Newsletter e-kerosene / greenwashing

Dear reader

The program of the new German conservative – social coalition government sets out a new direction for aviation and global warming: “Our goal is to shape the modernization of the aviation industry towards fair competition and decarbonization,” it states, and: “We want to reduce aviation-specific taxes and fees, and reverse the increase in aviation charges.”

When the policy framework weakens and, as a consequence, government revenues for the funding of technology innovations and other climate related measures shrink, it increasingly falls to companies and individuals to fill this gap and avoid the abandoning of the Paris climate goals.

German aviation in court

Unfortunately, the outlook is not promising: Germany’s largest airline Lufthansa was recently convicted by a Cologne Regional Court for misleading statements about its climate related products and impacts. But other airlines are also not particularly honest when informing their customers about their carbon footprint; after all, they risk scoring an own goal with upcoming international regulation. The real and unvarnished climate footprint of flights remains a painful and sensitive topic for the industry. Read more here.

E-kerosene as a solution?

The gap between the Paris climate goals and the necessary progress on one of the central solutions, namely electricity-based power-to-liquid kerosene (e-kerosene or PtL-kerosene), is growing even wider. The new Government program states: “We will immediately abolish the Power to Liquid (PtL) blending mandate that goes beyond the EU ambition.”

Yet incentives would be more important today than ever. Our own PtL plant in Northern Germany still doesn’t function nearly as planned after four years, and our hopes for continuous production, which we were still cautiously optimistic about in summer 2024, have not been materialized. As a consequence, we must also change the atmosfair products: If you offset the CO₂ emissions of your flight with atmosfair as of now, you can still fund the production of carbon-neutral e-kerosene, but we no longer guarantee a specific quantity. Read more here. Currently, we are exploring all alternatives to find solutions, including taking steps against technology providers.

When presenting to audiences at home and abroad, I am sometimes surprised by how little real-world knowledge exists even among industry experts. Consulting firms still draft unabashed growth curves for e-kerosene, and research programs at universities and government commissions take functioning technology and up-scaling for granted. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that some technological concepts get stuck on the way from laboratory to industrial scale. In the worst case, our technology in Northern-Germany could suffer the same fate as the prominent case of Choren from the 2000s in Freiberg, Saxony: a hyped future technology in the field of renewable synthetic fuels, attracting significant investor money, on a path that eventually led to insolvency.

But there is also good news: In a large test facility in Vienna, we have successfully produced additional barrels of raw kerosene through the gasification of waste biomass (Biomass to liquid, BtL). The facility has nominally the same production volume as our PtL plant in Germany, but the technological maturity is significantly higher. Now we are in the process of exploring industrial sites in several developing countries where there is sufficient waste biomass such as wood shells or sewage sludge to build a production facility.

As a non-profit organization, atmosfair is committed to CO₂ abatement and transparency, even when the news isn’t always good. But the path is set: Even if large synfuel projects like Fulcrum in the USA fail and others are postponed and may never enter the implementation phase, burying our heads in the sand is not enough. It may be of little comfort that no other plant successfully produces e-kerosene at an industrial level. But for medium and long-haul air travel, unfortunately, there is no alternative other than to forego a flight.

I want to thank you for your trust. Mitigation of global warming by implementing the green energy transition in developing countries remains atmosfair’s main task. Many in developing countries are already suffering severely from climate change, while having contributed little to none to it. Reducing CO₂ here and at the same time providing tangible everyday improvements for people and the economy is our mission. That’s why we continue, even when it’s sometimes difficult.

Thank you for your support,

Dietrich Brockhagen

CEO atmosfair

Lufthansa and co: Why the greenwashing in CO₂ calculations?

With its judgment in March 2025, a Cologne Regional Court made it clear that Lufthansa’s offset carbon calculator shows customers only a fraction of their flights’ climate footprint and conceals the largest part; the one caused by so-called non-CO₂ emissions.

It’s astonishing that it took almost 20 years before a court established this. As early as 2008, newspapers reported in detail how Lufthansa rejected atmosfair when choosing its offset provider, because atmosfair calculated the full climate impact of flights, while the chosen provider MyClimate from Switzerland did not.

Science has been clear on this for decades: Non-CO₂ emissions such as nitrogen oxides, sulfur compounds, or soot are produced in aircraft engines and cause effects at high altitudes such as ozone formation and the formation of contrails and cirrus clouds. These have been intensively researched since the 1990s, NASA and the German Aerospace Center DLR among others being on the scientific forefront in this field.

