Watch: The Role of SAF in Making Aviation More Sustainable

Description:

Joel Makower, Editor of GreenBiz.com, interviews Amelia DeLuca, Vice President of Sustainability at Delta Air Lines. Amelia discusses the importance of partnerships between airlines, corporations, and business travelers in making aviation more sustainable.

Title: Making Aviation More Sustainable: The Role of Business Travelers

Duration: 4:23

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Bright, uplifting music

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The Shell™ pecten logo appears, then fades. A three-dimensional model of Earth rotates while white silhouettes of planes fly across the globe. On the right side of the screen, a shot of Amelia DeLuca talking with no audio.

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This episode: Making business travel more sustainable, Part 3 of 3

{Joel Makower sits onscreen. Facing him is Amelia DeLuca. The camera alternates between speakers.}

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Joel Makower

Executive Editor

GreenBiz.com

Joel Makower:

What are you hearing from your corporate customers about what they expect of Delta and other airlines in the coming years from a sustainability perspective?

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Amelia DeLuca

Vice President, Sustainability

Delta Air Lines

Amelia DeLuca:

Well, first off, they're like, “I love this challenge. I've never been more excited to learn something new.” So, I thought that was a really great testament to, again, the integration, the excitement that's coming from the people that are going to lead us through the transition on the business travel side.

Then they're saying, “I'm hearing about it all day long from everyone. My leadership is asking me what the plan is. My employees are asking me. What am I supposed to do? How do I travel in a more green way? And what are you doing to, again, pick those partners that are the most sustainable partners that we can have?”

{A pilot with a suitcase boarding a Delta plane appears on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

So, I think corporations are walking alongside us in this journey in the sense that they're saying, “I'm all in on this.” They know Delta is all in on this, but we’re all kind of saying, “Okay, what does this look like? How do we build partnerships?”

Sustainable aviation fuel partnerships is a great example of something that happened fast, pretty organically. One corporation saying, “Hey, I want to get involved in this.” And then you got a whole bunch of other people saying, “Yeah, I'm in on this, too.” I think we're going to continue to see that evolve as we go where we find new and creative ways to engage at an enterprise level, as well as directly between the brand and the consumer.

{A woman and a child wearing face masks looking out of an airplane window appear on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

And there's such a benefit to that because that's how Delta has always built such great brand recognition and trust, is not only to attack it through our partnerships, through supply chain, and businesses but also through the end consumer.

Our corporate customers are having the same pressures that we're having right now as a company and as an airline. They're hearing from their investors, as well. “What is your plan? What is your plan to hit Net Zero, to hit your own science-based targets?”

{A Delta plane taking off appears on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

As soon as we had corporate customers coming to us and saying, “Hey, my business travel emissions are actually a really big part of my greenhouse gas emissions.” For certain companies, we are actually sometimes the majority of their greenhouse gas emissions, depending upon how they operate and what type of business model they have.

What's really exciting about SAF is that when customers came to us and said, “Hey, what can you do?” Well, the first thing we said is, “One, we're committed to carbon neutrality today. We are carbon-neutral, so rest assured your travelers should feel comfortable when they're traveling on Delta.”

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

But then the second thing is if they need to achieve their own climate goals, we have a solution with sustainable aviation fuel. And as soon as we went out there with our first deal with Deloitte, the interest that we received from other corporations has been… It's so inspiring to see how many corporations between small to big, all industries are saying, “Hey, I want to learn more about this. I would like to talk to my senior-level leadership about this product and figure out how I can fit it into my portfolio.”

{A shot of a Delta airplane taxiing appears on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

It's a win-win situation because it allows the corporation to impact their scope three business travel emissions, while simultaneously we impact our scope one.

Joel Makower:

So, what's the ask of the business traveler in helping bring along the demand at the rate that we need?

Amelia DeLuca:

I think the first step within any corporation at any level – from an individual traveler to an executive to the person who is working in their business travel space – is having education and awareness for what the impact of your business travel is, as well as what the solutions are.

So, we talk a lot about education. Just understand the basics of sustainability. Understand your footprint. Look at the data. Let the data guide you to where your impact is. That's that transparency that's so important. We know our impact. We know our impact as a company. We know other companies know their impact when they travel on us.

Then the second thing right after that is to say, “Okay, I want to take a step now. It may not achieve my climate goals of 2030 or 2035, but there are things available today for me to take steps.” And many corporations are doing that because you see corporations who are also carbon-neutral, who are also using offsets.

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

Description:

Joel Makower, Editor of GreenBiz.com, interviews Amelia DeLuca, Vice President of Sustainability at Delta Air Lines. Amelia discusses the role of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and how to scale SAF and bring prices down.

Title: The role of SAF in aviation sustainability

Duration: 6:07

[Background music plays]

Bright, uplifting music

[Animation]

The Shell™ pecten logo appears, then fades. A three-dimensional model of Earth rotates while white silhouettes of planes fly across the globe. On the right side of the screen, a shot of Amelia DeLuca talking with no audio.

[Text Displays]

This episode: The role of SAF in aviation sustainability, Part 2 of 3

{Joel Makower sits onscreen. Facing him is Amelia DeLuca. The camera alternates between speakers.}

[Text Displays]

Joel Makower

Executive Editor

GreenBiz.com

Joel Makower:

Delta has made some pretty big commitments around buying SAF. Talk a little bit about what you've done and why.

