The National Farmers Union is warning against unchecked growth of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). Darrin Qualman, the union’s Director of Climate Crisis Policy and Action, said a global sustainable aviation fuel project may seem like a great way to decarbonize the aviation industry but the biomass required to create these fuels could increase on-farm emissions and put food systems at risk.
He said people should be concerned about this issue now because the world is at the front end of a massive public mega investment into SAF.
SAFs are a non-fossil fuel alternative that can be used in aircrafts without any modification. The report states that the current plan is for SAF production to increase using corn, soybeans, and canola over the next decade. In the long term, SAFs will increasingly be made from straw, agricultural residues, trees and grass.
“Don’t imagine these energy crops grown on forest land or waste land, necessarily,” Qualman said in a February webinar. “A lot of this is on Prime crop land or prime pasture land.”
He noted that literature around SAFs remain hopeful about sustainability and often foresee the fuels eventually being fashioned out of waste oils – like that which is leftover after making french fries in a restaurant. This would address the land use problem. Data from the U.S., however, shows that the amount of SAFs produced from waste oils is inconsequential. The burden largely remains on agricultural land to produce materials for SAFs.
Qualman said based on the projected increase of air travel, airlines could use up to two-thirds of a trillion litres of fuel per year by 2050. He said people should imagine if all this fuel was made from agricultural biomass. In Canada, creating this fuel would require 2.1 billion acres, which is 21 times the farmland area in Canada.
“The question is, should we attempt even a fraction of SAFs from crops?” Qualman said. “If we produce, say, 10 per cent of this, it would still take two times the cropland area of Canada. What would happen to global markets and global prices if a cropland area equivalent to two Canadas was taken away from food production and diverted to SAF production?”
The NFU and Qualman noted many Canadians are already struggling from a high cost of living. Redirecting necessary farmland toward creating biomass for aviation fuels may increase the upward pressure on food prices.
Chris Hessler, a U.S. expert on cleantech innovation, said there is truth to the NFU’s concerns but there is also oversimplification in them.
“If we were to try to scale up the current technologies using the current feedstocks and completely replace the fossil demand for jet fuel, we would run hard into all manner of sustainability issues, no question about it,” Hessler said. “But it’s also the truth that rarely does technology stand still.”
Hessler said many private sector investors can be scared away from putting money into clean tech, which would encourage innovation.
“We need really, really big dollars invested here,” he said.
Hessler warned against assuming technology is stagnant because this type of thinking only delays climate action. He said all projections show that aviation demand is expected to increase over the next few decades and there are no viable solutions for long term flight electrification.
Qualman, however, said part of the issue is believing sustainability can be achieved when economies endlessly grow. He said the NFU’s recommendation is for there to be increased alternatives to flying like improved train service.
“Alongside some of this techno solutionism, we just need to take a good, hard look at how much we’re consuming and how much we’re doing,” he said.
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