Some SAF comes from waste fats, for example, from food production processes. Only 10% of the total area required would go towards biofuel production in McKinsey's scenario. The vast majority of this new cropland (70% ) is needed to grow crops for feeding livestock. We will need an additional 70-80 million hectares of cropland by 2030 globally, estimates management consultants McKinsey & Company – that's an area bigger than the state of Texas. Around the world, competition for land is fierce. "We concluded that there wasn't really enough land," he says. In a Royal Society report published earlier this year, Lee and colleagues analysed the UK's potential to produce its own SAF for commercial flights. In the US, SAF production is estimated to reach 2.1 billion gallons (7.9 billion litres) annually by 2030 – well below President Biden's target of producing 3 billion gallons (11.3 billion litres) of the fuel annually by that year. However, to date, SAF has helped to fuel hundreds of thousands of flights – at least as part of a blend with fossil fuels. The International Air Transport Association predicts that the airline industry will require 450 billion litres of SAF by 2050 – only 300 million litres were produced in 2022. SAF accounts for just 0.1% of all aviation fuels consumed. It's an issue that Virgin Atlantic itself acknowledges. "If we want to do engine tests, we have difficulty purchasing the fuel." "You just can't get hold of the damn stuff," says Lee. But it would be difficult to power more than one glitzy flight with 100% SAF today. It all adds up to a successful proof-of-concept. Lee notes that international regulations don't actually allow for flights using more than 50% SAF as fuel at the moment, so Virgin Atlantic's hop across the pond required a special permit from the UK's Civil Aviation Authority. Stratoplanes: The aircraft that will fly at the edge of space.The drones that flew into nuclear blasts.By switching to SAF over fossil fuels, you can achieve carbon savings of around 70%, says Lee, though this depends on the specific source of biomass you choose. "What they're doing is quite important, they're just demonstrating that the flight is perfectly safe, there are no problems with the fuel," says David Lee, a professor of atmospheric science at Manchester Metropolitan University, who studies the impact of aviation on the climate, and who was a co-author of the paper that investigated the feasibility of transitioning to SAF. It's just that scaling SAF production up is a gigantic challenge. Proponents of SAF argue that the fuel could make flying much greener than it is currently. The airline industry is currently responsible for about 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions, roughly the same as the entire country of Japan, which is one of the world's highest emitters. And if you tried using waste sources of biomass alone, you w ouldn't have nearly enough to keep all the world's planes in the air, say some experts. One academic paper published in August estimated that, if you were to grow sugar cane and use that to make biofuels for commercial jets, you'd need 125 million hectares (482,000 sq miles) of land – roughly equivalent to the surface area of the states of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Louisiana combined. The problem is the sheer volume of biomass needed to power an industry as fuel-hungry as aviation. While biofuels release CO2 when burned, some consider them a sustainable option because they are renewable and biomass removes some CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows. The biomass required to make biofuel can come from a broad range of sources – plant material, food waste or even algae. (The flight was partly funded by the UK government.)īut not everyone is so sure that this represents the future of flying. A British Conservative MP posted his smiling selfie with Branson to the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, and declared the flight "a significant UK aviation achievement". Virgin Atlantic's Boeing 787 was powered not by fossil fuels, but plant sugars and waste fats – a form of so-called Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF. The world's first commercial airliner to cross the Atlantic using 100% biofuel had just landed in New York. As the politician next to him took out his phone for a selfie, Virgin Atlantic chairman Richard Branson peered into the camera, grinned, and did a double thumbs-up.
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