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Amelia DeLuca

Vice President, Sustainability

Delta Air Lines

Amelia DeLuca:

When we think about the demand signals we need to send – whether that's to the government, whether that's to SAF producers that are startups, or whether it's to major oil and gas companies that are thinking about converting – not only when you have a brand like Delta, as well as some of our competitors, focused on SAF, but you have these huge corporate names, and they're saying, “Yeah, I want this, too, and I'm actually willing to help with that premium right now so that we can scale it up and get to a point where the price is more or less on par with jet fuel.” That's when the magic starts to happen.

{A Delta plane taxiing on a runway appears on screen}

{A Delta plane taking off appears on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

You're going to hear, especially when you think about sustainable aviation right now, it's all about SAF because it's here, but it's urgent right now that we figure out a path to scaling it.

Joel Makower:

But 98%, as you said, of your emissions come from burning jet fuel. Where does fuel fit into this? What's the plan to look at reducing fuel use, alternative fuels and to cut into that 98%?

Amelia DeLuca:

It's a two-part story, essentially. It's now until 2035, and then it's 2035 and beyond. Which is why, as an airline, we have what's called a Science-Based Target at 2035, which is essentially a carbon intensity target, or, in our case, because all of our carbon comes from fuel, a fuel efficiency target at 2035.

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

And we’ve recently signed on to that and committed to the science-based targets, which is a really ambitious goal to manage in our fuel efficiency.

{Wind turbines at sunset appear on screen}

{A Delta airplane flying over mountains and a body of water appears on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

When we look at our path to that science-based target, there's really three levers that we have today. One I talked about: fleet renewals. We have the best fleet team in the industry. We have the best partners between Airbus and Boeing, and that is just working hand in hand to make sure every new aircraft that we take is as efficient as possible.

Number two – people don't always think about this one, but it's a big one that we control – is operational efficiencies. That just means flying as smart as you possibly can.

{A Delta airplane taking off at sunset appears on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

Some basic things that you will think about is flying straight versus kind of flying all over the place, but also the amount of weight that you put on an aircraft, for how much you're provisioning in your catering section to essentially the weight of the seat that you might have.

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

All of that goes into how heavy that aircraft is and will determine whether you burn a lot of fuel or less or more efficient fuel.

Then the third one, which is just the most exciting thing that's coming out of this industry right now, is sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. That's exciting because sustainable aviation fuel is something many of us have heard about for quite some time, and it's here. It's flying in our airplanes today. Not at large amounts. We need to talk about how we scale that, but it works today. It's not just some idea in a lab. Sustainable aviation fuels – you can think about them today like biofuels, essentially – are using things that are not pulled from the ground not extracted like oil is today but instead using, in our instance, we might use used cooking oil, or in the future, we might use inedible corn.

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

Through some new technologies, that can be processed and essentially blended in with jet fuel. So that's a really exciting promise that's going to scale from anywhere between probably 10% around 2030 is the goal of jet fuel consumption would come from SAF, to upwards to 65% by 2050.

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

Joel Makower:

Amelia, what's the role that policy needs to play in bringing SAF to scale?

Amelia DeLuca:

Policy is critically important right now. We see how policy has helped advance the scaling of other cleantech solutions.

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

Right now is that moment where sustainable aviation fuel needs support from policy globally. Policies that have incentives for SAF producers, that's the most critical thing we can do right now. Items like the blenders’ tax credit is something that's going to allow us to be able to reduce the three to five times price premium that comes with sustainable aviation fuel to jet fuel. Again, it's a critical time in our industry to be able to not have those huge green premiums because, as a hard-to-decarbonise sector that also is emerging from the worst crisis we've ever had in our history, we've got to have support from governments.

Coming out of the pandemic, we now know how to think about partnerships in a totally different light in a good way, in the sense of when the world shut down at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, we were all looking across at each other saying, “We’ve got to save our industry.” We looked to government for support. We looked to new partners, like some of the work we've done on the clean side.

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

We brought in new partners to say, “Hey, we need some solutions on the clean side, and we're not experts in this.” We brought on our first Chief Health Officer. That's just an example of how the pandemic has shown us how partnerships look differently when you face new challenges, and it's the same for the environment.

The partnerships you're going to see in this space is, one, an acknowledgment that the transition of this industry will not necessarily be led in a silo just by the airlines. The airlines are the ones that buy the airplanes, they put the sustainable aviation fuel. But we don't create the airplanes, we don't create the fuel. And so, partnerships involve us looking across our supply chain and saying, “Okay, we want to sit with you and walk this journey together. We want to be your thought partner. We want to be your investor, in some instances. We want to raise the ambition together.” Because if we get out of sync, that's when I think we're going to see investors and other parts of our stakeholder groups start to lose confidence in us as an industry.

I point to a couple of examples that tie in really well with Delta.

{A Delta airplane taking off appears on screen}

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

One is the work that's being done with the World Economic Forum through a group called Clean Skies for Tomorrow, which brings together airlines and fuel suppliers and governments essentially trying to scale and create policy for sustainable aviation fuel.

Joel Makower:

So, what's next on the Delta sustainability roadmap?m;

Amelia DeLuca:

Where Delta will become more involved going forward is going to be on the research and development and the investing to make sure that we are able to scale clean technology for our industry in the future.

We work with amazing university partners. MIT is one of them, and they are on the forefront of doing some incredible work to be able to identify, what are some additional impacts that the industry has and how do we start to mitigate them?

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Video footage provided by Delta Air Lines

And again, what is the solution when it comes to that next generation of technologies as we go forward between electric to hydrogen to that next generation of sustainable aviation fuels that are not going to be powered from biological materials, but instead powered from, whether it's the carbon in the air or hydrogen, who knows? There's a lot to be uncovered.

Joel Makower:

Thank you, Amelia.

Amelia DeLuca:

Thank you, Joel.

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