These effects were quantified early on. In 1996, Greenpeace estimated that the total climate footprint of air traffic, including its non-CO₂ emissions, was three times higher than the one caused by its CO₂ emissions alone. In 1999, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) developed a new metric to measure the non-CO₂ effects of air traffic and determined a multiplier in the range of 2-4, meaning a double to four times higher total climate impact of aviation including the non-CO₂ effects compared to its pure CO₂ emissions. Since then, research has continuously evolved, with some effects newly discovered, some found weakened, others strengthened, but all determined with increasing precision. Today, we have reached the point where this multiplier for non-CO₂ is no longer quantitatively dominated by the remaining uncertainties of physical effects such as optical density of contrails or radiative forcing through ozone formation in the lower stratosphere, but by normative settings: Do I determine the warming impact of emissions for the next 20, 50 or 100 years? Do I measure climate impact by the warming caused at ground level or by the radiative forcing in the atmosphere? The Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences excellently and comprehensibly summarized the state of knowledge and its meaning in a 2021 publication.

Now, Lufthansa is not the only German or international airline that has been understating the climate impact of its flights for many years.

The reason becomes clear when we look back to 2022: At that time, the EU Parliament mandated the EU Commission to submit a proposal by the end of 2026 on how non-CO₂ emissions can be integrated into the mandatory EU Emissions Trading System for airlines. As long as this EU Commission proposal is not transposed into law, non-CO₂ emissions will be included in the ETS with simple multipliers on pure CO₂ emissions from 2028 onwards. In addition, a measurement and reporting system for non-CO₂ emissions in the EU will take effect from 2025.

It is hence clear that non-CO₂ will soon become expensive for airlines: Having to pay about three times as much as today is not exactly news which airlines cherish.

The airline lobby didn’t remain idle: Willie Walsh, head of the global airline association IATA, approached the EU Commission in 2024, asking to change the new reporting system from mandatory to voluntary. Because, of course, science wasn’t advanced enough yet; furthermore, there would be legal concerns about the EU charging foreign airlines.

Apart from the fact that the EU Court of Justice had already green lighted this matter, and that science and politics are used to deal with remaining scientific uncertainties, as demonstrated in the case of anti-smoking adverts on cigarette packages: IATA shows that the issue of non-CO₂ emissions is so touchy for airlines that even unsuspecting measures like voluntary carbon offsetting are suffering: No airline today offers voluntary CO₂ offsetting using the full climate footprint, because doing so would drastically reduce its credibility when alleging scientific gaps in the upcoming legislative and lobbying processes.

What does this mean for us? atmosfair calculates CO₂ and non-CO₂ emissions according to the actual and established scientific understanding and therefore several times higher than Lufthansa or other German and international airlines. Clearly, given the political arena described above, no airline wants to offer their passengers atmosfair offsetting.

However, as a non-profit organization, we are primarily committed to climate protection and not to maximizing revenue. In the long term, climate only wins, if prices of air fares speak the ecological truth. Therefore, it is more important to us and our patrons to make the full climate impact transparent to passengers rather than taking the cheap cop out. atmosfair patron Prof. Klaus Töpfer, who passed away last year, supported the atmosfair decision against Lufthansa in 2008, even when this harmed atmosfair by closing some doors during that important phase of inception. He summed it up at the time: “We must always be ready to talk. But this clearly is a no-go.”

Green kerosene: Pilot plant in Northern Germany struggles with Power to Liquid technology

In summer 2024, we were still cautiously optimistic: We announced to the press that our plant had produced a total of 5 tons of synthetic crude kerosene in the four years since its opening in 2021. This was significantly less than the 300 tons annually planned at the opening, but, as everybody knows, first steps are always the hardest. “The technology is not mature and has yet to show that it can overcome important hurdles for scaling up,” we said publicly a year ago. We were aware that until then, the plant had mainly operated in a simplified mode and the actual mode was yet to come. Additionally, testing showed that refineries did not accept the synthetic crude because it was out of specification. Some potential causes could be ruled out early: We use industry standard hydrogen as feedstock and had already switched to CO₂ at food-grade quality as a feedstock after early sulfur contaminations in the CO₂ stream of the nearby biogas plant. Also, our down times in feedstock supply had been reduced to a few days per year.

Today, almost a year later, things unfortunately look hardly better. Little synthetic crude has been added, and the actual operating mode remains a challenge.

Our plant is not the only one having problems. In Hamburg, a refinery uses identical technology and has not reported on any production output so far.

We are currently weighing options for next steps: This could involve converting our PtL plant to a new production route (Gas to Liquid via plasmalysis using the biogas available on-site) but also initiating legal action against our technology supplier. In general, we show much goodwill and have an understanding for new technologies but nevertheless, we demand that our technology supplier takes his share of the responsibility. The coming weeks will show whether we’ll have to enforce our claims in court.

This does not change atmosfair’s fundamental mission: We continue to build pilot plants where technologies are still new to spread them in developing countries. This includes photovoltaics with batteries and mini-grids for villages, waste-to-energy plants for electricity and biogas from landfills, production of biochar through pyrolysis with simultaneous power generation, and other new or little-tested concepts. This also goes for the production of green kerosene, for which many developing countries are well endowed: Both electricity-based kerosene due to high solar radiation in the solar belt of the earth and BtL kerosene due to large amounts of unused residual biomass have good chances in developing countries to foster both energy transition and the economic development of these countries.