Darrel Qualman, policy advisor for the National Farmers Union, laid out challenges with farm-based jet fuel when he spoke at a conference at Houston, Texas.
Here’s what Qualman said:
Airline and energy companies are on the eve of a megaproject: switching the fuel supplies of the global jet fleet to agricultural feedstocks.
The massive scale of the plan will create many negative effects.
Removing billions of tonnes of biomass from the world’s farmlands will slow soil carbon sequestration and create soil health risks.
Growing and removing that biomass also creates the need for increased quantities of nitrogen fertilizer, which will increase on-farm greenhouse gas emissions.
Energy crops will require many millions of acres to produce and will compete with food crops and drive up grocery store prices.
Governments have committed to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This creates a problem for airlines and their rising emissions.
The industry’s plan is to transition off fossil fuels and onto Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs).
For the most part, this means fuelling jets from farmland.
Initially, limited SAF feedstocks will come from crops: corn, soybeans, and canola.
Phase two, much more ambitious, is to use other agricultural feedstocks—mostly crop residues such as straw and corn stover—and also tens-of-millions of acres of purpose-grown energy crops: fast growing grasses and farmed trees.
A third phase is proposed: to turn air (a source of carbon) and water (a source of hydrogen) into liquid hydrocarbon fuels using renewable electricity, but such plans are costly and probably not scalable, requiring, by many estimates, quantities of electricity roughly equal to total current global production.
The scale of the SAF megaproject is staggering. Airlines plan to double air travel by 2050. To fuel all those flights, they will need more than 130 billion gallons of fuel per year—about half-a-trillion litres.
Producing even half of that volume from farm-sourced feedstocks will require one to two billion tonnes of biomass per year.
And the investment required to build thousands of production facilities is, according to airline industry associations, $4 to $8 trillion between now and 2050.
The SAF project is just one of many such plans to take more and more from farmland, including: feeding billions more people as populations grow, producing billions of tonnes of biomass per year for negative-emission electricity (so-called bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, BECCS), producing biomaterials to replace plastics, producing biofibres to replace petroleum-derived fibres and fabrics, etc.
And we’re going to try to do all that from a global farmland base that will be increasingly battered by climate impacts.
We’re already taking too much from the planet’s farmland base, and multiple new demands are planned.
There simply isn’t enough farmland, biomass, soil, water, or productive capacity to supply SAF feedstocks in the quantities proposed.
To try to do so risks triple failure: failing to actually decarbonize aviation, failing to ensure food security, and failing to safeguard our farmland and our besieged biosphere.
