Air Transport

^{AIMEE TURNER / LONDON}
EC working group expected to recommend airlines use own data or information from ATM authorities

A European Commission stakeholder working group set up to examine how an effective emissions trading scheme (ETS) would best operate is expected to recommend that airlines monitor their own carbon emissions.
Last September, the EC proposed aviation’s inclusion in the European Union ETS and a working group comprising experts from EU member states and key stakeholder organisations was established to assess issues.
The working group held its fourth and final meeting on 11 April and tackled monitoring as one of the central issues relating to the administrative requirements within an EU ETS extended to aviation.
Monitoring mechanisms that the group considered included using self-reported data by airlines on the basis of recorded trip fuel in mass and balance documentation already prepared before and after each flight, or, alternatively, using data such as distance, aircraft type and environmental data from air traffic management (ATM) authorities.
The working group also considered a combination of these monitoring options using ATM data in a “worst-case estimate” on which airlines could negotiate upwards by self-reporting actual post-flight data using an emission factor for kerosene aviation fuel of 3,154kg CO2 per kilogram of fuel burned.
“Preferably, a monitoring method should not provide a disincentive for possible optimisation mechanisms – new technology, operational measures, optimisation of load factor, etc – for reducing emissions,” a working group background paper advises.
“It should also preferably be transparent, based on officially accepted documents [eg aircraft mass and balance documentation, International Civil Aviation Organisation database, etc] and its implementation should not place too high an administrative burden on the stakeholders concerned,” it adds.
British Airways already calculates its emissions within the UK for the purposes of the UK emissions trading scheme through a detailed analysis of fuel consumption data.
The working group results will be prepared in time for the EC’s general review of the EU ETS scheme, which is due to report at the end of June. As part of this review it will consider extending the current scheme to aviation.