Airbus - 2022 Universal Registration Document

1. Information on the Company’s Activities /

1.2 Non-Financial Information

01

Strategic pathway 4 Investing in smart air traffic management (ATM) solutions and optimised operations

Improving the efficiency of air transport operations and infrastructure could reduce emissions by up to 10% (source: ATAG). The Company therefore supports initiatives aimed at reducing ATM inefficiencies such as the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research programme (“ SESAR ”), while working on disruptive practices like formation flying. The Company also focuses on developing fuel saving procedures for airports and ground operations to minimise the use of engine power and auxiliary power units (“ APU ”) while the aircraft is on the ground. The Company organises face-to-face forums and webinars every year with airlines to exchange knowledge on how to improve ground and in-flight operational efficiency and using latest technological solutions. Namely, a “fuel efficiency network” has been developed with representatives of the ecosystem including airlines, ATM, engine manufacturers, airports and suppliers. In November 2019, the Company launched the fello’fly project which aims to demonstrate the technical, operational and commercial viability of two aircraft flying closer together for long-haul flights. Through fello’fly, the follower aircraft will retrieve the energy lost by the wake of a leader aircraft by flying in the smooth updraft of the air it creates. This provides lift to the follower aircraft, allowing it to decrease engine thrust and therefore reduce fuel consumption in the range of 5-10% per trip. Through its subsidiary Navblue, the Company provides services helping its customers to minimise fuel consumption with best operational practices, innovative services and training. Through its subsidiary Metron, the Company provides solutions to airports, authorities and airlines to optimise air traffic management taking into account live congestion and weather condition data, hence reducing engines’ running time and fuel burnt. In 2022, flights in the airspace of nine countries could benefit from it. Finally, CO 2 emission compensation will be instrumental to stabilising aviation emissions in the medium term until disruptive solutions reach market maturity. For that reason, the Company supports ICAO’s CORSIA scheme as the only global market-based measure for international civil aviation. The Company believes that direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is a high-potential technology that could turn out to be meaningful in carbon schemes applicable to aviation at some point. It involves capturing CO 2 emissions directly from the air using high powered fans. Once removed from the air, the CO 2 can be used to produce power-to-liquid SAF that is drop in compatible with today’s aircraft. As the aviation industry cannot capture CO 2 emissions released into the atmosphere at source, captured atmospheric CO 2 can also be safely and permanently stored in reservoirs within rock formations. This latter carbon removal solution would allow the sector to extract the equivalent amount of emissions from its operations directly from the air, thereby removing residual emissions. Non-CO 2 Effect Impacts Aircraft engines produce emissions linked to the fuel combustion and indirect emissions formed in its wake. Those emissions, which have an impact on climate when flying in high altitudes, include CO 2 , nitrogen oxides (NO x ), water vapour (H 2 O), nvPM (non-volatile particulate matter of black-carbon or soot), sulphur oxides (SO x ) and condensation trails. Depending upon prevailing weather conditions, altitude and geographical location, non-CO 2 emissions can change the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the cloudiness, which in turn affect the climate. CO 2 emissions contribute to increased atmospheric CO 2 concentrations, which induce a low and positive radiative forcing, but with cumulative effects due to the long lifetime of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Non-CO 2 emissions do not have the same cumulative effect as CO 2 . Non-CO 2 forcers

› Coordinated by the Company in the Single European Sky ATM Research programme (SESAR), ALBATROSS launched in 2021, is an initiative of major European aviation stakeholders to demonstrate how the technical and operational innovations the Company delivered in the past years can be combined and used all together to further reduce the environmental footprint of aviation on the short term. It includes technologies such as continuous climb and descent operations, flight trajectory optimisation with real-time transmission of four-dimensional trajectory data and hybrid “taxibot” assistance on ground operations. › By end 2020, the Company’s fello’fly demonstrator project had signed agreements with two airline customers, Frenchbee and SAS Scandinavian Airlines, as well as with three Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSP) – France’s DSNA ( Direction des Services de la Navigation Aérienne ), the UK’s NATS (National Air Traffic Services) and European Eurocontrol – to demonstrate its operational feasibility. In November 2021, two A350 test aircraft conducted the first-ever transatlantic fello’fly flight confirming the potential for fuel savings of more than 5% during long-haul flights. › In 2022, Metron’s ATM optimisation solution deployment was further extended to Qatar and expanded in Singapore. It is estimated that some 2Mt CO 2 were avoided in 2022 by the global fleet thanks to this innovation. › In 2021, the Company and a number of major airlines – Air Canada, Air France-KLM, easyJet, International Airlines Group, LATAM Airlines Group, Lufthansa Group and Virgin Atlantic – have signed Letters of Intent (LoI) to explore opportunities for a future supply of carbon removal credits from direct air carbon capture technology. › In 2022, the Company partnered with 1PointFive and pre-purchased 400,000 tons of carbon removals (see Offset Strategy above). It also invested in Carbon Engineering Ltd., a Canadian-based climate solutions company, operating the largest Direct Air Carbon Capture (DACC) Research & Development facility in the world. such as contrail-cirrus and NO x are short-lived components that have stronger, but time-limited effects. Uncertainties are still high on the exact impact of non-CO 2 emissions of aviation. Lee et al. 2020, states that uncertainties around the contribution of non-CO 2 emissions on aviation’s net effective radiative forcing (ERF) are ~8 times higher than those of CO 2 . Non-CO 2 emissions can have both positive and negative radiative impacts. In particular, contrail-cirrus can have large cooling or warming effects depending on several factors such as their location and time of generation, spatial coverage, lifetime, or optical properties (ice crystals size, shape, density), though the effect at night is exclusively warming.

Strategic pathway 5 Encouraging temporary CO 2 emission compensation schemes

81

Airbus / Universal Registration Document 2022

Made with FlippingBook Digital Proposal Maker