That Was The Week That Was 08-12 March 2021
It’s Infrastructure Week!
Remember how every now and then, when Donald Trump needed to divert attention away from the scandale du jour, or perhaps make everyone look at him again once that scandal had run its course, he would stand up and announce a big beautiful, so beautiful, bigly infrastructure week? It was going to be announced in a week, it would be beautiful, so beautiful, etc. Needless to say, that plan, or the announcements or whatever, never came. Four years of waiting and American infrastructure did not get any newer, or more beautiful. Sad! The big D may not enjoy hearing this but in Europe, we are stealing his infrastructure week idea.
Monday started with the Commission making a periodic report to the Parliament on how we are going in getting the infrastructure in place for alternative fuels. This report looks at all transport modes, but aviation gets a mention. Liquid biofuels can already be blended with aviation grade kerosene, it notes, but so far only accounts for 0.05% of fuel uplifted. Still, thinking of being uplifted, in what could a Trumpian change of focus – look, a spider! – we are investing in developing electric, hybrid and hydrogen aircraft. So nevermind the lack of progress, chase the next rainbow. The report does tell the industry to lift its game, or in Commission speak: aviation will ‘need to increase their efforts to meet the ambition of the Climate Target Plan’. That that, aviation! Help is on the way, with the RefuelEU initiative aiming to boost supply and demand for sustainable aviation fuels. So we can sit back and relax again, with a target that is always just, just, over the horizon. That, after all, has been the aviation industry’s strategy from the off.
ATAG – IATA’s diffusion line – with that patented IATA-swagger said in 2009 that by 2020 SAF would account for 15% of the industry’s fuel use. To be fair to ATAG, they clearly meant very late in 2020. Sometime around the end of the thirty second quarter of 2020. Remember, all this will happen very soon. Maybe even only in five or so years.
That is all so very optimistic, as long as you keep your eyes glued to the horizon; but back in that bit between where you are now and the sky, the International Council on Clean Transportation weighted in on Tuesday with what can only be called a dose of reality. How much aviation fuel feedstock do we have to meet our SAF goals? That is an excellent infrastructure week question. According to their research, the ICCT thinks that we can meet about 5.5% of the projected need. And, if that does not bother you enough, the ICCT cheerily notes that moving beyond 2% will require ‘conversion pathways with more challenging economics and uncertain production timelines’.
Meanwhile, the state aid fairy got right into the swing of Infrastructure week. We are now, finally, seeing the money hose being pointed at physical infrastructure. Airports are starting to get a turn to put their snouts in the trough as the airlines stand back for a moment. Lufthansa is so annoyed at this outbreak of equality that it has recently upgraded and up-resourced its lobbying efforts in Brussels, so it must irk them that on Tuesday Riga Airport got nearly €40 million to upgrade its facilities.
The most important infrastructure at the moment is undoubtedly a strong, solid, global vaccination process. Nothing is more important than that now, so numbers compiled by the news website Tortoise News and released on Wednesday were very sobering. If you take the view, as real epidemiologists do – as opposed to us amateur ones – that no-one is vaccinated until everyone is vaccinated, then the task remains daunting. About 320,000,000 doses have been administered. About 6 billion to go. That is going to be a lot of uses of the word ‘jab’. Only 0.02% of the African population has been vaccinated.
Still, we press on, as we must, trying to reinvigorate tourism. Covid has been nasty, but to mis-quote Churchill, it is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle and that puzzle remains sustainability. For aviation sustainability is not just about SAF, it is about sustainable tourism too. Tourism is always teetering on the edge of being a category error – if you wish to get off the beaten track you can only do that by beating a track – and unless you want to visit industrial sites it is best to look only on the surface. So there is much expectation about the Union’s Strategy for Sustainable Tourism. It slowly wends its way through the Parliament at the moment: TRAN submitted its report to the plenary of the Parliament on Wednesday.
Thursday’s infrastructure offering was a hint of things to come, from a different quarter. ACI Global set out a press release but instead of noting that more money was needed, PLEASE, it noted that airports were investing in technology to recover. That is a new take. Most of the money splashed at aviation so far has gone on downsizing fleets and clinging onto slots. The airport contribution was to the annual SITA IT Insights report. Nevertheless, in business as usual news, Norway too has splashed more than €54 million on its tourism industry. This was waved through by the Commission. Of course it was.
Sweden got in on the act too, getting approval for a subsidised loan to support air traffic control services. We could have used the crisis to finally get serious reform of ATM, but no, this went through on the nod. We must now be at the point where it is impossible to imagine what it would take for an application for random state aid to be knocked back. It is absolutely clear that anything resembling a requirement for structural change, or infrastructural change is not a mandatory component.
In the USA, the American Society of Civil Engineers released their 2021 report noting that there is now a $2.59 trillion shortfall in investment. They didn’t release this during the Trump presidency – they are very civil engineers indeed. But it shows the scale of the task ahead. Imagine if instead of giving much of this amount to the airlines around the world – IATA’s last calculation was near to $200 billion in aid, and that was before the new US bailout, we spent it on infrastructure instead. How much better would aviation build back better then? And how much more competitively if we had had serious industry reform?
Topping off the week on Friday was a verging-on-breathless announcement from that old war horse, ICAO, telling the world that they had sorted the problem. The Council had put the CART – the Council’s Aviation Recovery Taskforce – before the war horse and they have solved the problem. They have the one true path to the pandemic response and recovery. You will be pleased to know that it is a multilayer risk management strategy and Friday saw six new recommendations fall from the heavens. Who needs infrastructure when we have ICAO looking over us? These six recommendations take the total number of recommendations of the CART to 20. It is fair to say that global uplift lacks the necessary infrastructure to have made them effective.