The airlines Air France, KLM and Transavia, all belonging to the same group, have just announced that from this same month of January they will add a surcharge of up to 12 euros on their tickets to try to compensate the extra cost derived from the use of ecological aviation fuel, which is more expensive than the conventional one.
Travelers in economy class will pay between one and four euros more, while those in business class will pay between 1.5 euros and 12 euros, depending on the distance to their destination, said the Air France group.
Air France’s Dutch partner KLM and low-cost subsidiary Transavia also implement the surcharge on flights departing from France and the Netherlandsthe company announced.
This business group explained that it is replacing between 0.5 and one percent of the kerosene it uses in its planes with the sustainable alternative, the so-called biofuel.
Still minority
Sustainable Aviation Fuel or SAF is manufactured mainly from used cooking oil or from forest or agricultural residues. It enables airlines to reduce carbon emissions by 75 percent compared to kerosene over the life cycle of the fuel.
Jet fuel currently accounts for 20 to 30 percent of airline costs.
But nevertheless, adoption of SAF, which is four to eight times more expensive, is slow among the big airlines.
In fact, current production levels are well below what would be needed to power the world’s aircraft fleet.
In 2019, sustainable fuel accounted for less than 0.1% of the 360 billion liters of fuel used by the aviation industry.
Air France says it is confident that the cost of SAFs will fall as more European countries start producing them mass.
For a few days, the airline has already started offering passengers who want to reduce the carbon footprint of their flight the opportunity to make a donation towards the purchase of additional sustainable fuel. Air France announces that every euro donated would be invested in SAF.
Air traffic accounts for 2.5 to 3 percent of global carbon emissions. The industry aims to become carbon neutral by 2050, both by investing in planes that use less kerosene and by using cleaner fuel.
Under a new law that came into force in France on January 1, airlines that refuel in the country must use at least one percent of sustainable fuel. in its fuel mix, a proportion that will increase to two percent in 2025 and five percent in 2030.
The advantage that sustainable aviation fuels bring to an industry in dire need of quick fixes is that do not require notable changes in engines or logisticsas they behave like kerosene in turbines and can even mix with it.
With this technology, the waste expelled by airplanes contains the same amounts of CO2 as normal fuel, but is considered renewable and sustainable due to the rapid replacement of crops and because of its condition as a carbon sink, whose absorption of CO2 reduces by up to one 80% GHG generated by engines.
Biofuels with drawbacks
But nevertheless, in the field of biofuels and SAFs, there are still many problems to solve. Its energy density is lower than that of fossil fuels and its price, for now, is three times and four times that of aviation kerosene.
Furthermore, and as Jordi Riba, professor of Electrical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, points out, “organic products need to be grown and the planet does not have enough surface area so that they do not conflict with food.”
Another consideration is that They are also not free from indirect emissions during their production. “They are renewable because plants absorb carbon as they grow, but in agriculture nitrates that come from carbon are used and tractors and transport are needed, kilometers are made. There is nothing that has zero impact ”, clarifies the teacher.
Faced with all this, the implementation of electric motors in commercial aviation is beginning to be seen as the true alternative, although (and despite the existing projects), it is not expected to begin to materialize anytime soon.