside from hydrogen, there's also companies that are exploring hybrid electric or electric powered aircraft. So we have a company called Heart Aerospace as a startup based in Sweden that's talking about building a thirty passenger aircraft that has a range of flying about two hundred kilometers on electric power alone, as or even four hundred or eight hundred kilometers with the combination of a hybrid technology where the hybrid engine generates electricity for the aircraft, And that could
also be a solution. But given the fact that lithium ion batteries aren't great a storing large amounts of energy, we may not see that working for sort of long haul intercontinental aircraft.
One thing that made fossil fuels so successful is that they're just so energy dense. Of course, the other thing is is when you go on a long haul flight, you're actually getting rid of the fossil fuels from fuel tanks as you fly. The fuel consumption is not linear on a flight. You burn a lot of fuel at the start, and then because the plane's getting lighter because you're burning fuel, you need less fuel further along the flight.
So the calculation for long distance is based on the aircraft losing weight as it travels, and obviously you can't do that with lithium ion batteries. You lose the energy from the battery, but the weight still there. Until we see some kind of real and this may not even happen in our lifetimes, a kind of real step change in battery density or or something like that, you're not going to see battery power planes on long hal flights.
So it looks like things are looking up thirty years in the future. But when we come back, where can he done to reduce plane pollution right now? Well, as you say, both hydrogen and batteries to power planes are ways off. So can the sustainable aviation fuels that you mentioned earlier help with some of the emissions problems? In the meantime, while they're developing these things.
There's a variety of them.
So you have biofuel based sustainable aviation fuel, which might take animal fat and turn that into a combustible kind
of hydrocarbon. Then in Germany in particular, they're working on some slightly more out of left field fuels called synthetic aviation fuels, which basically would pull carbon out the atmosphere and combine it through a chemical process, which was the chemical process that the Germans used in World War Two to turn coal into fuel for the Luffaffer and for their kind of soldiers when Germany couldn't.
Get access to oil field.
Through this process, you can make kind of a synthetic fuel from hydrogen and carbon from the atmosphere.
But again you.
Wouldn't be surprised to hear that that's probably quite expensive and takes massive amounts of renewable energy to make.
Probably in the future this will be.
Able to be done at a large scale, but in this relatively short kind of twenty five year period we have, it's difficult to see how it's going to make a major difference.
Right now. They're kind of expensive, right.
Yeah, they're several times more than the cost of normal keresy. As well as that, there's also just very very small supply of these fuels at the moment, and scaling up will be a massive task.
If you look at this sort of ramp up goals or sustainable aviation fuel, they're talking about ten percent sustainable aviation fuel blended into regular jet fuel in twenty thirty, So essentially it's a long drawn solution. It's not going to be something that sort of decalbonizes the industry tomorrow. It's going to be a long roadmap towards it, but it does seem to be the only real solution that the airline industry has as they work on radical designs and new technologies.
Some airlines allow passengers to pay more for a ticket to support these cleaner fuels. How does that work?
There are some airlines that are kind of tentatively offering it. The way it works is, if we take Lufthansa, which is Europe's largest airline, they do offer passengers an option whereby you can, when booking your ticket, you can pay an extra fee for sustainable aviation fuel. Obviously, that fuel that passenger buys doesn't get put onto the actual flight that passengers taking.
It will at some point.
Be put into Lufthansa's fleet somewhere else. Customers don't really seem willing to pay that extra for their flight tickets to secure these fuels.
If customers are left to pay for it themselves, most of them don't really want to pay because, I mean, as some airline executives explained to me the other day, if there's a rival airline that's offering a fair that's fifteen euros cheaper, people are likely to choose that. So would people be extra for sustainable aviation fuel?
Probably not.
So, given all the complications here, a lack of a viable option, a long timeline before these renewable powered planes come into existence, and a lack of willingness of flyers to pay extra. Where do things go from here? How long do you think before we actually have net zero in airline travel?
If I had to guess, I think it'll be some point way beyond twenty to fifty. And there's a lot of extremely talented engineers in the aviation sector and scientists working on this, so you can never kind of rule out a technological solution, But just the targets we're talking
about seem too soon. All the while, other sectors are going to be decarbonizing rapidly, so we know what's happening with electric cars, and in some countries are bringing in bands in the twenty thirties on new combustion engine sales, so we'll see road transport emissions go down. We're probably just starting to see industrial emissions go down in the
electricity generation sector with wind and solar power. Actually, emissions in a lot of countries have already fallen quite a lot if aviation emissions are continuing to rise because more people are flying into the twenty thirties and forties. Are we looking at maybe in ten fifteen years from now, that aviation is in a kind of world where this
voter demand to go green is intensifying. Are we looking at aviation companies is kind of the new tobacco companies of the twenty thirties and twenty forties.
As a proportion, today, aviation emissions are about two and a half percent of global emissions. But as other sectors decubinize, that proportions just going to get higher and higher and there is going to be more pressure. I mean, before the pandemic, we did see activists like Grata Tunberg and others talking about flight shaming, where people were told not to take unnecessarily flights. And we've seen a resurgence and air travel, especially after the pandemic, when people want to
fly again and everything else. But once that bent up demand debits, will flight shaming come back and will the aviation industry be under pressure from that?
Will sid Thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thanks so much, Wes, Thank you so much for having.
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