Doubts
about switching over to all sustainable airline fuel in the future are starting
to creep in.
The
heads of the world's two largest airplane leasing companies said it couldn't be
done without a massive government investment, according to Reuters.com.
And
some in the industry
even wonder if that's worth the effort.
Officials
who do business with aviation – including lessors and banking officials – say
taxpayer dollars will be needed for the organic material to produce sustainable
fuel and to handle its waste.
"If governments want airlines to burn sustainable
aviation fuel (SAF), they're going to need to devote extraordinary sums of
taxpayers' money to make it happen," Aengus Kelly, CEO of the world's
number one lessor AerCap, told the Airline Economics conference.
That might change in the future, of course, but right now,
sustainable fuel is far more expensive than traditional airline fuel.
How expensive?
The industry estimates it will take between $1.45 trillion
and $3.2 trillion in capital development to bring SAF's share of the fuel
market needed to reach a goal of net zero emissions by 2050.
"If we have a limited amount of funds, which every
government does, we should put it where we get the biggest bang for our buck
and I'm just not sure in aviation that it's going to move the needle
enough," Kelly said.
Andy Cronin, CEO of leasing company Avolon, said SAF will
likely need significant policy and state intervention.
"I think that's a real concern," Cronin said.
But airlines have made the public pledge to switch to sustainable
fuels, and they won’t be let out of that commitment.
"A lot of people wanted to get on the bandwagon, and now
they're discovering that it's a much more nuanced, much more complicated
issue," Dubai Aerospace Enterprise CEO Firoz Tarapore said.
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