Here is the plain text result:
It is the perfect start to a holiday: your plane ticket is cheap, your cabin baggage is safely stowed, the engines are roaring into life – and the pilot has announced that there’s no need to worry about the environmental impact. This is Jet Zero, a vision where air travel is entirely carbon neutral thanks to new technology and green ventures that offset the environmental impact. The plan was drafted in 2022 when Boris Johnson was prime minister, marking a step towards the government’s legal obligation to reach net zero by 2050.
The previous government said that it aimed reach Jet Zero by focusing on “the rapid development of technologies”, as well as operational improvements and – among other things – more sustainable fuel types.
This is not an entirely new quest. Aircraft around the world have been steadily getting cleaner since 1969 when the first high-bypass turbofan engines were used on the new Boeing 747 aircraft. In the years since there have been other innovations including sharklets, or upturned wing tips on modern planes that reduce drag and save, on average, 4% of fuel per trip.
More developments are in the pipeline, including a new type of jet engine, developed by Rolls Royce, called the “UltraFan”, which will reduce average fuel consumption by 10%.
Aviation’s CO2 emissions come primarily through jet engines using carbon-rich fossil fuels, which produce CO2 when burned, so there have been attempts to create an alternative type made from renewable biomass and waste resources, known as Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF).
The British government says that 22% of all jet fuel from UK aviation has to come from sustainable sources by 2040. But this comes with further challenges.
Hidden away in a mini aircraft hangar of sorts, just outside Bristol, inventor Stephen Fitzpatrick has spent seven years working on a pioneering aircraft that could be the basis of another solution. His carbon fibre creation, known as VX4, has eight propellers and looks like a giant drone, but what’s crucial is that it doesn’t use fuel. Instead it is powered by lithium-ion batteries similar to those in electric cars.
The prospect of replacing jet engine-powered long-haul flights is, however, remote. “There is no battery chemistry in the world that will give us the energy we need to take hundreds of passengers over the Atlantic,” he concedes.
Harnessing hydrogen in other ways may be a better bet. The British-American aircraft company, ZeroAvia, says it expects to have an 80-seater powered entirely by hydrogen in the air within two to three years. Airbus is developing something similar.
The reductions from SAF, fuel efficiency improvements and zero carbon aircraft will only cut aviation emissions by around a third, according to the previous government’s estimates. So another part of the Jet Zero strategy involves a pricing scheme to charge airlines for CO2 emissions and carbon offsetting.
Some schemes have been highly controversial, with questions around how to prove how many trees have been prevented from being cut down.
Duncan McCourt, chief executive of Sustainable Aviation, an umbrella group for UK airlines, airports, manufacturers and others in the business, is optimistic that removing carbon from flying won’t add much more than a few pounds to the cost of an airline ticket.
But the Jet Zero plan says nothing directly about the knock-on cost to passengers. Instead, it refers to “demand management”. Sir Dieter Helm has his own take on what Jet Zero means for holidaymakers and fully believes that it will lead to higher costs. As for the likelihood of the government hitting its Jet Zero target on time, he is unconvinced of this too, but he also suggests that this may not be the point.
And now, the number of flights taken annually by people in the UK is projected to rise even further, translating into an additional 150 million more flights a year. So the scale of the government’s challenge, which was large enough when it began, is only set to grow.
Source link
