Category: CCS

New Briefing: Sustainable Aviation Fuel

Briefing 18 takes a critical look at ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’ and the Westminster government’s Jet Zero plan.

Briefing 18 takes a critical look at ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’ and the Westminster government’s Jet Zero plan.

Click on the image to download the briefing

Air travel and global warming

Currently almost all air travel is powered by jet fuel, a refined hydrocarbon derived from crude oil. The aviation industry accounts for between two and three per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. However, this figure is misleading because, uniquely, most of the exhaust gases from jet engines are expelled in the upper atmosphere. Research shows that because of this their effect on global warming is equivalent to around ten percent of the impact of greenhouse gases from all sources. The industry is arguing for continuing expansion of the global number of flights, greater fuel efficiency and the replacement of jet fuel by what they call Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). In this briefing we examine some of the issues around SAF, discuss whether it is sustainable, whether production can be scaled up to replace the use of fossil fuel and take a critical look at the Westminster government’s plans for ‘Jet Zero’. This briefing was written at the beginning of January 2025 – less than six months before PetroIneos propose to close Scotland’s only oil refinery at Grangemouth – and when UNITE, the main trade union at the refinery is arguing for the refinery to be repurposed to produce SAF.

Marching to save jobs at the Grangemouth refinery

What is SAF?

So called ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuel’, or SAF, is jet fuel that is chemically equivalent to conventional jet fuel but manufactured in ways that avoid the use of fossil fuel feedstock. It would be more accurate to describe most of the fuels that the industry refers to as SAF as alternative jet fuels. A small amount of alternative fuel is already in use. In 2023 90% of this was biofuel manufactured from oil seed or sugar cane. UK government plans under the heading ‘Jet Zero’ are based on using hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) for fuel production – the raw material is waste oils and fats mainly from the food industry. There are plans to use other forms of waste material as feedstock. It is also technically possible to manufacture what are known as e-fuels from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. All these options – most particularly e-fuel – are energy intensive and use large amounts of electricity in the production process. The costs of production are 2 – 5 times more than jet fuel derived by refining crude oil.

Sustainability?

We should insist that SAF is not sustainable if it uses food crops, prime agricultural land or freshwater. The rationale for describing biofuels as sustainable is that the carbon emissions from burning the fuel are equivalent to the carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere by the plant material from which the fuels are derived. However, even if all the energy input into the production process is from green electricity there are still multiple ways, for example transport, or the environmental impact of large-scale monoculture agriculture, that mean that all the biofuels currently in production result in a net increase of carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Jet Zero

In Britain a “SAF mandate” has been introduced by the Westminster government, which stipulates that from next year, 2% of all jet fuel supplied must be SAF, increasing to 10% in 2030 and 22% in 2040. At the same time there are plans for continuing expansion of the aviation industry. It’s likely that under this mandate greenhouse gas emissions will be higher in 2024 than now. Jet Zero is anything but net zero. Initially most of the SAF fuel is expected to be derived from waste oil and fats. The EU has a similar mandate, although it extends to 2050 – when its target for SAF use will be 63%.

Practicality/Scalability

A report published in May 2024 by the Institute for Policy Studies analysed Jet Zero, aviation industry plans and other initiatives and found that there is currently “no realistic or scalable alternative” to standard kerosene-based jet fuels. Jet Zero is not about a transition to a sustainable low carbon industry, and it’s based on fanciful assumptions. There are severe limits to its scalability due to the limited supply of used cooking oil and animal fat. British airlines will be in competition for these supplies with others around the world. For example, in the EU there is only enough supply for about 2% of current demand. It’s also in competition with the production of bio diesel for road haulage which uses the same feedstock. The scale of the gap between Jet Zero and net zero is illustrated by the fact that even with current levels of flights 50% of all agricultural land in Britain would have to be devoted to the production of biofuel to eliminate the need for fossil fuel. If crop-based biofuel is ruled out and SAF were to be produced from other forms of waste as well as cooking oils, it’s estimated that if all the useable waste in the UK was converted to SAF it would still provide less than 20% of the fuel demands from outgoing flights.

