Can airlines pivot fully to biofuels?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2019
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As pressure grows on airlines to reduce their climate change impact, and “flight shame” grows among people concerned about their own impact, ever more research is being put into alternative, “cleaner” sources of fuel. Katie Prescott travels to Oslo to see new projects to bring more so-called biofuels into the system. Air BP’s commercial development manager, Tom Parsons, explains the difficulties in implementing and costing biofuels, while Dr Andrew Welfle at the University of Manchester describes the potential sources and applications of biofuels.
(Picture: At a plant near Chiang Mai, Thailand, cooking oil and palm oil are processed to produce biodiesel. Picture credit: John van Hasselt/Corbis via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Katie Prescott and this is Business Daily on the BBC's World Service. |
| 0:07.2 | Is making aviation fuel environmentally friendly ever possible? |
| 0:11.7 | The airline industry's high carbon emissions levels are under intense scrutiny, |
| 0:16.4 | but can we really power planes with anything less polluting than fossil fuels? |
| 0:21.6 | In my position, I would love to have it integrated into the price, but I do realize that if we |
| 0:26.6 | are 10, 20, 30% more expensive than our competitors, that would be a problem for our profitability. |
| 0:32.6 | And what are these fuels made of? And what's their environmental impact? |
| 0:39.9 | Bioenergy and biofuels can be low carbon. |
| 0:41.3 | Yes, it can be low carbon. |
| 0:42.9 | It can have a low environmental footprint. |
| 0:44.7 | It's just in case we have to do it correctly. |
| 0:48.3 | Business Daily on the BBC World Service. Thank you. Flight shame, climate change protests and the clamour for change. While flying for some is |
| 1:04.5 | frankly routine, for others it has become immoral. And the so-called flight shame movement |
| 1:10.7 | has in recent months garnered a lot of publicity. |
| 1:14.8 | Maya Rosen refuses to fly. |
| 1:17.3 | She's one of the founders of the Stay on the Ground movement in Sweden. |
| 1:21.4 | And she told me why she made that decision. |
| 1:24.0 | Hello? |
| 1:24.4 | Hi, is that Maya? |
| 1:26.1 | Hi, yeah. |
| 1:27.0 | To kick off the interview then, where was the last |
| 1:29.1 | place you went on holiday? A small island called the Nordkoster on the Swedish West Coast, and I went there |
... |
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