Blain’s Morning Porridge – 27th November, 2023: Flying the Atlantic on Unicorn Poop!
“Regarding engine power: Lots is good. More is Better. Too much is just enough..”
Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson is set to cross the Atlantic in a plane powered by unicorn farts. It’s marketing smoke and mirrors. The reality is Sustainable Aviation Fuel is an evolutionary dead end. Solving the Air Travel issue will require lots of capital.
My favourite airline is Virgin! What’s not to love about them? There is just something about the way Sir Richard Branson imbues the brand with something special – but he is the Willy Wonka of marketing genius. As he will prove later today when a Virgin 787 Dreamliner flies from London to New York powered by nothing but Aromatic Magic Unicorn Farts. Virgin scientists have spent months collecting flatulence from Sir Richard’s dazzling herd of horses with horns, refining it into enough Jet-oil to make the first ever Sustainable Aviation Fuel flight across the Atlantic. We love you Sir Richard – and your unicorns!
Er, is this the same Sir Richard who burnt about 300,000 tonnes of raw, undiluted, liquid carbon in kerosene form to propel 4 chaps and his pet tortoise, Roger, to the incredible hight of just 50 miles to experience 5 minutes of weightlessness on a Virgin Orbital Flight? Nope – must have been someone else with a goatee…
Oh, sorry… my mistake. Apparently, the Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) on today’s flight isn’t derived from Unicorn Poop.
It’s certainly not aromatic. It’s made from used cooking and animal fat, slugs and snails and puppy dog tails, and a lot of synthetic kerosene which is made by growing lots and lots of corn and then converting the resulting waste into fuel. (Don’t worry… Sir Richard lets starving local children pick up any discarded husks left in the fields.)
Oh dear. I call BOLLCHOCKS on SAF and Virgin’s marketing flight today.
It will get acres of media coverage – I know because I was blathering on about it on the BBC’s Wake Up to Money at the unholy hour of 5 am this morning (although my line went suspiciously dead when I said it was bollocks.) Branson and the UK’s transport minister – who I won’t bother to name because a) no one will ever have heard of him, and b) he’ll probably be doing something else next week – will tell us all how transformational a moment it is.
It’s not. SAF is a dead end of pointlessness. We need real solutions…
If there is one thing we can say for certain it’s that in a rational world, the future of flying would be unlikely to involve much in the way of Sustainable Aviation Fuel. Its massively wasteful to produce – you need enormous amounts of feedstock, meaning fields of monoculture that could have been growing food being used to grow fuel instead. The greenwashers claim it has a lower carbon impact than jet fuel – but once it’s up in the air… it’s just the same really. You can’t change the way current jet engines work… as most airlines using new greener engines are currently discovering to their cost.
Whatever marketing department’s claim about green ambitions, airlines don’t like SAF because it costs about 5 times as much as conventional kerosene. SAF production is only about 0.1% of jet fuel. Airlines really don’t want the additional logistics and maintenance issues around using SAF – but the EU wants them seen to be doing something. Brussels requires airlines to use 2% SAF by 2025 – and for SAF to make up 63% of fuel by 2050. That’s going to require a massive increase in SAF production – which creates inevitable consequences.
In effect SAF is a big thing because regulators have declared it’s a big thing. Not because it should be a big thing – see what I did there?
Relative to fossil derived jet fuels, sustainable aviation fuel, “sustainably” produced, can result in a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions across its “life cycle”. (Yep, I know; that’s a calculation fraught with potential opportunities to “skew” the numbers.) You could save much, much more carbon by flying less. And there are consequences: fields of monoculture to grow artificial kerosene is hardly environmentally friendly.
There is also a potential reliability problem. At the moment Airlines around the world are suffering crise as a result of the new Airbus and Boeing Max planes using new more fuel efficient engines which simply don’t work as well as they should. Planes are being grounded for months. As a result, its more cost-efficient to fly older, fuel-guzzling types.
We really don’t know how engines – fickle thoroughbred beasts that like to quaff only the very best, purest fine fossil-fuel vintages – are going to react being force fed with liquid used-bacon fat derived SAF over the long-term. I will resist the temptation to say SAF is like asking a boxer to go on vegan diet of gruel before a big fight.
The marketing geeks say passengers will be happy and delighted to pay extra to fly on a SAF flight. Nonsense. Have you got on a flight recently? Why do you think everyone carries two pieces of big luggage (purposely designed to be just big enough to be too big) in the cabins – so they can save £25 quid by not putting in the hold. The biggest anxiety flying today is not: will we crash or will the plane take off on time, but will there be space for my hard-case in the overhead locker?
