Joining Forces to Build the Market for Sustainable Aviation Fuels

Business as usual

When SkyNRG was founded in 2009, sustainable aviation fuel was not yet allowed for use in commercial aircraft operations.

After the first flights in 2011, most of our clients were communicating about their commitments to fly on sustainable biofuels as a way to highlight their progressive and sustainable mindsets. Now it’s quite the other way around: companies have to explain themselves if they don’t have a travel policy that focuses on reducing CO2 emissions!

This shift in recent years, where corporate sustainability has become business as usual, means more companies are interested in flying sustainably with SkyNRG’s biofuel. This is a welcome development!

Team work

However, despite the growing interest in sustainable aviation fuels, there’s still much work to do before sustainable aviation fuels can be price competitive with fossil fuel.

Therefore, we must work to further develop this relatively new market.

Both WBCSD and below50 are great platforms that help us spread the word about sustainable aviation fuels, offering us the opportunity to work with like-minded companies who are also committed to growing the global market for sustainable fuels. The best part is that the partnerships made through below50 and WBCSD connect us to a broad group of stakeholders such as producers, technology players, governments and end-customers.

Because that is exactly what needs to happen to scale this market. It needs to be a joint effort between all stakeholders.

Government needs to create a long term, stable policy framework with clear boundary conditions on sustainability on the one hand, and strong incentive mechanisms on the other. Producers and technology players need to ensure sustainable aviation fuel is part of their product development focus, airlines need to re-think the way they contract fuel and should consider the strategic value of alternative fuel and civil society needs to work with the actual end-customer to raise awareness that, to ensure future flying, they need to contribute as well.

Only when we are all working together can we meet the challenges and start building a stronger supply infrastructure of low carbon transport fuels.

What SkyNRG offers companies who want to fly sustainably

Flying on our sustainable biofuel offers companies the opportunity to reduce their business travel footprint, and by doing so, they also support the development of a new and promising sustainable fuels market. This is one of the most important reasons for organizations to join The Fly Green Fund and the KLM Corporate BioFuel Programme - two initiatives that SkyNRG and partners developed especially for corporate customers.

Both platforms, The Fly Green Fund in Sweden and the KLM Corporate BioFuel Programme in the Netherlands, already have a large group of ambitious customers (among which ABN AMRO, Accenture and Schiphol Group) who prefer a solution for their own emissions that also helps make the aviation industry more sustainable.

Accenture, one of our earliest customers, said: “By joining forces with KLM and SkyNRG in the KLM Corporate BioFuel Programme, we’re able to bring this innovation to the market, rather than first create a footprint and later try to compensate for it.”

At SkyNRG, we see that more and more companies want to invest in measures that offer solid and long-term solutions for sustainable flying. Due to this growing group of organizations worldwide, we’re now working on a more global proposition for these companies.

Our goal for 2017 is to set up an international program that offers companies the chance to achieve their sustainability targets for business travel. Currently, we’re working on this format and we expect to launch by the end of this year.

With WBCSD as our supporting partner, we also hope to connect with our fellow members within this great platform who also have the ambition to fly more sustainably.

If you’re interested to learn more about SkyNRG’s initiatives, we invite you to contact us. We look forward to starting the conversation!

Contact: Merel Laroy, Head of Marketing & Corporate Sales at SkyNRG, merel@skynrg.com