Expanding Heathrow won’t bring growth and is certainly not sustainable

Last week, the government announced that it is backing the expansion of Heathrow airport. According to Chancellor Rachel Reeves, this will deliver economic growth and any climate concerns will be remedied by sustainable aviation fuels (SAF). Not so, says our CEO Aoife O’Leary. 

In her speech, Chancellor Rachel Reeves attempted to address any concerns about how a third runway at Heathrow Airport would impact the UK’s climate goals, stating that “Sustainable Aviation Fuel reduces CO2 emissions compared to fossil fuel by around 70%.” However this shows the Chancellor has simply bought into the industry’s propaganda. 

Aviation accounts for 8% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. But this leaves aside impacts of contrails, those white streaks in the sky you see forming behind planes which are made of mostly water vapor, trapping heat, potentially doubling aviation’s contribution to climate change.  

Airport expansion won’t drive growth 

Let’s examine the different parts of the Chancellor’s argument. First, increasing the number of flights in and out of the UK will not drive the economic growth Reeves is so desperate to deliver. Business travel represents a dwindling share of flights, whilst foreign tourists coming into the UK and boosting our economy are outnumbered three to one by UK tourists leaving the UK to spend money abroad, taking net £41bn out of the economy.  

If the government wants growth, better options for investment include boosting connectivity outside London with improved domestic public transport.   

The myth of “sustainable aviation fuel” 

Second, “sustainable” aviation fuel (SAF) is essentially a mirage. Yes, these fuels are biofuels made from crops, cooking oils and other sources of plant biomass. But producing them takes up huge amounts of land, endangering food security and biodiversity. Indeed, very little of these fuels even exist today and producing them at anything like the scale that will be needed to decarbonise aviation would be totally incompatible with any notions of sustainability.  

Purchasing these fuels will send even more money outside the UK as most “sustainable” aviation fuel comes from abroad, with wood pellets from overseas forests imported into the UK just to be burned for jet fuel. Another main source of fuel that the industry is hoping to rely on is used cooking oil (again, mostly imported from abroad, mainly China), but studies show that is often not used cooking oil at all but virgin oil such as palm oil, causing deforestation.  

As the government launches its consultation on strategic approaches to land use in England, it is obvious that sourcing these fuels domestically is not an option – The Royal Society has already concluded that the UK would have to devote half its farmland to make enough of these types of fuel to reduce emissions substantially.  

The only truly sustainable fuel that would bring real emissions reductions are e-fuels. These are produced from green hydrogen and can cut aviation’s carbon emissions to near zero, but UK government policy doesn’t provide the support these fuels need. UK rules on SAF require only 22% of the fuel mix to be SAF by 2040, of which only 3.5% (0.8% of the total) need to be e-fuels. So in 15 years, 78% of the fuel mix will still be fossil fuels, and the vast majority of the rest will be problematic biomass-derived fuels.  

Lack of evidence to support Heathrow expansion 

The UK government’s scientific advisory body, the Climate Change Committee stated clearly that “no airport expansions should proceed” without a UK-wide plan to assess emissions reduction and control aviation’s climate impacts. The fuel mandate that Reeves is championing is no such thing.  

Finally, but perhaps most damning of all, the stated £17 billion addition to the UK economy that the Chancellor says would be created from expanding Heathrow comes from a study, commissioned by Heathrow itself of which only the executive summary is available to the public.  

It can be quite complicated to sort out which aviation fuels are truly sustainable from those that are not – but all the evidence points to an easy path forward for Reeves: don’t expand Heathrow. It won’t bring growth and it certainly is not ‘sustainable’.  

The opinions in this article were drawn on by The Observer in the following two articles: 

Reeves’s Heathrow third runway report was commissioned by London airport 

Reeves’s Heathrow expansion plans leave Labour’s green agenda grounded