Costs of mitigating CO2 emissions from passenger aircraft

In response to strong growth in air transportation CO2 emissions, governments and industry began to explore and implement mitigation measures and targets in the early 2000s. However, in the absence of rigorous analyses assessing the costs for mitigating CO2 emissions, these policies could be economically wasteful. Here we identify the cost-effectiveness of CO2 emission reductions from narrow-body aircraft, the workhorse of passenger air transportation. We find that in the US, a combination of fuel burn reduction strategies could reduce the 2012 level of life cycle CO2 emissions per passenger kilometre by around 2% per year to mid-century. These intensity reductions would occur at zero marginal costs for oil prices between US$50–100 per barrel. Even larger reductions are possible, but could impose extra costs and require the adoption of biomass-based synthetic fuels. The extent to which these intensity reductions will translate into absolute emissions reductions will depend on fleet growth

Modelling environmental and economic impacts of aviation: introducing the aviation integrated modelling project

The Aviation Integrated Modelling project is developing a policy assessment capability to enable comprehensive analyses of aviation, environment and economic interactions at local and global levels. It contains a set of inter-linked modules of the key elements relevant to this goal. These include models for aircraft/engine technologies, air transport demand, airport activity and airspace operations, all coupled to global climate, local environment and economic impact blocks. A major benefit of the integrated system architecture is the ability to model data flow and feedback between the modules. Policy assessment can be conducted by imposing policy effects on the upstream modules and following implications through the downstream modules to the output metrics, which can then be compared to a baseline case. A case study involving different evolution scenarios of the US air transportation system from 2000 to 2030 is used to show the importance of feedback and to model a sample policy scenario in order to illustrate current capabilities