European Commission publishes list of aircraft operators and their administering states for ETS
Mon 16 Feb 2009 – The European Commission has published a preliminary list of over 2,700 aircraft operators from around the world who may be eligible to join the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) from 2012. The list also includes each operator’s administering Member State, which shows that over 750 operators, more than a quarter of the total, will be allocated to the United Kingdom. Most of the large US, Middle East and Asian airlines are included in the UK list. Latvia, by contrast, will oversee just five carriers.
The list, based on data supplied by Eurocontrol, includes all aircraft operators that have “undertaken a relevant aviation activity on or after 1 January 2006” and it is possible some may have since ceased operations, changed names, or merged with or been acquired by other operators. The list also does not take into consideration whether aircraft operators are included on the Community list of air carriers which may be currently subject to an operating ban because of safety reasons.
The Commission has therefore invited feedback on the accuracy of the list by 31 March 2009 and will subsequently publish updated versions in the future. Under the ETS directive the list will be updated before February 1 each year and the allocation of an aircraft operator to its administering Member State is effective for the entire trading period. All aircraft operators are obliged under the current timetable to submit monitoring plans to their administering state by the end of June.
“We urgently need to see the MRV guidelines, in particular those that will direct airlines how to complete their monitoring plans by the June deadline,” comments IATA spokesman Quentin Browell.
Operators have been allocated to an administering state based on the Member State which issued its operating licence or, in the case of third (non-EU) countries, to which Member State were emissions in the base year (2004-6 average) mostly attributed.
Most of the larger non-EU airlines flying to and from Europe, seemingly regardless of the latter criteria, have been allocated to the United Kingdom. From the US, those include American Airlines, United Airlines and Continental Airlines, although Delta Airlines will come under German administration. Middle East airlines allocated to the UK include Emirates and Etihad, similarly the majority of the international Asian carriers such Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines and Singapore Airlines, as well as South African Airways, Air New Zealand and Qantas.
Given that over a quarter of all operators are to administered by the UK, the country stands to make a tidy income from the auctioning of permits that operators will need to purchase from it to meet their emissions quotas from 2012 based on past emissions. The UK Government has already stated that it will not ‘hypothecate’ (earmark) revenues from auctioning for strictly environmental purposes, despite the EU directive on aviation’s inclusion into the ETS stating they should do so.
Unless the new US administration announces a similar emissions cap-and-trade scheme of its own that includes international aviation and can be linked to the EU ETS, relations between the two countries could enter a difficult phase on the issue. The US Government advice so far to its airlines caught up in the EU ETS directive has been to enter into the process ‘with prejudice’ pending the legislation being passed by the EU Member States, which must take place within the next 12 months.
Of the 126 aircraft operators listed under Irish administration, 95 of them are based in the US, including familiar names like Pepsi Cola, Eli Lilly, Hertz, Harley-Davidson and Kellogg.
Flights excluded from the ETS directive include:
·Those performed by aircraft with a maximum take-off weight of less than 5,700kg;
·Those by operators with fewer than 243 flights for three consecutive four-month periods, or flights with total annual emissions lower than 10,000 tonnes per year; and
·Military, heads of state, government, search & rescue, humanitarian, fire-fighting, medical emergency, scientific research and training.
It is unclear as to how many on the Commission’s provisional list of 2,700 operators will eventually be excluded from the final list.
Quentin Browell from IATA points out that there are a number of anomalies in the list that will need to be changed as, for example, some operators have been allocated to two separate administering states.
