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).
For example, the British government’s High Ambition scenario for the Jet Zero strategy said that 37% of the carbon reduction from the sector will come from removals by 2050.
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 delivers meaningful decarbonisation alongside its uptake of removals, so airlines are not simply compounding the problem by continuing to pollute.
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 DAC capacity in 2025 is about 0.5 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.