Does easyJet really offset all of its carbon emissions?
EasyJet claims to be the first major airline to be carbon neutral
Today upon landing in Barcelona the PA of my Easyjet flight announced that they “offset all carbon emissions from the fuel used in this flight”. I was surprised to hear that and I looked left to my fellow passenger, a stranger. I said “Wow!”. She said “That’s bullshit, surely”, while rolling her eyes.
I fired up my laptop as soon as I got home and found out that easyJet actually claim to offset the carbon emissions from the fuel used on all flights across their network. I thought this would be a good research project.
This article highlights relevant data from their corporate annual report and accounts. It explains how much carbon they emit, how exactly they offset it, and it links to the documents they provide to prove it. It then takes a look at the projects on which easyJet invest to declare themselves carbon neutral and how much money they put into those. Finally, it compares their current strategy with two alternatives that are remarkably more expensive but also more sensible.
In the 2019 Annual Report, their non-executive chairman, John Barton, announced that they “would become the first major airline to operate net-zero carbon flights across their network by offsetting the carbon emissions from the fuel used on all their flights”. In fact, further down the report, they claim that “easyJet is now the world’s first major airline to operate net-zero carbon flights”.
This can be either an amazing thing (a carbon neutral airline) or a ruthless marketing gimmick that adds to the problem, by fooling conscious travellers into believing that they can now fly without aggravating the climate crisis. The financial incentives for being perceived as carbon neutral are obvious. As Easyjet state themselves, “the likelihood of consumers choosing easyJet over another airline as a direct result of our carbon offsetting policy continues to increase steadily, rising to over 47% by September 2020”.
Is it true?
- How much fuel does Easyjet consume across their network and what are the resulting carbon emissions?
- What is Easyjet doing to offset those emissions and, if they do it via third parties, how do those organisations go about carbon offsetting themselves?
- Do easyJet’s strategy and efforts qualify them as “carbon neutral”?
How much fuel does Easyjet consume across their network and what are the resulting CO₂ emissions?
While I could not find any disclosure on the amount of fuel consumed by Easyjet, they do say that they spent £720m on fuel in 2020 and that their cost of fuel is somewhere around 600–700 USD per metric tonne, or somewhere around £450 — £525 per metric tonne. The price airline companies pay for their fuel is not straight forward, as they all do ‘hedging’ when it comes to securing future fuel supplies and to reducing exposure to price fluctuations. So, being rather loose on this calculation, we could estimate that Easyjet bought between 1.4 and 1.6 million metric tonnes or fuel in 2020. In 2019, before the COVID19 pandemic, they used twice as much.
In terms of carbon, those 1.4–1.6 million metric tonnes of fuel equate to 4.4–5.1 million metric tonnes of CO₂. As it turns out, Easyjet discloses their carbon emissions equivalent in 2020 as 4.3 million metric tonnes, so we can say that everything sort of matches for now. As you would expect, since I am only looking into the numbers they published in their annual report. So far.
What is Easyjet doing to offset those emissions?
In the annual report 2020 we can find first indications on how they offset their carbon emissions, which they claim they are doing by investing in high-quality carbon credits. Specifically, they indicate that they invest exclusively in ‘Gold Standard’ and ‘Verified Carbon Standard’ carbon credits. Of these carbon credits, 20% of the credits they acquire relate to renewable energy projects, and the rest relate to nature-based credits.
For the financial year 2020, Easyjet claims to have invested in carbon credits worth 3.15 million tonnes of CO₂, and it has published five carbon offsetting certificates to prove it. All those credits come from two conservation projects for the prevention of deforestation and degradation of forests (the nature-based projets, I assume), bought within a UN initiative called REDD+. I could not find any certificates relating to renewable-energy-based carbon credits.
As shown in their annual report, easyJet has offset 75% of the carbon emissions from the fuel used in all their flights in the financial year 2020. It seems that they chose not to offset the carbon emissions that they emitted from the beginning of that financial year (Oct 1st 2019) to the announcement of the carbon neutral policy (Nov 19th 2019).
What is the extra cost for easyJet to make their fuel “carbon neutral”?
Offsetting a tonne of CO₂ with prevention of deforestation costs between 3 and 30 USD, according to a recent report by the LSE. EasyJet pays £3 for each tonne of CO₂. For contrast, it takes 0.32 tonnes of aviation fuel to emit one tonne of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Given that easyJet pays 650 USD per tonne of fuel, the added cost to make aviation fuel “zero carbon” is 2%.
The additional cost of fuel for easyJet to make it “carbon neutral” is, +2%.
Note that the cost of aviation fuel has increased by 90% between October 2020 and September 2021. In light of this, +2% is only a negligible dent on the bottom line.
Carbon offsetting with forest protection in developing countries?
Since its origins, there has been intense debate on whether the carbon-emissions reductions thanks to the prevention of deforestation are realistic and meaningful. A publication earlier this year by Unearthed (the investigative branch of Greenpeace), in collaboration with the Guardian and Source Material, raises “many doubts about the ability of REDD+ projects to offset emissions in line with the claims of major airlines”. If you want to know more about this, I strongly recommend you read their report.
In addition to those questionable calculations, there is the issue of carbon colonialism, where a rich Western company (such as easyJet, but also the likes of Disney), invests in a programme to claim the carbon credits of a given forest in a developing country. Following this, “forest carbon sequestration for climate mitigation is privileged above all other forest uses, it then deprioritises other forest uses, other livelihoods, cultural uses, traditional industries, things like that, that rely on the forest. And a focus of forest carbon privileges the interests of the carbon offset developers, over other forest users and interests”. Here you can learn more about how Disney is offsetting the carbon emissions of their cruise ships with credits from a Peruvian forest.
