Qantas Group, Chief Sustainability Officer, Fiona Messent at the CAPA Airline Leader Summit Australia Pacific 2025

Transcript

Fiona Messent Barker:Fiona, what are you doing to decarbonise Qantas? Getting to net zero for aviation will be incredibly challenging because we are a hard-to-abate sector, which means we don't have many solutions available to us to actually decarbonise. What we do have is the ability to fly newer planes and fly them as efficiently as possible. So that's exactly what we're doing. The second big lever we have is sustainable aviation fuel, and the beauty of SAF is it's drop-in fuel, so it can be produced now and it can be dropped into the engines up to 50% blend with regular jet fuel. And we just need to be able to scale that to the level that we are targeting 10% by 2030 and around 60% by 2050. So we're doing everything we can in our power to be able to invest in the supply chain and really encourage the production of supply here in Australia, but also globally. We're working with government on policy and what it looks like to actually stand up a new industry here in Australia. And we're also working with our corporate partners because they play a really important role as well in signalling that demand in the market, that not only do airlines want to be flying on this, but our corporate customers do as well because they have their own emissions footprints that they're trying to reduce. Government has an incredibly important role to play in the decarbonisation of aviation. Government, we are setting up a whole new industry here in terms of sustainable aviation fuels. So as with any transition fuel or technology or industry, it does require that enabling environment that not only encourages investment in these potentially risky projects in the early days, but it also has to de-risk it for the off-takers as well. And so government has a really important role to play in setting up the industry, in attracting that investment, de-risking the supply, and ensuring that supply gets the level that actually brings the economics down as well, because we do know that SAF is expensive and we can't absorb that as an industry. So there's an important role for government to play. There's an important role for the whole supply chain, frankly, to play. And that's really what we're focusing on at Qantas. In May, the Qantas Group imported 2 million litres of SAF from Malaysia into Sydney Airport. And we did this for a couple of reasons. One was we really wanted to test the infrastructure in Australia. We don't currently produce fuel here in Australia, so this was a really important opportunity for us to not only see what it was like to import the fuel, but then also how do you actually get it through the refinery to blend it and get it into the Jew High at Sydney Airport. So it was really good to do that in partnership with Ampol and Sydney Airport, but also our SAF coalition. So they were really critical in one, signaling that they wanted to see fuel actually, you know, going through the infrastructure in Australia, but also they play a critical role in actually mitigating that cost for us as well. So we thought it was a really successful exercise. it ended up being able to fuel equivalent of 900 flights between Sydney and Auckland. And so that's really great, but we want to be able to pick up more of it, and we want to be able to pick up fuel that's actually produced in Australia as well. Thank you.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.