Carbon Removal and Sustainable Aviation Fuel in the News
The team at Tomorrow's Air is always busy tracking the latest trends and developments from the dynamic sectors of carbon dioxide removal and sustainable aviation fuel. Through our technical supply partners and through the conferences, panel discussions, newsletters and research reports we monitor, Tomorrow's Air keeps abreast of what's happening and offers a monthly digest in our Airrow Bulletin.
Google Drops Carbon Neutrality: This July Google dropped its commitment to carbon neutrality, which it has had in place since 2007. To back up the claim, the company has been purchasing least expensive offsets, but now will shift to emissions reductions and purchases of high quality removals. For travel companies who have been afraid to adjust their own climate strategies away from carbon neutral claims, Google’s move alongside other recent developments such as the E.U. Green Claims Directive which specifically targets green claims, are paving the way for businesses to incorporate a wider range of actions into their climate strategies. Google’s goal now is to achieve net-zero emissions across all of our operations and value chain by 2030. The company plans reduce 50% of its combined Scope 1, 2 (market-based), and 3 absolute emissions (compared to our 2019 base year) by 2030, and will invest in nature-based and technology-based carbon removal solutions to neutralize our remaining emissions.
Solar panels at the Acciona, Chile site where Google has invested in the use of clean energy since 2017
Bad News for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: In the United States the Supreme Court has upended the 40 year old Chevron Deference. Francesca Dominici, a professor and co-director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative summarized the effect of this ruling when she said, “The Supreme Court took away an important tool that the EPA could have used to clean up the air we breathe. The decision will almost certainly slow down our country’s transition to clean power, and it’ll leave our air dirtier for at least the next five or ten years, maybe longer.”
United States CDR Update: Carbon Brief reported on the recent gathering of hundreds of scientists in Oxford, England, for the third international conference on negative CO2 emissions. In Carbon Brief’s rundown of the event, a few sessions caught my attention, especially the one in which Dr Jennifer Pett-Ridge from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outlined the findings of a recent report on the options for CDR in the United States: Pett-Ridge said the US can reduce 1bn tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by 2050 using CDR methods, at an annual cost of $129bn.
State-owned Swedish power utility company Vattenfall, a partner in the HySkies SAF project
SAF Innovator HySkies Faces Setback: Through its Innovation Fund, the EU backs carbon-cutting projects it hopes to scale. HySkies, an e-fuels project in Sweden, was approved to receive an $86.8M grant from the fund back in January, 2023 on the basis of its projection to produce 82,000 t/year of e-SAF and 9,000 t/yr of renewable diesel in partnership with Shell. This month Shell pulled out of the deal, leaving the project without a technology partner. Other businesses have also had to return their Innovation Fund grants: German utility Uniper said earlier this year it had to hand back a grant awarded last year after its plans got delayed because it could not secure a power purchase agreement from a wind power developer.