So how are we going to solve the problem of aviation and carbon emissions. There are two ways to think about it:
- What is the trade-off between flying and the multiplier effects it creates? Flying contributes about 2.5% of global CO2 emissions. However, tourism is a $7.5 trillion dollar business, accounting for some 7.6% of global GDP. That’s money that generally drives growth and prosperity in the poorer nations where tourism is concentrated. If you cut flying, you cut the money flowing into these economies, creating demand for alternative growth, which will inevitably come from higher carbon emission manufacturing. Air travel is an important global wealth transmission mechanism plus it could be a mitigant on emissions.
- What are the alternatives to conventional air travel? Are there any? Can new engines or aircraft help?
Let’s not forget that SAF fuels were not conceived as such. Many years ago, bio-engineers came up with plant-based and cooking-oil derived kerosene because the aviation world perceived “peak-oil” and a global shortage of fossil fuels. As a result, the technological imperative was to replace fossil fuel with alternative fuel sources – carbon emissions were not a thing in the 1970s when the tech was first proposed.
New alternative cleaner sources of aviation power are possible. Many engineers believe some form of hydrogen fuelled engines are likely. The problem is burning hydrogen as a jet engine requires very heavy engines and fuel security. An aircraft the size of a Dreamliner might only have capacity for 20 or so passengers – making hydrogen fuel too expensive for mass travel. An alternative might be hydrogen fuel cells – inert hydrogen fuel driving electric engines. With current tech, it will be slow and probably more suited for local flights.
There is the increasing promise of new light-weight, energy dense battery technology. When extolling the wonders and virtues of Tesla and the EV revolution it’s easy to forget “Musk’s” battery tech is at least 50 years old. New carbon-ion, sodium and other battery tech shows promise. One day we could be building planes that are basically a battery powering the engines. Tech will find a way.
There is, however, one massive, massive problem. Capital. The current plane makers, Boeing and Airbus, don’t have the necessary finance to design and build new tech aircraft – without massive government subsidy and support. In the current struggling economic outlook – the costs of sustaining an aviation revolution may be too high.
Or perhaps, out there are entrepreneurs, inventors and innovators who see the opportunity and have the solution…. Who knows? I have an idea…
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Out of time, and off to do a day job
Bill Blain
Strategist and Author of The Morning Porridge.
3 Comments
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I sometimes think the EU, ESG heads don’t understand basic math. So much effort is being put into SAF… but at what cost and benefit? I think we’d be better served spending the money elsewhere (new technologies or in areas/industries that produce more carbon) as aviation only contributes to 2,5% of carbon Emissions. How much more can a 2.5% industry improve in a short amount of time without a significant money waste?
Lessors unfortunately have no choice but to play the game otherwise they limit the pool of potential investors. The situation reminds me of an old Romanian communism saying when the population was not doing great (not enough food and money) …”they pretend they pay us, we pretend that we work” everybody is pretending that what they doing actually works when it doesn’t.
Well noted on the new engines as well, manufacturers have been pushed to make engines much more efficient and now they break down and need to be fixed more often. Some airlines need to keep tens of engines on ground to be able to fly as intended (e.g. 15 mln USD per engine x 20 = 300 mln USD of extra capital locked up). What are the environmental costs of having to ship these engines back for repair them before it was intended?
Don’t agree on SAF Bill,
You are perhaps forgetting who is behind this; it is not just Rocket Richard, but some very strong lobbying is going on for SAF in the USA. A very powerful cabal of vested interest in using agriculture for fuel, just like they did with Ethanol – another abomination, but still now forms 10-15% of the gasoline mix. They will also point out that it has the added benefit of being home grown, rather than Oil from those “pesky foreigners”; it is not just the usual, but powerful, farm lobby (Deere, Archer Daniels, Bunge, Mosaic) but also major airlines Delta, KLM; Boeing and Airbus, plus all the Refiners (Shell, BP, Neste) that have spent large amounts of Capex in order to use it. The Inflation Reduction Act contains subsidies for this and yes, while it costs a lot more for now, that is partly because volume is tiny. Asia is behind this too; Sinopec is gearing up plants to make it and will argue that they have industrial waste cooking oil anyway; I think it will pass.
I don’t think the problem with using hydrogen for fuelling jet engines has anything to do with the potential weight of the engines. The problem, or rather the problems lie with the fact that H2 is the lightest of all flammable gases and therefore has to be compressed to an enormous pressure in order to create enough space to carry passengers as well. This enormous pressure has a number of very deleterious consequences, such as the weight of the pressure vessels themselves, and the fact that unlike vessels for carrying ATK they just cannot be made strong enough without being cylindrical which means that they cannot be squeezed into add spaces in the wings, but lastly, and most importantly, the slightest leak will mean that from a pressure of maybe 3000 psi (or 200 bar) the fuel system will empty itself into the atmosphere in very short order. Something that for some reason might just prove problematic in mid-Atlantic.