International Airlines Group (IAG) and Microsoft are continuing their partnership to lower lifecycle carbon emissions by extending their 2023 co-funded purchase agreement for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by five years.
Under the new terms, Microsoft will co-fund an additional 39,000 tons of SAF that will help reduce lifecycle carbon emissions by approximately 113,000 tons.
The extension to the agreement enables Microsoft to address Scope 3 lifecycle emissions and is the largest and longest Scope 3 SAF agreement to date between an airline and corporate customer, according to publicly available data.
By partnering with its corporate customers, IAG — which includes airlines in Spain, the U.K. and Ireland such as Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, LEVEL and Vueling — is able to purchase more SAF and reduce its Scope 1 emissions.
Microsoft is also co-funding SAF that is used by the Group’s airlines to ship data center components globally in partnership with Microsoft’s freight forwarders.
“We’re pleased to work with like-minded organisations such as Microsoft to expand efforts to reduce flying lifecycle emissions,” said Jonathon Counsell, IAG’s Group Sustainability Officer, in a statement. “Long-term agreements help encourage much-needed funding in SAF production, something that IAG is championing through our investment in global SAF projects such as LanzaJet.”
“We are taking our collaboration with IAG further, extending our SAF purchase agreement to bring Microsoft closer to our goal of being carbon negative by 2030, while ensuring a multi-year commitment to help drive greater SAF production,” said Julia Fidler, Environmental Sustainability Fuel and Materials Decarbonization Lead at Microsoft. “We are pleased to work alongside IAG on efforts to increase demand and make SAF more widely available through our shared long-term purchase agreement.”
The SAF will be produced from used cooking oil and food waste at Phillips 66’s Humberside refinery and from sustainably sourced bioethanol at Georgia-based Freedom Pines Fuels, LanzaJet’s facility in the U.S.