DHL Express and Shell sign 1-year contract for SAF use at Brussels Airport

German parcel company DHL Express and energy company Shell have signed a one-year agreement for the use of 25,000 tons of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) at Brussels Airport.

This will allow it to replace a third of the traditional kerosene in the planes departing from Brussels Airport with the more environmentally friendly fuel derived from, for example, frying oil and animal waste fat.

With the contract for 25,000 tons or nearly 200,000 barrels of SAF, DHL says it is Brussels Airport’s largest purchaser of sustainable aviation fuels. The parcel company, owned by Deutsche Post, has about 50 flights to and from Brussels Airport daily, mainly at night.

‘Greater willingness among corporate customers’

“The sustainable version of kerosene reduces CO2 emissions by up to 80% over its entire life cycle,” says DHL. The difference lies in the production process, as the same amount of CO2 is released during flight with both fuels.

The big disadvantage of SAF is that it is on average three times more expensive than regular kerosene. According to DHL, this is not as big a problem in the cargo sector as it is in the more price-sensitive passenger aviation. “There is a greater willingness among corporate customers to pay for more sustainable solutions,” it says.

SAF premium

DHL Express has the ambition to replace 30% of its kerosene consumption worldwide with SAF by 2030 – aircraft engines do not have to be modified for the more sustainable fuel.

Brussels Airport, for its part, aims for SAF to account for 5% of total kerosene use by airlines by 2026. The airport operator launched a SAF premium for airlines this year with support from the federal government, which was subscribed to by DHL and Brussels Airlines, among others.

‘Aviation sector is simply too slow’

SAF is one way to reduce CO2 emissions from aviation, which account for about 3% of global CO2 emissions.

For that matter, in the context of COP29 in Baku, the climate summit at which a new target for international climate finance is being negotiated, the German environmental organization Atmosfair published an interesting climate ranking of the world’s largest airlines.

The results of that study cannot be called encouraging. As Atmosfair Managing Director Dietrich Brockhagen summarizes them: “The climate turnaround in air travel is a long time coming. Our figures show that the sector is simply too slow regarding climate protection.”

Airline Index 2024

The Airline Index 2024, which compares and ranks the carbon efficiency of the 200 largest airlines of the world, shows that international passenger airlines only improved their CO2 efficiency by just under 6% in 2023 compared to 2019, the last year of normal travel before the massive disruptions of the coronavirus pandemic. Those figures correspond to an annual reduction of roughly 1.4%.

However, Atmosfair argued that 4.0% reductions are needed yearly to achieve the climate targets agreed in the Paris Agreement if air traffic continues to grow. Even the climate targets of the civil aviation organization ICAO of 2% per year, which the environmental advocacy group described as insufficient, have not been achieved.

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