United Airlines is pledging to become carbon neutral by 2050, in part through a new investment in carbon capture technology.
The Chicago-based airline said it signed a letter of intent to make an initial multimillion-dollar investment in a company building the first industrial-sized plant in the U.S. using direct air capture technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air.
United declined to specify the amount of the investment in 1PointFive, a partnership between Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, a subsidiary of oil and gas company Occidental, and Rusheen Capital Management, or the timeline for building the plant.
Companies — United included — have purchased carbon offsets to reduce the impact of their greenhouse gas emissions, but traditional offsets “do almost nothing to tackle the emissions from flying,” United CEO Scott Kirby said in a letter announcing the investment.
“More importantly, they simply don’t meet the scale of this global challenge. Carbon emissions have increased 4000 times since the industrial revolution. It’s just not realistic to think we can plant enough trees to start bending that curve today,” he said.
Traditional offsets cancel out emissions by funding programs that reduce emissions elsewhere, like forest conservation.
The plant United’s investment will help fund is expected to capture and sequester 1 million tons of carbon dioxide each year using direct air capture technology. That’s equivalent to about 40 million trees, but will cover about 3,000 times less land, according to United.
The project would capture enough carbon dioxide to offset nearly 10% of United’s annual emissions, Kirby said.
1PointFive will use the carbon dioxide captured in lower-carbon oil production before storing it deep underground, but the plant will not lead to new oil production, he said.
United’s pledge to be carbon neutral sets a more aggressive goal than the industry-wide target of cutting emissions in half by 2050 and matches the U.K. aviation industry’s pledge to reduce net carbon emissions to zero by 2050, announced earlier this year.
United also is working to reduce the amount of emissions it creates, including through investments in biofuels, which generate less emissions than traditional jet fuel. Those fuels are in short supply relative to the industry’s demand today, though United uses some at its hub in Los Angeles and has invested in a biofuel company that plans to build a plant in Gary.
Even with sustainable fuels, flying still generates greenhouse gases: Last year, United purchased 40 metric tons of carbon offsets to balance out the greenhouse gas emissions it wasn’t able to eliminate from a flight between Chicago and San Francisco designed to be as green as possible.
The investment comes in the middle of an unprecedented crisis for the airline industry. Airlines got billions of dollars in federal aid this spring as the coronavirus pandemic brought travel to a halt, and U.S. airline passenger numbers remain down about 66% compared with last year, according to Airlines for America.
Traffic isn’t expected to improve significantly until COVID-19 vaccines are widespread.
Planning for the investment and climate pledge began before the coronavirus pandemic, Kirby said.
Still, climate change is “another crisis” that will force more dramatic behavior changes than the pandemic, Kirby said in the letter. “The longer we wait the more drastic those changes will have to be. So we have to start making them now.”
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