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British Airways has completed a deal to cancel out some of its rising emissions by financing a process that sprinkles crushed-up rocks on the ground to capture and store more planet-warming carbon dioxide.
The company has agreed to pay British project developer UNDO to take around 4,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere – about 0.02% of the airline’s current annual emissions – through a form of carbon removal known as “enhanced weathering”.
Weathering is the natural process of rocks decomposing and converting carbon dioxide into solids and liquids. Enhanced weathering is when this natural process is artificially sped up by spreading ground-up rock on land, shorelines or in the ocean.
British Airways’ sustainability director Carrie Harris said carbon removals like this “form a key part of our roadmap to reach our climate goals”, adding that though the firm’s initial purchase was “relatively small, the partnership hopes to demonstrate the art of the possible and unlock future investment in carbon removals”.
Standard Chartered bank provided debt financing for UNDO to scale up its activities, and CFC provided insurance for the deal.
Most technology to cut aviation emissions directly is expensive, speculative or problematic, while sustainable aviation fuels are costly and in short supply. As a result – and with the industry and governments generally unwilling to reduce flight numbers – a large chunk of airlines’ green strategies counts on carbon removal technologies.
In 2022, transport ministers around the world agreed an “aspirational goal” for the international aviation industry to reach net zero by 2050.
The British government’s “Jet Zero Strategy” to get UK aviation to net zero by 2050 plans to achieve about a third of the industry’s emissions reductions through carbon removals.
British Airways projects that its own emissions will be higher in 2050 than in 2020, even with more efficient flying and sustainable aviation fuel. But it plans to still reach net zero emissions in 2050 by investing in carbon removal projects and buying carbon offsets.
Experts have questioned the legitimacy of some of the carbon credits previously purchased by the firm. A government official in Peru claimed in an investigation by Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s journalism unit, that a forest protection project funded by British Airways over-estimated how much danger the forest was in – and therefore how much greenhouse gas was prevented from being released into the atmosphere.
More broadly, academics at the University of California Berkeley found last year that clean cooking projects, another type of carbon offset bought by British Airways, deliver only a fraction of the emissions reductions they advertise.
Jim Mann, the founder of UNDO, said in a statement that the aviation industry “will require large amounts of high-quality carbon removal to meet their net zero commitments” and that deals like the one with British Airways are needed to scale up the market.
He added that enhanced rock weathering is “one of the most robust carbon dioxide removal solutions available today because it is permanent, highly scalable and provides a host of co-benefits” – including better soil.
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Scientists working with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, however, reported in 2022 that enhanced weathering is expensive due to the costs of mining, transport and disposal, and requires a lot of energy to grind up the rocks. Deployment at scale may require decades, they added.
While the technique has the positive side-effect of improving soil quality, the IPCC scientists found it can also have negative impacts caused by mining for the rocks and contamination of air and water.
A briefing by researchers for the UK parliament warned that if the technology were to take off, “there would likely be adverse environmental impacts due to the extent of quarrying required, such as destruction of habitats, noise, water and air pollution.”
(Reporting by Joe Lo; editing by Megan Rowling)