Industry Insights with Aaron Robinson - Book and Claim, and Steps to Scale up SAF
Aaron Robinson
Vice President of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) – U.S
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IAG
In this interview Aaron Robinson, IAG, shares what he sees as the most underrepresented but critical considerations for scaling up SAF, and how he believes, as a member of the advisory board, it should be discussed at Sustainable Aviation Futures EU Congress, as well as insights into IAG's SAF strategy and achievements to date.
Could you start by sharing a little bit about yourself and also your role within IAG, please?
I started working in sustainable aviation back in 2007. And, for the most part, that's been really the core focus of my career. Certainly, the space has evolved quite a bit since then. And for me, in fact, my focus has really narrowed over time, away from some things that are a little less around decarbonisation - things like recycling or ground fleet elements like that - and moving much more squarely into: how do we get to net zero, and in particular, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as the single biggest lever within that.
So at IAG, which covers five airlines including British Airways, Iberia, Aer Lingus, Vueling, and LEVEL, I'm responsible for leading our SAF procurement in the US, as well as a host of other issues including our corporate customer relationships and sustainability.
Let's get down to brass tacks: what is IAG’s SAF strategy?
Yeah, it's really quite similar to others. It's to continue scale up both through purchase agreements and investments. We have a number of investments in place both in the US and then in the UK as well. And really the near-term focus for us is to ensure compliance with upcoming European mandates starting next year, but then also get to 10% SAF by 2030 which is actually something that we were the first airline group globally to set that goal.
In 2023 IAG used (not bought) 53,000 tonnes of SAF which was the third most of any airline globally, 12% of the global SAF supply, and a 5x increase on usage from 2022.
Some really exciting numbers there and obviously aligns with a few other airlines in the industry with some really progressive goals for SAF. I want to touch upon something which is quite important for the progression of SAF, and that’s book and claim. It's steadily progressing as an exciting driver for scaling SAF alongside some of the mandates and incentives that are in place in different markets. In your opinion, are the current options for book and claim fit for purpose or are there any tweaks or adaptations required?
Thanks for this, it's a great topic and I think there's a lot of excitement around a book and claim, but then also a lot of different conceptions around what it is, where it's needed, and how to do it. So for many years, I've been using book and claim in corporate programs both here [at IAG], and then at my predecessor airline as well, to enable and scale up SAF through the use of corporate customer funding.
So that kind of voluntary market that, voluntary use of book and claim, is really quite exciting and gets honestly most of the attention these days because it has so many players involved in it and, and so much interest. And then also so many players and environmental groups trying to write some rules around it, and say here's how here's the rule book on innovation and here's the box that everyone has to live in.
Those certainly create a lot of constraints which makes it very difficult for an airline to live within or to have a different set of constraints for a different customer. It can be quite challenging to work on that.
Ultimately, it's something as airlines we want to shape and want to play a role in enabling that, but we don't want to constrain innovation either.
So that's kind of one element. Another element of book and claim, which I think is a bit underrepresented, is on the regulatory side and especially with European mandates coming into play. One thing that we very much want to see as part of this is an affordable scale up of SAF. The worst possible outcome would be the SAF mandate comes into place and it has to be at every single airport in the EU or in the UK. The better outcome is that SAF gets concentrated in airports where it makes the most sense logistically to flow, and affordably, as well.
The problem with this ultimately becomes that you have whatever airlines are concentrated at that airport, probably a hub carrier in many instances, are going to be economically disadvantaged versus an airport where that SAF didn't flow to.
So, if we want to get an affordable scale up and an equitable scale up we have to have some mechanism to enable those costs and those benefits ultimately to be shared across the airlines involved.
I'm really glad that you mentioned scale up there. Obviously with book and claim there's a lot of nuts and bolts and things we need to work out and establish over the coming years. At the Sustainable Aviation Futures Congress we really are seeking to establish a scale up action plan, and this will be the focus of one of the panel discussions that you'll be joining. In your opinion, and not to give too much away obviously, just a little snapshot into the panel, what is the single most important thing that is needed to scale up SAF?
Well, the easy answer is money. I think most people are going to say that in some form or another. But maybe if I could focus instead on what the most underrepresented critical element is, and to me that is involving the customer ultimately.
Civil society is absolutely critical here if, customers wants SAF and are demanding it to be the case, it's one thing to ask them to pull out their wallets, but the real key is enabling it from government policy and government policy responds to the needs of civil society.
And so, if we're able to go and convince our customers that SAF is important, then that will in fact, in turn, enable governments and push them to be providing the requisite financial needs necessary.
Now, I think there's a gap that's historically existed because customers ultimately have a big challenge. They can't see SAF, they can't observe it. It's by its very nature designed to be identical to jet fuel. And so that's something that as a as a communications gap, ultimately, we need to solve it in the industry too, to get that unlocking of funds from government.