Costs of mitigating CO2 emissions from passenger aircraft

Andreas W. Schäfer (), Antony D. Evans, Tom G. Reynolds and Lynnette Dray
Additional contact information
Andreas W. Schäfer: UCL Energy Institute, University College London
Antony D. Evans: University of California Santa Cruz
Tom G. Reynolds: Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lynnette Dray: UCL Energy Institute, University College London

Nature Climate Change, 2016, vol. 6, issue 4, 412-417

Abstract: Abstract In response to strong growth in air transportation CO2 emissions, governments and industry began to explore and implement mitigation measures and targets in the early 2000s. However, in the absence of rigorous analyses assessing the costs for mitigating CO2 emissions, these policies could be economically wasteful. Here we identify the cost-effectiveness of CO2 emission reductions from narrow-body aircraft, the workhorse of passenger air transportation. We find that in the US, a combination of fuel burn reduction strategies could reduce the 2012 level of life cycle CO2 emissions per passenger kilometre by around 2% per year to mid-century. These intensity reductions would occur at zero marginal costs for oil prices between US$50–100 per barrel. Even larger reductions are possible, but could impose extra costs and require the adoption of biomass-based synthetic fuels. The extent to which these intensity reductions will translate into absolute emissions reductions will depend on fleet growth.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2865 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcli:v:6:y:2016:i:4:d:10.1038_nclimate2865

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/

DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2865

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Climate Change is currently edited by Bronwyn Wake

More articles in Nature Climate Change from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().