Aviation and Greenhouse Gas Removals
There is no pathway to Net Zero for aviation by 2050 which does not include the use of greenhouse gas removals (GGRs).
In 2026, the Department of Transport’s new Aviation Forecasts stated that on current trends of aviation decarbonisation, 41 million tonnes of greenhouse gas removals would be needed to mitigate UK aviation emissions every year by 2050. Currently, the global total of verified permanent emissions removals is just 2 million tonnes.
Removals can be broadly divided into nature-based solutions (NBS), such as afforestation; or engineered removals which includes Direct Air Capture (DAC) of CO₂ (using machines to suck CO₂ out of the air and store it in permanent underground storage); or Bio-energy with Carbon capture and Storage (BECCS), which is burning biological matter such as plants and crops to produce energy and sequestering the emitted CO₂ in underground storage.
As we get closer to Net Zero by 2050, the aviation industry will have to purchase a growing amount of GGRs.
AEF believes that those removals must be of the highest quality, ensuring that the CO₂ is locked away for thousands of years.
For that reason we are not in favour of the widespread use of forests as removals, due to the risk that they take decades to reach their full removal potential, and face enormous risks in a heating planet of wildfires and drought. The most permanent removals are unsurprisingly the most expensive, so we are exploring policy options to help these nascent technologies to scale, and to ensure that the aviation industry takes responsibility for 100% of its fossil fuel emissions, instead of relying on decarbonisation to happen in other sectors of the economy.
What are the risks?
The biggest risk with relying on removals to solve the aviation decarbonisation problem is that at present, the global supply of removals is infinitesimally small. The total deployed and verified engineered removals capacity in 2026 is about 2 million tonnes of CO₂ – approximately 37 billion tonnes is emitted globally every year. Engineered removals are also likely to be one of the costliest options for carbon abatement – it’s estimated that they will cost around $500 per tonne removed, compared to a few dollars per tonne of low quality forestry offsets.
If the aviation industry chooses to rely on this technology as its Plan B for decarbonisation – assuming SAF will not deliver the scale of emissions reductions necessary – this will likely lead to steep increases in ticket prices in years to come.