Transatlantic air fares to jump under net zero fuel rules
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Yet one more cost for Net Zero:
The cost of a return trip to New York is on track to rise by £40 as a result of incoming net zero regulations, according to figures from Virgin Atlantic.
The extra burden on travellers is expected if the cost of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is passed on directly. Calculations by Virgin Atlantic, a pioneer in using the greener jet fuel, show that ticket prices would have to rise 6pc.
For a return flight to New York that would amount to a £40 increase at current prices, based on two one-way fares costing about £350 each.
SAF is a refined blend of waste oils, animal fats and ethanol from corn. The fuel is viewed as the most practical route towards reducing aviation’s net CO2 emission before completely new technologies, such as hydrogen propulsion, become available next decade or beyond.
Airlines operating from the UK will be required to use at least 10pc SAF to power their flights from 2030, but with the fuel currently costing six times as much as traditional jet fuel, passengers face a potential jump in fares.
Figures published by Flint Global suggest that by 2040, when the UK mandate will require a 22pc SAF blend, fares will be a third higher if costs aren’t addressed.
The UK rules are more stringent than the EU’s requirement for a 6pc SAF mix by the end of the decade, with the difference potentially giving continental carriers such as Lufthansa and Air France a competitive advantage over the likes of Virgin Atlantic and British Airways.
British Airways currently sources 90pc of its SAF overseas.
UK aviation CO2 emissions account for 0.1% of world emissions.
And as with everything else, as the world as a whole gets richer, more people will be flying. Any attempt by the UK to save a few tonnes of carbon will be swamped.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Why is the UK the leader, leading the lemmings over the Net Zero cliff? We used to lead the world in technological advancement. Now we lead the world in de-industrialisation. Why is this happening?
Partly because the US State Dept wants Europe de-industrialised. And partly because the PMC class wants to ‘feel good’ about itself and is incapable of thinking very much.
Because 97% of lemmings agree that climate change is happening and the way forward is towards the cliff.
Because the UK has a massive oversupply of globalist politicians in all parties except the minor right-leaning parties, and has been in that situation since Thatcher was ousted in 1990 and was replaced by John Major. Globalists are basically Western liberals whose main interest is in impressing other Western liberals by doing such things as being world leaders in tackling climate change.
It is technically possible to have a UK Conservative party leader who is not a globalist. The Conservative party membership has quite a bit of control over who becomes leader and is more likely to vote for a non-globalist, that is someone who is more inclined to put Britain’s interests first. But when a non-globalist does get the job as Conservative party leader, they don’t last very long in that position. The three examples of this happening in the 21st Century were Iain Duncan Smith (when the Conservatives were in opposition), Boris Johnson (though Johnson did act like a globalist when it came to Green issues) and Liz Truss. There could have been a fourth example if Andrea Leadsom had not pulled out of the leadership contest with Theresa May. I suspect the party membership would have preferred Leadsom over May as leader, but then in a year or two Leadsom would have got the boot.
Labour has an even more globalist mentality than the Conservatives. After Tony Blair left office he set up an organisation called the “Tony Blair Institute for Global Change”. You can’t get more globalist than that.
Because politicians become politicians to lead the world in something – it doesn’t matter what – and this is currently the easiest and most virtuous.
You think Theresa May had really thought through Net Zero before she introduced it in parliament? She just wanted a “legacy”. Politicians are vain beyond anything you or I can understand.
Used cooking oil from Chinese kitchens using Russian gas or coal-fired generation , shipped across the world using diesel, to put into UK aircraft to increase prices for customers. And all in the pretense it cuts CO2 emissions?
Completely barmy.
The Chinese used to use their used cooking oil in the manufacture of pig food. Now that they can make more money selling it to the UK and EU they use palm oil in pig food thereby increasing deforestation in countries such as Indonesia. Yet again “green” biofuels turn out not to be green when all the implications of their used are taken into account.
Because our Dear Leader of the time, the fat pig dictator supported all this drivel as he wanted to get his leg over with Princess Nut Nut .Simples .So we all have to suffer from his d**k driven stupidity .
