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The president of Emirates: if we want to decarbonise air transport the solution is only nuclear power.

Emirates Airlines president Sir Tim Clark said in an interview with Skynews Australia that "we need to face reality" when it comes to sustainable fuel and spoke of nuclear power as an option for the future of aviation.

Sir Clark sat down with Ross Greenwood, editor of Sky News Business, to discuss sustainable fuel mandates and why it's "not the right way to do it". According to Clark, the current obligations, which provide for the introduction of fuels produced without CO2 emissions, with costly constraints for all agents, are the wrong path to decarbonisation.

The path that the industry sees to achieve zero emissions is to use SAF, zero emission fuel, but this cannot be achieved, according to Clark, only by imposing supply obligations on airports or purchase of certain types of fuel, because this, without an adequate production structure, will only lead to an increase in costs which, obviously, will be passed onto the shoulders of consumers.

“This stick approach, in my view, is not the right way to achieve the SAF goal,” Sir Clark told Greenwood. To be able to decarbonise civil aviation we need to be able to supply large quantities of zero-impact aviation fuel, but this can only happen through the use of large quantities of energy which can only be supplied through nuclear energy, perhaps from SMR .

For this reason he indicated modular nuclear energy as an option for the future, for this solution allows the supply, in a widespread and low-cost way, of the quantity of energy to produce all the aviation fuel used to make civil aviation fly.

Here is the video interview with the CEO of Emirates:

From a scientific point of view, there are already possibilities for implementing the so-called "From Power to Liquid" (PtL) process, which, starting from water and atmospheric CO2, allows the production of aviation fuel with carbon capture. The problem is that the resulting price is equal to 5.16 pounds/kg, compared to 0.56 pounds/kg for fuel coming from oil.

This therefore makes the cost of energy for the production of SAF essential, combined with the consistency of production which involves a complex chemical process and which, in any case, would operate continuously. PtL from nuclear energy would be nothing more than an indirect way to make planes fly with nuclear energy. The British government is evaluating six SMR projects whose destination would be the production of SAF.


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The article The president of Emirates: if we want to decarbonise air transport the solution is only nuclear power. comes from Economic Scenarios .


This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-presidente-di-emirates-se-vogliamo-decarbonizzare-il-trasporto-aereo-la-soluzione-e-solo-il-nucleare/ on Sun, 28 Jan 2024 20:05:32 +0000.