When a Virgin Atlantic flight powered solely by cooking oil successfully jetted from London to New York last year, the airline’s billionaire co-founder Richard Branson was showered with praise.
Politicians, aviation executives, and journalists, many of whom were invited on board, hailed the achievement as a milestone in the sector’s battle to decarbonize, while the flight itself was watched worldwide.
“I was just thinking of my history of firsts across the Atlantic and all my previous ones I’ve ended up being pulled out of the sea, whether it is ballooning or boating,” Branson joked as the plane made its descent to the JFK airport runway.
It was undoubtedly an achievement, but you couldn’t help but leave feeling like it was all a bit blown out of proportion.
Now, the UK’s advertising regulator has given the skeptics a reason to feel a bit more justified.
In a ruling on Wednesday, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) banned a pre-takeoff Virgin Atlantic radio ad, claiming the flight would be “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel” following complaints from five viewers.
The radio transcript goes as follows:
“On the 28th of November, Virgin Atlantic’s Flight 100 will take to the skies on our unique flight mission from London Heathrow to JFK to become the world’s first commercial airline to fly transatlantic on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.
“When they said it was too difficult, we said: challenge accepted. Virgin Atlantic Flight 100. See the world differently.”
Virgin Atlantic isn’t happy with the verdict, which is understandable given it appears to undermine the project and raises questions over whether it was more of a PR job than anything else.
The flight was powered by so-called Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), a biofuel made up of things like ethanol and cooking oil.
This is important as the dispute centers around the wording.
The airline says the term “sustainable aviation fuel” is used across the world, by airlines, governments and others, and thus would not mislead consumers into believing the flight was 100 percent green.
The ASA agreed the term is widely used, however it argues it would still give the impression to the standard consumer that the fuel itself had “no negative environmental impacts at all.”
This gets to the crux of the issue.
Virgin Atlantic’s SAF flight was ultimately a victory for the airline, but not for the battle to reach net-zero.
It was rarely brought up in coverage of the trip but the flight still produced significant emissions, including CO2, nitrous oxide and others.
The production of SAF can involve extensive land use changes, both indirect and direct, and relying on methane-belching animals.
Prior to the event, a consultancy firm calculated the carbon emissions across the full life-cycle of a Virgin Atlantic flight using traditional jet fuel.
The carrier has now confirmed that sustainable aviation fuel produced the same level of CO2 during the flight as its traditional counterpart would have, a staggering omission from most press reports at the time.
SAF emits the same amount of CO2 as conventional kerosene-based jet fuels.
However, the difference is that it utilizes carbon that has recently been captured from the atmosphere by the plants and livestock it is produced from.
Its jet fuel counterparts absorbed carbon millions of years ago.
SAF also comes at a huge cost, and will require a Herculean global production ramp-up if the industry wants to come close to any of its targets.
How far does aviation have to go?
In an interview on the flight, Virgin Atlantic’s chief executive Shai Weiss was quick to play down how quickly he thinks it could be rolled out across the entire fleet.
The ad debacle proves many people simply don’t understand how far there is to go for aviation.
A consumer opinion survey commissioned by Virgin, presented to the ad watchdog, confirmed the poor knowledge consumers had of the limitations of SAF after tuning in.
Just 15 percent understood that it had the same impact as jet fuel and a whopping 30 percent believed it had “zero impact on the environment.”
It’s hard to believe that Virgin Atlantic had no idea what it was doing when publicizing that advert to the general public, many of whom will not have heard of SAF to begin with
“Virgin Atlantic’s Flight 100… [will] become the world’s first commercial airline to fly transatlantic on 100 percent sustainable aviation fuel.”
Miles Lockwood, director of complaints and investigations at the ASA, said: “Claiming that a product or service is sustainable creates an impression that it is not causing harm to the environment and for that reason we expect to see robust evidence that this is the case. “
“In this case, while sustainable aviation fuel does emit less carbon emissions than regular aviation fuel, it nevertheless still generates significant carbon and non-carbon emissions in-flight and its production at scale can have wider environmental costs and trade-offs.”
Honesty and transparency over the obvious limitations in the battle to decarbonize is surely a must if there is any hope the sector will reach its emissions targets.
“While we are disappointed that the ASA has ruled in favour of a small number of complaints, we remain committed to open, accurate and transparent engagement on the challenge of decarbonisation,” a Virgin Atlantic spokesperson said.
By City AM
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While I'm not a fan of Richard Branson, he is using the recognized definition of SAF. Other products of the same sort are recognized as green and 100% sustainable that produce far more CO2 than SAF. For example biomass is counted by most experts, so-called, as completely green, though the energy in pillaging and ripping out the lumber from the forests, cutting them into usable lengths (briquetting), and shipping it to the end user uses almost as much, if not more, fossil fuel energy than just producing and using the fossil fuel for energy. Not only that, but it produces far more toxic substances than the equivalent fossil fuel, perhaps even coal. (I'm hedging here, because there are so many variables in the production of biomass.) What is the cost comparison of loading, transporting, unloading, loading, etc wood with shipping coal or oil? Plus it produces as much CO2 as the fuels it supposedly replaces!
What about byproducts of using sugarcane or sorghum residue (bagasse). Sure they can be used as fuel or to make end products, hurrah! But NOT returning them to the field from which more sugarcane will be harvested and grown demands that extensive quantities of artificial fertilizers be used. Guess from where those artificial fertilizers come? Right, fossil fuels.
At least, SAF produced from used cooking and motor oils is from recycled products that might possibly be dumped in our garbage dumps. But it would be interesting to see the amounts of recycled product and that which is produced specifically for use in SAF (i.e not recycled). There is a limit to how much SAF can be produced from recycled materials. I note that there is no mention in the article of the percents of recycled material and virgin material were used.