Right, it wasn’t already on legislation before he became leader…
Oh wait, it was.
and there is not a dog’s chance that the Keeling curve that records the rise in harmless CO2 will be checked. So utterly pointless.
co2 is the gas of life. Essential, not just harmless.
What noble sacrifices we are all asked to make!
Why does UK demand 22%SAF and EU only 6%. All that will happen is UK flyers will fly via Amsterdam (particularly with the new right wing government dropping EU net zero demands), Paris, Brussels and Dublin to USA and Far East?
Why is the UK seeking to be the first nation to go bust by introducing impossible net zero demands?
In fact next week I am going to USA via Dublin, it was two thirds the price of Heathrow, with the additional advantage of clearing US immigration at Dublin.
US immigration takes at least an hour, more sometimes as US citizens get priority.
When your goal is to be virtuous, being first and the most, matters
The cost is going to be more that £40.
SAF fuels are not ‘plug in’ so they cannot use the same pipes and farms that serve airports. (Airports are served by pipes, that run for hundreds of miles.). So SAF fuels will have to be tankered in, and stored in new (separate) fuel farms.
And SAF fuels are pretty worthless, because it takes a liter of diesel, to make a liter of SAF fuel.
The ONLY route for aviation is R-gen fuels (or Regenerative Fuels). (They used to be called Synthetic Aviation Fuels, but that name seems to have been usurped.)
R-fuels are made from CO2 and hydrogen, using copious amounts of (nuclear) energy and an iron catalyst. The Oxford team have a laboratory-size demonstrator. But this produces a much cleaner burning fuel, that has no nitrides, and none of the aromatics that emit unburned hydrocarbons and cause soot deposits.
R-fuels are ‘plug in’ so can be mixed with Jet-A1 and use all the current infrastructure. They will still be twice the price of current fuels, but they will be Net Zero (if the energy comes from nuclear), and much cleaner to the atmosphere.
Ralph
So an expensive solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
I suppose Co2 is a problem, if you believe extra plant-food is a problem.
But SAF fuels are not going to solve the problem. By reducing food production, and costing so much energy to produce, they are going to exacerbate the problems we face.
R
I’m surprised that R-fuels are only twice as expensive as fossil fuels. Given the amount of energy required to make them, I would’ve thought the difference is a lot more than that ?
It may well be. Because oil already contains its energy, while R-fuels have to create that energy. There is an extra step involved.
However, we still don’t know if R-fuels will even work at scale. The government wants net-zero fuels, but is not putting any money into their production. The Oxford team were having a Go Fund Me or something, because our STUPID politicians will not invest money in viable technologies.
However they will put £60 million into Rolls Royce making a hybrid aircraft, when a child of six will know that a hybrid aircraft can never work. (Too complex, too heavy, too many stages causing inefficiencies, too expensive, and far too hot – they had the engine in the fuselage.)
Needless to say, the absurd EfanX could not even get airborne. And you all paid for this debacle.
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/rolls-royce-and-airbus-cancel-e-fan-x-project
Ralph
I hadn’t seen that hybrid plane idea before. You are right, they are giving money to ideas that anyone with a back of an envelope would know are ludicrous. The heat storage in sand idea for storing electricity is another one.
Rolls promised a 70% decrease in CO2, but managed a 400% increase. And the thing was so hot, it was in danger of spontaneous combustion.
I think RR should give the grant money back. I think the application was based upon fraudulent data, but they have refused three FoI requests.
R
Well if the suckers are daft enough to fall for it ….?
I think there is a lot of this type of fraud going on. The government clearly does not employ persons with any sense to review these proposals.
The three civil servants, in the different departments, were all called Gray.
R
All of these internals, can only power two of the normal Bae146 engines…! Hmm – so where do the passengers sit?
Image
R
Simple.
The prevalence of terror.
The divisions within society.
The spread of misinformation.
R
Tick vg.
Private contract enforcement by government makes them more efficient.
So after a plane flies over, you sniff, “That was a Virgin.”
