United Airlines' 2050 carbon neutral target won't rely on offsets: director

United Airlines will not rely on carbon offsets in reaching its 2050 net-zero goal, the company's sustainability director said March 15, a decision that forces the airline to place a greater emphasis on nurturing the global supply of sustainable aviation fuels.

"Our commitment to net-zero is not relying on the use of carbon offsets," Managing Director of Global Environmental Affairs and Sustainability Lauren Riley said during an event hosted by the Atlantic Council. "No harm against carbon offsets -- they have a role in this marketplace -- but for us it was really about investing in those solutions that enable permanent decarbonization."

The US airline became the first in its industry to commit to an emissions reduction target when it set a carbon neutral by 2050 target in 2018.

But the road to scaling up sustainable aviation fuels to the volumes needed by United -- and the airline industry at large -- is a long one. In 2019, the last year airlines were unimpacted by the pandemic, United Airlines consumed about 4 billion gallons of jet fuel. Only about 1 million gallons of that total was sustainable fuels, or about 0.025%, yet it was the largest supply of sustainable fuels in the aviation industry, Riley said.

The company has ambitions to use 250 million gallons of sustainable fuels, or about 5% of all fuel consumption, by 2030. The near-term target was created after the company joined the First Movers Coalition, a group of more than 30 companies with commitments to buy new decarbonization technologies by the end of the decade. Launched during the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, the coalition was created by the Biden administration and the World Economic Forum to stimulate demand for decarbonization technologies in hard-to-abate sectors.

Consumers and investors

Riley said United Airlines joined the coalition in response to pressures from consumers, who are increasingly interested in reducing Scope 3 emissions, investor pressures, and new climate disclosure rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"We're hearing from all the way around our entire stakeholder sphere the importance of setting near-term goals," Riley said. "By joining the First Movers Coalition, we are able to demonstrate that by 2030, if there's high integrity alternative fuels available, we at United Airlines will commit to purchasing it."

The present issue, however, is that there is no large scale capacity of sustainable aviation fuels to purchase, be it hydrogen or other synthetic fuels. Although United Airlines' own investments seek to potentially rectify that issue -- the company has invested in the sustainable fuel company Alder Fuels and has a purchase order for hydrogen-powered planes -- there is no large-scale supply of sustainable aviation fuels on the market. And the development of that market has taken time, Riley said.

"It's quite slow," she said. "What's so fascinating is the technology is known. The alternative fuel that we need is understood, it's just not available at the scale that we actually need to materially impact the emissions across aviation."

In December 2021, United Airlines demonstrated that the technology was available when it organized the world's first passenger flight in which one engine was powered by 100% sustainable aviation fuel.

'An enormously ambitious target'

To Varun Sivaram, senior director for clean energy and innovation to the US climate envoy, it is essential for the aviation sector to bring commercial or near-commercial technologies to scale this decade.

Reaching net-zero by 2050 is "an enormously ambitious target," Sivaram said.

"United Airlines is so large that they themselves could help shape this market," he said. "You put them together with other consumers of fuel, and suddenly you have an advanced market commitment that is sizable enough that an innovator or an investors says, 'I want to build a facility that produces this technology.' And they take that risk because there's substantial enough commitment from United and its partners."