How Much Money Could Airlines Make Selling Carbon Offsets from Contrail Avoidance

Contrails, high-altitude ice crystal clouds, are formed in specific atmospheric conditions by water vapor and soot emissions from jet engines. Contrails reflect back to Earth outgoing thermal radiation that would otherwise escape into space resulting in an estimated 2% contribution to the Earth’s total anthropogenic (i.e. human-made) global warming. Studies show that on an average day in the U.S. airspace, 15% of the flights generate contrails and that an increase of Cruise Flight Level by 2000’ can prevent contrail formation. One way to incentivize aircraft operators to take explicit actions to eliminate contrails is to enable aircraft operators to sell the CO2-equivalent of contrail avoidance as a "carbon offset.This paper describes a method for calculating the CO2-equivalent of a contrail avoidance maneuver as a carbon offset and estimating the revenue potential of a contrail avoidance action. A contrail-generating domestic flight operator (e.g. fractional/private jet, or airline) would generate between $50 and$150 per nautical mile of contrail using a climate-forcing window of 20 years and the Global Temperature Potential (GTP) and the Global Warming Potential (GWP) metrics respectively. For 2022, assuming an average of 5% of US domestic airline flights per day were eligible for legitimate contrail navigational avoidance for 50 n.m. contrails, US domestic airlines would have generated between $994M (GTP-20) and$2,983M (GPW-20). This is between 0.5% and 1% of total US airline revenue in 2022. The challenges and implications of estimating the equivalent carbon offset, the limitations, and future work are discussed.