A blog post from Accenture, ‘Shell, AMEX, Energy Web Foundation and Accenture create new green fuel platform’ outlines the technology behind ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel (SAF). SAF promises to be usable in today’s airplanes without any modifications, reducing lifecycle emissions by ‘up to 80%’. When SAF is available, the ‘Avelia’ software platform will provide corporate travelers with a way to authenticate, record and report the emissions reduction benefits of SAF. Accenture modestly describes the Avelia platform as ‘where technology meets human ingenuity’.
Avelia was launched in June 2022 and is ‘now processing lie (sic) transactions’. The system is described as ‘one of the world’s first blockchain-powered digital SAF book-and-claim solutions for business travel’. Accenture, Shell and the Energy Web Foundation cooperated on developing the platform with Accenture implementing the blockchain component. Blockchain is said to provide ‘transparent tracking of the different environmental attributes that SAF delivers’. The platform is also claimed to ‘demonstrated the credibility of the book-and-claim model and the use of blockchain to ensure secured allocation of SAF’s environmental advantages to companies and airlines’*.
Shell is said to be making significant investments in the production and supply of SAF and has an ambition that SAF will account for 10% of its total aviation fuel sales by 2030.
* The original version of the article offered a link to a ‘Full Report’ on Avelia that gave a 404. We pinged the Accenture team and were told … ‘Many apologies, there is actually no full report related to this platform unfortunately.’
Comment – the Avelia team are clearly not au fait with our editor Neil McNaughton’s views on blockchain as a certification mechanism as expressed in his seminal ‘Blockchain is bullshit’ editorial. Briefly, while blockchain can unambiguously assign a unique token to a non fungible object in the real world, this is a futile activity for anything fungible … like ‘SAF’!
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