Delta Air Lines has announced plans to build a facility to produce sustainable aviation fuel, a controversial solution to replacing heavily polluting jet fuel, the company announced on its website.
The new Delta sustainable aviation blending facility, located in Minnesota, will be only the third such facility in the United States, Delta said.
The aviation industry accounts for around 2% of the world's total planet-overheating pollution, according to the International Energy Agency, with most of that pollution coming from the burning of jet fuel, which is made out of liquid petroleum. Sustainable aviation fuel seeks to address that problem by instead making jet fuel out of feedstocks such as biomass and then blending that fuel with petroleum.
To make its sustainable aviation fuel at its Minnesota facility, Delta will use a novel crop developed at the University of Minnesota called winter camelina seed.
Currently, "there isn't enough [sustainable aviation fuel] being produced today to fuel the world's commercial airlines for a single week. That's why this blending facility is so important," said Peter Carter, Delta's executive vice president of External Affairs.
Critics of sustainable aviation fuel, however, have referred to the entire industry as a greenwashing enterprise intended to help aviation companies like Delta escape true accountability for the amount of pollution they produce.
Since replacing petroleum fuel with sustainable jet fuel would require far more biomass than is readily available, this nascent industry may mean an expansion of soy and corn farming, the New York Times reported. This, in turn, would use up more land and deplete groundwater — all while releasing toxic air pollutants around farm communities.
What's more, the aviation industry has been running a sort of shell game with sustainable aviation fuels for over a decade now, repeatedly promising these fuel alternatives will be the answer to all of its problems while failing to deliver real results.
"The International Air Transport Association (IATA) announced an aggressive climate goal in 2007, asserting that [sustainable aviation fuels] would account for 10 percent of all jet fuel consumed by the aviation sector within a decade," the Institute for Policy Studies wrote in a 2024 report on the subject. "Even after the association lowered that benchmark repeatedly, SAFs currently account for just 0.2 percent of the total jet fuel supply."
🗣️ Which of the following sustainable changes would make you most likely to choose a particular airline?
🔘 Using cleaner fuel ⛽
🔘 Reducing in-flight waste 🗑️
🔘 Making it easy to choose low-emissions itineraries 📋
🔘 I don't pay attention to sustainability when I fly ✈️
🗳️ Click your choice to see results and speak your mind
As a concrete way to bring down pollution from the aviation sector, the Institute for Policy Studies instead had a simple suggestion: reduce the number of flights, particularly private flights, in which a small number of individuals are having an incredibly outsized impact on the ongoing overheating of our planet.
To accomplish this goal, the Institute for Policy Studies recommended increasing the taxes on private jet fuel, banning "short hop" flights, levying a transfer tax on private jet sales and resales — and, of course, investing in sustainable public transportation infrastructure such as trains.
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