Conclusion

UNITE’s plan for the Grangemouth oil refinery suggests that there is an assured future as a biofuel hub for Britain. As we write the details of the plan are not publicly available. We can only assume that they are based on the faulty logic of the British government’s Jet Zero report. Sadly, these figures just don’t add up. There is a powerful case for a plan to support the Grangemouth workforce into a sustainable future, but Jet Zero is an illusion. SAF is not a magic bullet. Current technologies are not capable of meeting the fuel demands of the aviation industry. E-fuels are potentially scalable, but the costs are prohibitive. We will discuss what is to be done about aviation in a future briefing.

Click the link to download Briefing 18

You might also want to look at Briefing 10 – ‘Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)’ and Briefing 17 – Net Zero

All of the ScotE3 briefings can be downloaded from this site’s resources page.

Sunak fiddles while Rhodes burns

Pete Cannell and Brian Parkin take a critical look at Sunak’s recent oil and gas announcement.

On Monday Rishi Sunak flew to Aberdeenshire by private jet to announce that at least one hundred new North Sea drilling licenses will be granted in the autumn.  A policy described by junior energy minister Alex Bowie as “maxing out our oil and gas reserves”.  At the same time Sunak gave the go ahead to the Acorn Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project to be based at St Fergus near Peterhead.  Acorn will be one of four CCS projects in the UK – the other three are in England.

St Fergus Gas Terminal © Ken Fitlike CC-BY-SA/2.0

At a time when fires rage across Europe, and North America and floods wreak havoc in China and elsewhere, the new oil and gas licenses have received widespread criticism from climate campaigners, climate scientists, the Scottish Government and even some Tory MPs.  Reactions to the CCS announcement are more mixed.  SNP politicians have welcomed the announcement.   Carbon Capture is prominent in the Scottish Government’s draft energy plans and Sunak argues that CCS will mean that the net zero by 2050 target is still in scope.  

In our view both strands of Monday’s announcement represent Sunak paying his dues to the big oil and gas companies.  In the rest of this article, we’ll explain why.  

For months the Tories have argued that the cost-of-living crisis is the result of a crisis of energy sovereignty caused by the war in Ukraine.  In fact, the price of gas had rocketed upwards before the war. There was no shortage of supply, since most of the gas used in the UK is piped from the North Sea.  Compared with the rest of Europe the UK is unusually reliant on gas for home heating and cooking.  There is a real problem here – the North Sea gas fields are nearing the end of their lifespan.  So given there is an overwhelming need to reduce carbon emissions the obvious answer is to start now, planning for the future by electrifying the domestic heating system and insulating homes alongside a planned phase out of the use of gas.  The Tories are doing none of this.  On paper they still say they want to replace natural gas by hydrogen.  But the weight of evidence that this would phenomenally expensive and a hugely inefficient use of electricity to generate the hydrogen means that they are rapidly backtracking.

So is Sunak’s plan to license more oil and gas fields going to keep people warm.  Not at all.  First the new fields contain more than 85% oil, not gas (see technical note below).  That oil would be exported on the world market.  Much of the gas is ‘sour’ – it has a high sulphur content – and is unsuitable for home heating.  So, we have the worst of all possible worlds – continuing use of fossil fuels at large scale when the climate science says that the use must stop and the likelihood of very high fuel bills and insecurity of supply.   Only big oil and their shareholders come well out of this – the rest of us and future generations pay the price.

A close look at Sunak’s plans for Carbon Capture and Storage is equally disturbing.  The technology proposed for CCS is untested at scale.  Even if the most optimistic targets for carbon sequestration are met, they represent a tiny fraction of the total carbon emissions from the North Sea.  At present the only source of carbon dioxide at St Fergus is the gas stabilising plant.  In the long-term Carbon Capture may be able to play a role in helping reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – but right now the priority must be to cut emissions rapidly.  The £20 billion allocated by Westminster to the 4 CCS projects could be spent on expanding the production of renewable energy, home insulation and developing the electricity grid.  

The parallels with the Cumbria Coalmine project are powerful.  There we have the Tories supporting the exploitation of a fossil fuel, coal, which is not wanted by the steel industry.  With the new licenses and CCS, we have a plan for energy security and net zero which delivers neither.  Quite simply both represent political statements by the Tory Government that affirm their unswerving commitment to fossil capital.

Technical note:

The proposed Acorn (St Fergus) (and other) CCS plants are designed to be emissions source dedicated- i.e. they are intended to sequestrate carbon from say, a power station or chemical plant flue stack- not the ‘general’ atmosphere, and as such they are demonstration installations.

