Airport expansion is not ‘sustainable’ growth

Today, GALBA has written to all MPs in West Yorkshire to challenge Rachel Reeves' suggestion that alternative aviation fuels can offset the rise in greenhouse gases caused by allowing airports to expand.

I write on behalf of GALBA to say how deeply disappointed we were to hear Rachel Reeves announce her support for the expansion of Heathrow and Leeds Bradford airports. The government’s own independent scientific advisers on the Climate Change Committee have repeatedly warned that expanding any airports at this time can only undermine our efforts to reach net zero by 2050.

This is not just about Heathrow and LBA, it’s about Gatwick, Luton, Bristol and more.

In its 2024 Progress Report to Parliament, the CCC was clear: there should be no airport expansions until a national capacity management framework is in place to control the growth of aviation emissions. No such framework is in place. By ignoring this advice, one has to wonder: what sort of message has been sent to other sectors of the economy and their efforts to decarbonise?

Rachel Reeves has suggested that the increase in emissions caused by airport expansions could be reduced by using ‘sustainable’ aviation fuels (SAF). I’m sorry to say that claim does not stand up to scrutiny. While SAF can be made from waste matter, there is a very limited supply of genuinely sustainable feedstock to make it.

Research by the Royal Society in 2023 concluded that to produce enough SAF feedstock to meet the aviation industry’s net zero ambitions – even if flying is kept at today’s levels – would require over two thirds of the UK’s agricultural land. Alternatively, if crop-based fuels are not permitted under the UK SAF mandate, we would need 2.4-3.4 times the UK’s entire renewable electricity generation, at 2020 levels.

The uncomfortable truth is that the rise in emissions from airport expansions will almost entirely wipe out any reduction in those emissions from using SAF. Even putting aside important questions about the methodology used to calculate emissions reductions over the feedstock’s lifecycle, SAF cannot realistically be scaled up to the quantities needed fast enough. In its 2023 Progress Report, the CCC warned that relying on nascent technologies and fuels, especially SAF, is a high risk approach to decarbonising aviation.

Synthetic aviation fuel, made by combining green hydrogen with carbon capture, offers genuine hope of reducing aviation’s emissions. However, this fuel is very expensive, which is likely to reduce future demand, and currently makes up a tiny proportion of all aviation fuel used. It has not attracted the large scale investment needed to scale up production so it is likely to be 20 years or more before it will be powering a significant number of the planes that take people on holiday.

Finally, I was shocked to read in last Saturday’s Guardian that the Chancellor’s claims about the alleged economic benefits of Heathrow expansion came from a report that was paid for by Heathrow Airport, used Heathrow’s own data and adopted a methodology that the DfT says is not fit for purpose. This cannot be the right way to assess the costs and benefits of expansion.

Our chances of leaving a liveable planet to future generations hang by a thread – as does the government’s environmental credibility. Please speak with Rachel Reeves and ask her to reconsider her position. I look forward to your reply.

Thank you

Nick Hodgkinson

Chair of GALBA

PS: if you can spare 15 minutes, please watch this interview with Finlay Asher (from 7 minutes 30 seconds), an ex-aerospace engineer who now runs the NGO Safe Landing. He explains the limitations of SAF and sets out an alternative vision of the future of the aviation industry.