Delta pledged to spend $1 billion over 10 years to mitigate the greenhouse gases that its airplanes pump into the atmosphere by burning jet fuel. But to achieve carbon neutrality, it’s going to have to buy hundreds of millions of dollars a year in carbon offsets. That has a mixed record.
Share to linkedin... [+]Delta Air Lines made an aggressive commitment Friday to go carbon neutral as of March 1, raising the ante for an industry shadowed by flight shaming, which has begun to reduce air travel in Europe. But CEO Ed Bastian stated plainly in a television interview that the principal means by which his airline will likely achieve carbon neutrality in the near term is rife with efficacy concerns.
But if the $1 billion budget includes Delta’s offsetting program , buying carbon credits could exhaust much of it. Assuming average spending of $100 million a year, that would suggest Delta is planning on buying relatively cheap offsets in the range of $2 per metric ton, says Dan Rutherford, director of the marine and aviation program at the International Council For Clean Transportation.
Development of biomass-based alternatives to jet fuel are further along, but they’re still in their infancy and cost two to three times as much. There were 360 billion liters of conventional jet fuel used in 2018, the latest year for which figures are available, and 7 million liters of sustainable aviation fuels. That amounts to about 10 minutes of annual jet fuel use, says Rutherford.
“If you were to change all the fuel in a 737 for batteries of an equal weight, the range of that 737 would be 160 nautical miles,” notes Pat Anderson, director of the Eagle Flight Research Center at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida.
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