Apart from the Peterhead sour gas power station, the other nearby CO2 source is the St Fergus gas terminal which adds about 3-4% carbon to the overall gas/carbon penalty.

Total North Sea reserve gas content is about 27% (73% oil). The new blocks have a much lower gas composition c.12%. 

The carbon contents of the different fuels (compared with coal) is:

Coal   97%

Oil       89%

Gas    35% max inc process penalty

Briefing – the use and abuse of hydrogen

The latest in our series of briefings. Like all of the briefings this one is just two sides of A4 and is published under a Creative Commons license which means you are welcome to share, adapt and reuse the content. Download a PDF version here.

Abuse

Check through the news bulletins and the financial papers and you’ll find hydrogen in the news.  Big energy companies, the Westminster and Holyrood governments and some trade unions are all heralding hydrogen as a ‘green’ alternative to the natural gas which most of us use for heating and cooking.  For example, SGN who run Scotland’s gas network are promoting a plan in which hydrogen would be produced and stored at the St Fergus gas terminal, north of Peterhead.  It envisages starting to use hydrogen in Aberdeen and then extending the hydrogen network to the rest of the northeast coast and the central belt by 2045.

Natural gas used for heating and cooking accounts for around 30% of the UK’s carbon emissions.  In contrast burning hydrogen for heat results in zero emissions.  So, it appears that replacing natural gas with hydrogen is a no brainer.  In this briefing we’ll explain why that’s not the case. 

Grey, blue and green?

You will hear talk about grey, blue, and green hydrogen.  The colours refer to how the hydrogen is produced – and it’s the production method that determines the impact of hydrogen on the environment.

Grey hydrogen is made from natural gas. Almost all the hydrogen that’s in use now is produced in this way. World-wide production currently amounts to 70 million tonnes.  Greenhouse gases are a by-product of the production process, and current production has a similar impact on global warming to the whole aviation industry.

Much of the current hype is over blue hydrogen.  Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas in the same way as grey – the difference is that the production process incorporates carbon capture and storage. Greenhouse gases are stored rather than released to the atmosphere.  Using blue hydrogen for all our domestic heating and cooking would require carbon capture on a massive scale.  Large-scale carbon capture is untested, the technology for capture is not yet available and there are serious concerns about the long-term safety of large-scale storage.  The production process for blue hydrogen is energy intensive and needs large amounts of green electricity.  One example – Northern Gas Networks have a plan to convert domestic gas supplies to hydrogen.  The aim is to have converted 15.7 million homes by 2050.  This would require 8 million tonnes of hydrogen and need the equivalent of 60 production plants of the size of the largest currently operational plus a huge deployment of unproven carbon capture and storage technology.

Green hydrogen is produced by electrolysing water – if that electricity is from a renewable source the process is zero carbon.  However, the process requires even more green electricity than producing blue hydrogen.  The NGN scheme to supply 15.7 million homes would require around seven times as much wind generated electricity as is currently produced in the UK.

Image by Utahraptor ostrommaysi CCBY-SA 3.0

Generating electricity to provide the energy to ‘reform’ natural gas or electrolyse water into hydrogen and then using the hydrogen for heat is inherently inefficient.  Direct use of electricity is cheaper, more efficient and would require much less generating capacity.

So why the hydrogen hype?

A new hydrogen economy (dependent on carbon capture and storage technology) is at the heart of the North Sea Transition Deal, dreamed up by the industry body Oil and Gas UK, published by the UK government in March 2021 and endorsed by Holyrood. The transition deal aims at continuing extraction of oil and gas through to 2050 and beyond. It is a costly diversion. To be sure of cutting emissions with the speed that is required we need to phase out oil and gas and invest in proven technologies that are based on renewable energy sources.  

Ed Matthew Associate Director at independent climate and energy think tank E3G says hydrogen is the wrong choice for heating homes.  Blue hydrogen (manufactured from natural gas) needs CCS so would be massively expensive and keeps us hooked on gas. Green hydrogen (made by electrolysis using renewable electricity) is 4 times less efficient than using heat pumps. “Hydrogen is being pushed by the gas industry. Beware.”  Dave Toke, reader in energy politics at Aberdeen University agrees. He calls it: “the start of one of the greatest pieces of greenwash that have been committed in the UK.”

