Watch: the role of SAF in making aviation more sustainable
Sustainable aviation fuel can help corporations maintain business travel while meeting their emissions targets, but more cooperation with airlines is needed to produce more sustainable aviation fuel and bring prices down, according to a senior sustainability executive at Delta Air Lines.
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The pandemic shut down most business travel and while it is starting to rebound, many companies are rethinking their corporate travel policies in response to increasing awareness of the need to act on climate goals, Amelia DeLuca, Delta’s Vice President of Sustainability, said in an interview.
The role of SAF in aviation sustainability
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
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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: The role of SAF in aviation sustainability, Part 2 of 3
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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“The ask here, essentially, to our business travel community is to understand that there's a solution available now. There is no reason to stop flying,” DeLuca said in an interview with Joel Makower, Editor of Greenbiz.com. “If you're looking to hit your own internal emission-reductions targets, sustainable aviation fuel is there for you. Get in the game now with us because we also want our corporations to be with us to help figure out how we engage on this as we move forward.”
Delta has made sustainability a key part of its business strategy. The Atlanta, Georgia-based carrier committed in 2012 to capping its emissions at that year’s level, then pledged in 2020 to be carbon neutral. SAF is a key part of that strategy, DeLuca said, noting that Delta will begin taking delivery of more than 303 million litres (80 million gallons) of SAF in 2024, compared to 11 million litres (3 million gallons) a year now.
The power of partnerships
Investors are putting increased pressure on airlines and other corporations to take meaningful steps towards net-zero emissions, DeLuca said, noting that the aviation industry is keen to partner with other stakeholders since a reduction in an airline’s Scope 1 emissions – meaning those stemming directly from its core business – amount to reductions in the Scope 3 emissions that cover those caused by travel for other companies.
“It's a win-win situation,” DeLuca said.
DeLuca highlighted a partnership Delta struck with Deloitte in February 2021 under which the global consulting firm became one of the first corporate customers to buy SAF through Delta to help offset its business-travel emissions. Such partnerships will help narrow the price premium over conventional jet fuel, DeLuca said.
“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 group start to lose confidence in us as an industry,” DeLuca said.
SAF: A safe bet for sustainability today
Encouragingly, DeLuca said investors have already been pouring money into SAF startups, a sign of confidence that this is a business ready for takeoff and not some unproven technology.
“I think the technology is there. It's working today. It's blending into our infrastructure today. And next-generation technologies will just make that able to be produced either in greater quantities or more cheaply, or perhaps both,” DeLuca said.
Echoing others in the industry, DeLuca said more policy support such as a tax credit on par with that for other biofuels, is needed to help close the price gap further.
“In the journey forward, sustainable aviation fuel is the most critical thing that we have to achieve our joint efforts between an airline and that corporation who's trying to reduce their business travel emissions,” she said. “But it's price-prohibitive not only for us as a company but for many customers who would like to purchase it,” she said. “Government policy is critical at this point.”
Making Aviation More Sustainable: A Conversation with Amelia DeLuca
Flightpath host, Joel Makower, recently spoke with Amelia DeLuca, Managing Director of Sustainability at Delta Air Lines, to discuss the urgent need to decarbonize aviation and how Delta has made sustainability an integral part of its business strategy.
Watch: the role of business travelers in making aviation more sustainable
Amelia DeLuca, Vice President of Sustainability at Delta Air Lines, explains how business travelers and corporations will play a crucial role in helping the aviation industry become more sustainable by clearly understanding their emissions footprint from flying and then partnering with airlines to reduce that impact.
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Watch: Nature’s role in tackling aviation emissions
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