The Finnish mineral oil company Neste wants to make aviation fuels climate-neutral. CEO Matti Lehmus explains how this works and where the limits of the technology lie.
Private cars are driving more and more electrically, trucks could be converted to fuel cells. When it comes to air travel, however, it becomes problematic. Making air travel emission-free will be one of the most difficult tasks on the path to climate neutrality. And yet the industry has set itself this goal by 2050 – also under the pressure of international agreements and out of fear of losing customers in the long term.
One company that wants to benefit from this is the Finnish oil company Neste. “Our goal is to avoid 20 million tons of CO2 emissions by the end of this decade,” says his boss Matti Lehmus in the podcast “The hour zero”. For a long time, Neste, a group with sales of 15 billion euros, was a completely normal petrol and diesel manufacturer that operated its own refineries. But the company has been changing course for about ten years and has been focusing on renewable fuels on a large scale. Neste is now the world market leader for largely CO2-neutral aviation fuels.
After initial criticism, raw materials that cannot be used as food – such as used cooking oil or technical corn oil – are now used for this. The company is also experimenting with algae oils and municipal waste. “With our products, you can reduce CO2 emissions by around 75 to 95 percent – over the entire life cycle,” says Lehmus, a chemist by training.
A comparison of the figures shows how difficult it will be to make this principle big: while around 300 million tons of fossil fuels are currently used in aviation worldwide, Neste has so far produced 100,000 tons of renewable fuels per year. However, this value is to be increased by a factor of 15 this year.
Nevertheless, Lehmus is certain that his technology will not be sufficient for CO2-free flying: “Unfortunately, there is no simple method that solves all problems,” he says. “We will need different solutions.”
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