Use

There is a place for hydrogen in a new sustainable economy.  Hydrogen fuel cells supplied with green hydrogen are likely to be an integral part of a full decarbonised economy.  Fuel cells work by using hydrogen to produce electricity which can then power a motor instead of using battery power, such as for electric vehicles.

Image by Bill Harrison CC BY-SA 2.0

Hydrogen fuel cells are currently better suited than batteries for long distance transport and to transport heavy loads.  There are likely to be applications in energy storage and in some very specialised processes that are difficult to decarbonise.  Sea transport may be a case in point

Campaign

The main message of this briefing is that the hydrogen + CCS strategy is designed to maintain the profits of the big energy companies and will not achieve the cuts in carbon emissions that are needed.  It puts profit before people and planet.  There are alternatives that will work.

To decarbonise heat, we need retrofitted insulation, heat pumps and district heating schemes on a mass scale that can only be achieved by the public sector.

Firms producing filthy-dirty “grey” hydrogen must be required to take action to reduce the horrendous levels of greenhouse gas emissions they produce. 

Hydrogen use must be limited to applications that are socially useful and don’t add to the climate crisis.

You can find all our briefings on the resources page.

Don’t let CCS dominate the climate action agenda in Scotland

Part of the coalition deal between the Scottish Greens and the SNP was the allocation of £500 million to support the creation of new sustainable jobs. There are indications that all of this funding may now go to CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage projects). One time chair of the Wood Group, Sir Ian Wood is a strong advocate of CCS and has been vocal in his criticism of the Westminster government’s failure to fund the Acorn CCS project in Scotland. The Wood Group lobbies and argues for CCS. Their website asserts that ‘If we are to achieve a net-zero world, carbon capture and storage infrastructure is a necessity and needs to scale up rapidly.’ Scot.E3 believes that CCS is a central plank of Oil and Gas UK’s strategy to continue the policy of maximum economic extraction of oil and gas from the North Sea. Choosing to spend the £500 million on CCS would constitute big step down a road that the Oil Industry wishes to travel and a setback for the campaign for a rapid just transition away from fossil fuels. There are many other projects that could be funded.

We are pleased to publish this post that has been submitted to the site. The author has asked to remain anonymous.

One of the SNP’s proposed solutions to climate change is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). This is very dangerous in our mission to decarbonise Scotland’s economy and provide other countries with the tools to do the same. On the face of it CCS may seem like another tool in the box to reduce carbon emissions, and that might be right if it weren’t for the very strong vested interests. 

There are very strong arguments that CCS can’t work for technical reasons – such as the inability to actually avoid the carbon being stored leaking. There are also strong economic reasons it can’t work – wind and solar are already cheaper than fossil fuels in most markets, with plenty of scope for further reduction. Adding an additional cost to the production of fossil fuel energy makes it even less competitive. 

Image Pete Cannell – View from Cromarty – CCO

So why are fossil fuel interests so keen on CCS?

There are two reasons why CCS is favoured by fossil fuel executives who want to portray themselves as concerned about climate change. The first is that it allows them to continue extraction of the oil and gas that their company’s valuations are based on. The second is that it distracts from other clean technologies that will actually decarbonise energy, such as renewables and storage. It does this by ‘crowding out’ renewables investment.

So CCS will do two things, even if it isn’t viable. It will allow more drilling for fossil fuels and it will divert investment from renewables and storage.  

The argument put forward by Oil and Gas UK is that CCS means we can continue to drill in Scottish waters and that those resources can be made ‘carbon neutral’ through CCS. 

The danger particularly comes because the UK Government has chosen not to support the Scottish CCS project. This has created an opportunity for the vested fossil fuel interests in Scotland to argue that the Scottish Government should use the money set aside for a worker-led just transition from oil and gas jobs should be diverted to supporting CCS. The £500m negotiated by the Greens as part of the coalition deal for clean jobs to replace oil and gas is now at risk from a dead-end technology that exists mainly to prevent the end of fossil fuel drilling. 

This illustrates exactly how CCS will crowd out renewables investment, but worse it will rob workers of the jobs that they need in truly clean industries. 

The fossil fuel industry tried the same approach with fracking in the last decade. We urgently need a campaign to persuade politicians who have fallen for the CCS lies and greenwash that this is another wrong turn. At the moment, that means SNP ministers and backbenchers.

END

There are other posts relevant to CCS on this site:

Video on carbon capture

Briefing on BECCS

Articles here and here