How to make climate-neutral aviation fly

Romain Sacchi (), Viola Becattini, Paolo Gabrielli, Brian Cox, Alois Dirnaichner, Christian Bauer and Marco Mazzotti ()
Additional contact information
Romain Sacchi: Paul Scherrer Institut
Viola Becattini: ETH Zurich
Paolo Gabrielli: ETH Zurich
Brian Cox: INFRAS
Alois Dirnaichner: Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Christian Bauer: Paul Scherrer Institut
Marco Mazzotti: ETH Zurich

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-17

Abstract: Abstract The European aviation sector must substantially reduce climate impacts to reach net-zero goals. This reduction, however, must not be limited to flight CO2 emissions since such a narrow focus leaves up to 80% of climate impacts unaccounted for. Based on rigorous life-cycle assessment and a time-dependent quantification of non-CO2 climate impacts, here we show that, from a technological standpoint, using electricity-based synthetic jet fuels and compensating climate impacts via direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) can enable climate-neutral aviation. However, with a continuous increase in air traffic, synthetic jet fuel produced with electricity from renewables would exert excessive pressure on economic and natural resources. Alternatively, compensating climate impacts of fossil jet fuel via DACCS would require massive CO2 storage volumes and prolong dependence on fossil fuels. Here, we demonstrate that a European climate-neutral aviation will fly if air traffic is reduced to limit the scale of the climate impacts to mitigate.

Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39749-y Abstract (text/html)

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:natcom:v:14:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-023-39749-y

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-39749-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

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