The oil must have come from a fish and chip shop…
R
I hate flying on a Virgin who doesn’t go all the way!
It would be nice if the government would ask us plebs if we want all of this kind of bollocks forced on us and if we want to pay for it. But, they know already what the answer would be.
To the nearest number, this will reduce atmospheric temperature by Zero. {Yes Zero is a number.}
There’s no truth in the rumour that Drax have bought the old Basler steam aero engine patents and are intending to fly American woodchips to Yorkshire.
… although, these days it seems any folly that ticks the virtue signal box is enthusiastically implemented.
Peak something
Not if there other constraints on growth; and there are. And I do not actually give a tuppeny dam anyway. Trees regrow. They were here four hundred million years before us and they will be here four hundred million years after us.
It is all reminiscent of the old Punch cartoon where the lady of the house has summoned a maid:
“Mary! Find out what the children are doing, and tell them to stop it at once!”
During WWII the Germans powered their V2 rockets with ethanol made from potatoes and it took 30 acres (or it might of been hectares) to provide enough fuel for a rocket to travel from Northern Germany to London. Imagine how many acres of crops would be needed to power a trans Atlantic flight, because the fuel density of hydrogen is too low for it to be useful in commercial jets so biofuels are the only way aviation can become “carbon neutral”. There clearly isn’t enough farmland in the UK or EU to provide enough ethanol for even a fraction of current air travel.
Another example of our morons in government wanting to be ‘world leading’ which seems to mean the opposite. Remember our ‘world leading’ track and trace disaster? How many millions of our money did they piss away on that? And only this morning on GBN there was mention of us still not having introduced our ‘world leading’ border inspection system on goods from the EU.
Chatting to a friend who had been visiting our local airport, which is doing its best to be carbon neutral, and running H2 busses and have ordered more. It seems there is a shortage of fuel supply – can’t think why. Then it seems when the fuel does arrive only about 75% gets transferred to the buses on refuelling.
I wonder what Efl & Safety make of all this – have the regulations kept up with this sort of operation?
“amid growing pressure to switch to greener fuels”. What pressure? Certainly none based on any science I have ever heard of, so it is the usual rancid rabid undemocratic marxist political pressure.
Just stand back and take it all in. Right across the board our Western systems are being deliberately stressed, in some cases already to breaking point. None of this Krap makes anything better and that is absolutely the intention. Klumutt is just an excuse to make multiple aspects of our Western economies unviable.
Something I have also noticed kicking off in several countries are protests against tourists. My first thought was akin to biting the hand that feeds you. I have not been keeping tabs on them all but I have seen Canaries, I think Portugal and also Spain and possibly also Greece. What is compelling is that they all kicked off within weeks if not days of each other. Now, if those countries really do ditch tourism then it will not be pretty ….for them! I just get the feeling something stinks and I think we will find well funded lefty agitators at work. They want to stop us flying end of so they are coming for us from both ends.
They do not care if the consequences are to send places like the Canaries back to the Stone Age as their economy collapses and people starve. Just more broken eggs
We are dealing with people who think they could do a better job than Mao and Stalin. Incredible isn’t it when more than 100 million people were murdered by those two “heroes”, not in war but because they were not ideologically pure, that our universities and streets are filled with useful idiots proudly flying the red rag with the hammer and sickle and no one says a thing especially not our oh so woke hapless plods and plodesses.
How is it that while flying the nazi emblem is illegal and rightly so, that the same does not apply to the that marxist symbol of murder and oppression which has it’s mark clearly stamped on every aspect of our economy, society and civilization which is currently being stressed ?
The architects of Critical Theory based in the Frankfurt School would be so proud of their efforts if they were alive to see what they had fermented. Am I the only one who noticed the significance of Columbia University as ground zero for the idiot protests the BBC et al have been fawning all over? Is anyone else aware that Columbia University is where those Marxists from the Frankfurt School decamped to when Hitler was feeling their collars in the 1930s and also where “Political Correctness” first emerged?
I am not a believer in coincidence especially when malevolent forces are at work.
Thanks for that info. No, I didn’t realise the significance of Columbia Uni.