Given the two previous reasons (dubious carbon accounting and carbon colonialism), the next question that comes to mind is: “What would it take for easyJet to offset all of their carbon with European initiatives (where it operates) and in a way that is clear and open to scrutiny?”
What if easyJet invested in European projects for renewable energy or carbon removal?
Since easyJet operates and pollutes in Europe, it is reasonable to think that their decarbonisation efforts should be located in Europe, thus avoiding carbon colonialism and being connected with the communities they work with. It is also reasonable to think that meaningful decarbonisation is one that can be measured properly and is open to scrutiny by those local communities, such as renewable energy projects or carbon removal technology.
Example 1. Offshore wind farm in the UK
Let’s imagine that easyJet decides to go all out and invest in a new offshore wind farm in the UK. Let’s call it easyWind, with an expected life of 20 years. This new wind farm will reduce the use of coal-fired and gas-fired power stations and thus will reduce the amount of CO₂ that would be emitted into the atmosphere. For simplicity, let’s say that each kWh produced by easyWind will displace one kWh from a gas-fired power station (the reality is that it would not be a 1 to 1 relationship). This means that each kWh from easyWind will reduce emissions by 400 grams of CO₂.
The idea is that easyWind will produce so much electricity that it will offset all the carbon emissions of all easyJet flights, and it will do so each year for the next 20 years. As we know, easyJet carbon emissions due to flights in 2020 (the Covid year) is around 4.3 million tonnes of CO₂. To compensate for that, easyWind will produce 11,000 GWh of electricity each year. This is a lot of electricity.
In 2020, the UK generated 75,000 GWh from both offshore and onshore wind farms, so easyWind mega-wind-farm will expand this national output by 15%. It won’t be cheap either. Distributing all the life cycle costs of easyWind (capital investment, operation and decommissioning) across the 20 years of expected operation, easyWind will cost easyJet between 1,000 and 1,400 mGBP each year. The good news is that they would benefit from the wholesale of all that electricity, which will yield an income of approximately 800 mGBP annually. All things roughly considered, easyWind will finally cost easyJet somewhere between 200 and 600 mGBP each year.
The cost of the REDD+ credits was at most 20 USD/tonneCO₂. With easyWind, the net cost would be between 65 and 200 USD/tonneCO₂.
In short, if easyJet invested in a UK-based offshore wind farm to offset their carbon emissions, this would be a project that is locally based (where they operate) and with clear hard data that is open to scrutiny just like any other project of this type in Europe. This wind farm(s) would increase easyJet’s fuel expenditure by 30% to 80%, as opposed to the (at most) 10% due to the REDD+ carbon credits. Oh, and by the way, would the UK be allowed to discount the carbon reductions due to easyWind for their goals to net-zero? Or would that be double booking?
Example 2. Carbon removal plants around Europe
This year we saw the opening of Orca, a carbon capture plant in Iceland with the capacity to suck out 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ each year from the atmosphere and to capture it underground. Let’s think for a second that easyJet considers this to be the most suitable way to become zero-carbon, by directly removing the CO₂ that they emitted into the atmosphere with their planes. It would take more than 1,000 such installations to remove the CO₂ emissions of 2020 alone, the year with the least flights.
Building the first Orca cost around 10 to 15 mUSD, and the company (Climeworks) is hoping to bring the cost down to 200–300 USD / tonnes of CO₂. Since easyJet would require 1,000 plants just like the current Orca, we could expect the cost to be on the lower end of that bracket. Therefore, if easyJet were to use carbon removal as their preferred choice for carbon offsetting, it would cost them around 850 mUSD each year to offset the carbon emissions of 2020 (4,300 tonnes CO₂). This would almost double their expenditure in fuel, which in 2020 was approximately 1 bn USD.
Summary of easyJet’s scenarios
1. Buying carbon credits from deforestation protection projects in developing countries (what easyJet is doing)
- 2% increase in fuel cost to reach carbon neutrality
- Contested methodology for measuring carbon reductions and concerns about carbon colonialism
- Very detached from the source of carbon emissions
2. Investing in a new offshore wind farm in the UK
- 30% to 80% increase in fuel cost to reach carbon neutrality
- Local project, hard data, open to scrutiny
- Closer to the source of carbon emissions
3. Investing in carbon capture plants around Europe
- ≥ 85% increase in fuel cost to reach carbon neutrality
- Local project, hard data, open to scrutiny
- Closest to the source of carbon emissions
My Thoughts
Just as my fellow passenger in that flight, I also suspected that easyJet claiming that all their flights are carbon neutral was bullshit. Now that I have looked into the numbers and read so much about these questions, I come out convinced that their approach and efforts don’t justify the claim of being carbon neutral. Our society is transitioning away from a fossil-based economy and we are experimenting with all kinds of instruments to make that possible. If companies, and any other type of powerful organisation, use those instruments for their own benefit, we risk making that transition much harder than it already is.
I think that REDD+ intentions are genuinely good and I am sure plenty of good work is done on the ground to prevent deforestation and degradation of forests. I hope that wealthy companies will help those projects, but not in exchange for the future carbon performance of those forests.
Finally, I have come to believe that the “voluntary carbon credits” market deserves a closer look, more scrutiny and solid governance models. At the end of the day, we want large companies approaching their decarbonisation in a way that is meaningful, ethical, transparent, and closely related to their activities, to their stakeholders and to their geography.
