The Green Manalishi

Rolls-Royce CEO Warren East—a man whose company produces primarily magnificent, gas-guzzling, luxury automobiles and turbine aircraft engines—has publicly called for the aerospace industry to hasten its march toward sustainability.

Mr. East states: "Ultimately, one day I'm pretty confident that you'll be able to fly from here to San Francisco on an aircraft with something like a gas-turbine burning hydrogen, but there's no way that we're going to be doing that in the next 15 years.” East, who will step down from his position at Rolls Royce at the end of 2022, adds: "So we need a transitional technology.”

Currently, companies from major oil producers to backyard startups are brewing feedstocks the likes of crop residue, forest materials, yard waste, discarded food, and cooking oil into sustainable aviation fuels (SAF), which ostensibly reduce carbon emissions by as much as eighty-percent over fossil fuels.

SAF is expensive, however, costing three to four-times as much as conventional jet fuel, and accounts for only about one-percent of the fuel currently used by commercial aircraft.

East posits SAF use will rise exponentially as more of the stuff is produced and economies of scale reduce its cost to a price-point comparable to that of fossil aviation fuels.

Mr. East supports governmental intervention in the aviation fuel market; “for example, SAF mandates, to help the make the numbers stack up,” he suggested.

East asserted that it is incumbent upon the aviation industry to aggressively employ technology in pursuit of its stated goal of attaining net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. "People don't tend to go backwards," East argued. "We learned about flying in the 20th Century. It's now the 21st Century, and we're not going to go back."

FMI: www.rolls-royce.com