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Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr is leaning into the post-Covid travel boom while directing its profits into lower-carbon aircraft.

“The message I think from the top this year is ‘Aviation is back. Mobility is back,’” he said. “We have seen nothing like this in terms of turnaround in our almost 100 years.”

Spohr is more bullish on fuel efficiency to lower emissions than on sustainable aviation fuel, which he says isn’t scaling up fast enough and is too reliant on carbon-intensive manufacturing processes.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It originally appeared in POLITICO Pro.

What’s happening with Lufthansa? Feel free to get us up to speed.

We have the highest market cap this year, with one exception, which was 2017. We actually didn’t only pass on our large two hub competitors in Europe, we basically have the market cap of the two of them combined in London and Paris.

What are we gonna do with our success? Basically, investing. The biggest step forward to zero emissions in 2050 and reducing emissions by 50 percent by 2030 is through new aircraft. Any new aircraft emits about 30 percent less CO2 than the aircraft previously. We have 200 airplanes on order: 100 are wide-bodies, and out of those 100, 60 are Boeing aircraft. That’s the biggest order we’ll probably ever have, but the sustainability is going to grow because all these aircraft are a huge step forward.

The second step forward in reducing our footprint — about 2.8 percent of global emissions — is SAF. There’s no other propulsion technology in sight, so we’ll need to continue to burn fuel in our engines, but that fuel could be synthetic fuel. We are the number one customer in Europe for SAF, but it’s only 1 percent of our fuel. So it must be scaled up enormously.

It cannot be done on bio-based fuel, it can only be done on e-fuels, which will take a huge amount of clean electrical energy. That’s not going to happen in Germany, but it happens year-round in some other places in the world. Since this is a global challenge, climate is a global industry, we also need a level playing field around the world like the U.S., for example, that does incentivize using SAF. The IRA was a huge step forward in this regard.

You said that even though you’re the top SAF consumer at this point, you’re still using a low percentage of fuel. What is Lufthansa doing to increase that volume?

Obviously, I’m on the demand side of SAF, right? I cannot produce it, I can only ask for it. I raise this topic wherever I go and speak to politicians. If all the SAF in the world were available to Lufthansa, how long would it last? What do you think? Five days. All the SAF we currently have in Europe would last us one half-day. So the amount available is nowhere close to where we need to be.

What the U.S. is doing in simplifying not only the use of SAF, but also the production of SAF, is the right way of going. This can only be done between the industry and government, where the U.S. I think is setting a good example.

What is the bottleneck? Is it that it’s too expensive, so they’re not producing much, or is it that they cannot produce enough? Or both?

You can either have bio-based SAF — which you cannot scale up because eventually the biomass is gone, you cannot have any more French fries being fried at McDonalds — so the only one you can scale up is e-fuels. For that, you need huge amounts of clean electrical energy.

Fifty percent of Germany’s electrical energy still comes from fossil fuels. It doesn’t make sense to use fossil fuels to produce electricity to then produce SAF; you literally lose an efficiency of one to six along the way. That is not the way to go.

You need to go to a place where you have sufficient clean electric energy, which will not be in the middle of Europe. The fuel is not coming out of the ground in the middle of Europe either right now. It comes from the Gulf, it comes from the U.S., comes from Venezuela. The industry is used to producing fuel in a different location than where you need it. This can only be done with a huge effort by governments and the energy industry, and for them it’s probably cheaper to produce fossil fuels. But the demand is there, there’s even now blending mandates in Europe, so the demand will go up. I’m very worried that we will not have sufficient amounts.

Delta was hit with a lawsuit recently over carbon neutral claims. What’s the significance of that lawsuit and allegations of greenwashing more generally?

It’s not for me to mention any competitor, but there were quite a few competitors who I think put the sustainability topic in the marketing department, not in the research department, where I put it. So one European low-cost carriers announced that all flights will be compensated, and it turns out they’re spending 50 euro cents per passenger, which they stopped, by the way. That’s crazy to think that these marketing claims work in the industry where everyone in the industry is now looking behind the scenes.

And I think the trend will go that way because people will not get through with cheating on this one, I’m pretty sure.

You now offer carbon offsetting already built in. What are the offsets?

We do two things. The “Green Fares,” which is what you’re referring to, is a special fare allowing you certain goodies like an extra bag or window seat and it costs a certain percentage more for which we then spend money both on the combination of SAF and carbon compensation. For about 3 percent of our passengers, that’s their choice. Then, on any route you take, you can decide if you want to use carbon compensation or SAF for your flight all the way up to 100 percent SAF on this flight, which I did yesterday for about 400 euros. Of course, technically you couldn’t put the SAF on my flight yesterday, but we see where in the world can we buy SAF and then we make sure we buy an extra whatever you want to put in.

What are your thoughts on the restrictions on short-haul flights in France, where there are high-speed train options and the notion of flight-shaming more generally?

Flight-shaming after Covid basically is gone. After Covid took away our mobility for two years, we all appreciate mobility so much that we don’t flight-shame anymore, which was a big thing at least in Europe before Covid. In the German elections, it was a huge topic. But it’s basically gone, because people appreciate being mobile.

It’s easy to talk about aviation being a problem, but once we answer that we’re only 2.8 percent and how challenging it is, then suddenly priorities go somewhere else where billions spent can create a much higher impact on the environment, which is the way we should do it.

That’s why I’m a big fan of CO2 pricing, emission pricing. But then of course, please for everybody, not for me and my competitor in London and Paris and my friends in Istanbul and Dubai don’t pay, which right now happens. So we need to have a level playing field.

Are you doing anything on supersonic?

Supersonic is very inefficient for its usage and impact on the environment. So I think today’s discussion, including the one we just had the last hour, I don’t see a future with that. It takes too much to bring somebody at supersonic speed from A to B, for just him or her saving a few hours for all that extra fuel. I think in the ‘60s it worked, but not today.

That shows you how honest I am, which usually doesn’t allow you to have a job like I do.

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