PARIS (Agefi-Dow Jones)–Airbus and several airlines including Air Canada, Air France-KLM, easyJet, IAG and Lufthansa announced on Monday that they wanted to explore the still embryonic technology of direct capture of CO2 in the air in order to offset a part of their greenhouse gas emissions.
“As the aeronautics industry cannot absorb its CO2 emissions released into the atmosphere at source, a solution for the direct capture and storage of carbon in the air would allow the sector to extract directly from the atmospheric air the equivalent amount of emissions from its operations,” Airbus said in a statement.
Direct airborne carbon capture and storage involves filtering and removing CO2 emissions directly from the air using high-powered fans. Once removed from the air, the CO2 is stored in underground reservoirs.
The companies concerned signed letters of intent on Monday in which they undertake to begin negotiations that could lead to the pre-purchase of carbon elimination credits issued by 1Point Five, an American company specializing in this new technology.
Airbus has meanwhile already “pre-purchased” 400,000 tonnes of carbon offset credits from 1PointFive.
“We are already seeing strong interest from airlines to explore methods of eliminating carbon in an affordable and scalable way,” said Julie Kitcher, head of corporate communications at Airbus, quoted in the press release.
“These first letters of intent mark a concrete step towards using this technology both for our own decarbonization plan but also for the sector in general to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050,” said she added.
-Francois Schott, Agefi-Dow Jones; 01 41 27 47 92; [email protected] ed: ECH
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July 18, 2022 12:53 ET (16:53 GMT)