Sustainable aviation fuel is the answer to decarbonisation
Published Wed 22 Feb 2023
Australian Financial Review
22 February 2023
Australia is in danger of missing an opportunity to add $8 billion a year to our GDP and create an extra 8000 jobs if we don’t move faster to develop a domestic sustainable aviation fuel sector, says the chief executive of Bioenergy Australia, Shahana McKenzie.
According to McKenzie, the nation had close to 10 years of inaction on SAF under the previous government and in that time much of the world raced ahead, but she is hopeful things are about to change with the federal government recently announcing its intention to release an aviation white paper.
Following last year’s release of Bridging the Price Gap for Sustainable Aviation Fuel report, the white paper will explore how to maximise the aviation sector’s contribution to achieving net-zero carbon emissions, including through sustainable aviation fuel and emerging technologies.
Last year’s report brought together a diverse range of industry stakeholders who outlined four recommendations to move the industry forward in Australia.
The key recommendation was to establish a “jet council” to connect state and federal governments with aviation industry stakeholders to guide the ongoing development of sustainable aviation policies.
McKenzie says Transport Minister Catherine King is expected to meet with industry to help shape the role of the jet council at the Avalon airshow next week.
Boeing’s regional sustainability lead for Asia Pacific, Heidi Hauf, agrees we have fallen behind globally which is a shame because “Australia was leading the world 10 years ago”.
Agricultural waste
“We had one of the world’s first SAF road maps, developed by the CSIRO, but because of a range of political issues we now aren’t in that leading position, but we certainly have a lot of potential,” Hauf says.
Most of our current potential lies in our access to an enormous number of feedstocks, including agricultural waste such as sugar cane tops and forestry residues like sawdust.
According to McKenzie, the sugar cane tops and trash from Queensland alone would provide enough raw material to supply the whole domestic aviation sector with SAF, yet remain laggards.
She says we’ve missed a few opportunities already and cites how used cooking oil exports shot up 33,000 per cent between 2020 and 2022 as the US SAF industry forged ahead.
For Hauf, Australia’s potential also lies in our proximity to Asia and some of the world’s fastest growing aviation markets where the demand for SAF will be strong.
“We already have the diverse feed stocks which can be scaled and we have the potential to significantly grow our renewable energy sector, and that’s a big part of the future of sustainable aviation fuel, particularly when you think about electric fuels,” Hauf says.
Importantly, growing the industry will increase our energy security as we build out refinery capacity to produce SAF. And unlike large refineries elsewhere, a part of the vision would be to build smaller refineries in regional Australia close to sources of feedstock.
“These projects are quite a bit smaller than your traditional fossil-based refineries and we would be looking at around 18 to 20 refineries along the east coast of Australia alone,” McKenzie says.
Yet to get to a point where Australia can have a viable SAF sector, Australia needs to play catch-up at a rapid pace and that will require plenty of government support in the early stages.
“At the moment, SAF costs around three to four times the cost of traditional jet fuel although if you are uplifting SAF out of California, you can pay close to the normal price of aviation fuel,” McKenzie says. “The reason is the incentives provided by the state of California effectively create an even playing field for airlines to be able to decarbonise.”
As for Australia’s airlines, they have made some strong commitments to clean up their fleets, with Qantas outlining an ambitious target to have 10 per cent of its fuel use coming from SAF by 2030 and 60 per cent by 2050.
Ambitious targets
Unfortunately, Qantas must look to overseas supply for SAF because we don’t have a domestic industry.
Yet while the targets are ambitious, the International Energy Agency says the world’s aviation sector is not on track to reach net-zero emission by 2050. SAF stocks still only make up around 1 per cent of the world’s aviation fuel.
The IEA says the development of SAF will be critical to getting back on track. This means more investment in production capacity and new policies such as fuel taxes, low-carbon fuel standards and mandatory blending.
Hauf says Boeing is getting out in front and has agreements in place to purchase more than 20 million litres of blended sustainable aviation fuel produced by Neste, the world’s leading SAF producer, to support its US commercial operations through 2023.
Closer to home, she says Boeing continues to work with the CSIRO to develop the sector and explore the production potential in the region as it’s “a really pivotal piece of investment for us”.
Technical capability
Globally, the company has invested $US60 billion to improve and build more advanced products with greater fuel efficiency and lower carbon emissions.
“We’ve been partnering with SkyNRG, based out of Amsterdam, who are real experts across the whole SAF value chain from production to finance and technical capability. A whole suite of things needed to get the industry up and running,” Hauf says.
Hauf points out SAF is not the silver bullet when it comes to decarbonising the aviation sector, although it will play a vital role in fuelling long-haul flights, which account for about 70 per cent of the sector’s emissions. Hydrogen and battery power will play a role on shorter haul routes, but those technologies probably won’t have advanced into the long-haul space by 2050.
“At Boeing we like to talk about four strategies in our approach to decarbonisation – fleet renewal, operational efficiency, renewable energy and the development of advanced technologies, in conjunction with other aerospace companies.
“And fleet renewal is probably the most significant way to reduce emissions right now, because replacing an older fleet with new aircraft can reduce emissions by 15 to 25 per cent immediately.”
Boeing’s focus is not just about SAF or reducing carbon emissions, according to Hauf: it’s aviation’s total climate impact.
The company constantly monitors all emissions, ranging from water vapour to chemtrails, and “what we’re doing is getting a better understanding of the total climate impact across the entire lifecycle of an aircraft”, Hauf says.
For McKenzie, what we do with SAF will be vitally important because it is going to “have to do the heavy-lifting out to 2050” before real innovation in the aviation industry hits the mainstream.
“The aircraft in circulation today will potentially still be in circulation over 20 years from now so we need a solution that will work within the existing infrastructure, aircraft and systems that will enable the industry to decarbonise.”