Milan’s Linate Airport now fills private jets with sustainable fuel

It is the first in Italy to provide such a service

Milano’s Linate Airport became the first in Italy to fill business aircraft with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), reported AINonline, citing the company that manages the facility. The airport is supplying the blended SAF, produced by Italian energy company Eni, to its long-term tenant Sirio’s private jets.

With this move, SEA Prime (the company managing Milan’s Linate and Malpensa airports) hopes to expand the use of this, still-new, approach to decarbonizing the general aviation (GA) fleets in the region in the following months.

GA is the industry term for non-commercial aviation

The move is the latest in the company’s environmental initiatives, which have also included replacing its passenger shuttles and operational equipment with electrically-powered versions. It also plans to construct a green-hydrogen generating plant at Malpensa.

“We are really glad to have reached a new milestone for Milano Prime,” said CEO of the company Chiara Dorigotti, as quoted by AINonline. “The decarbonization of our sector is certainly a priority for SEA Prime and for the SEA Group, as evidenced by all the initiatives to date, and we trust that availability of SAF in Italy will increase to respond to the ever-increasing demand from business aviation operators who want to achieve sustainability objectives.”

The aviation industry contributes 2 percent to the overall global carbon emissions and is considered a sector that is particularly hard to decarbonize. The reason for this is that the long distances and the immense power required to propel the aircraft do not lend themselves easily to alternative energy source transformation the way it is possible for other transportation vehicles.

Still, the aviation sector has set a target for itself to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. However, for the time being, the only tool that has been developed (and is still in process of improvement) is sustainable aircraft fuel (SAF). The latter is derived from used cooking oil or other non-palm waste oils from animals or plants; solid waste from homes and businesses, such as packaging, paper, textiles, and food scraps, or even corn sugar.

Another obstacle to decarbonization is that SAF is currently more costly than traditional fossil jet fuel. That’s down to a combination of the current availability of sustainable feedstocks and the continuing development of new production technologies. As the technology matures it will become more efficient and so the expectation is that it will become less costly for customers.