Q&A: Amex’s Nicole Sautter on decarbonizing aviation

A blockchain-based initiative called Avelia, developed by Shell Aviation in collaboration with American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), is working to reduce the environmental impact of the aviation industry.

This program connects airlines and businesses with SAF and provides trackable environmental attributes to help decarbonize air travel for individuals and businesses.

Nicole Sautter, Director of Global Sustainability at Amex GBT, is leading the company’s efforts on this front.

With extensive experience in travel and sustainability, she is dedicated to creating a more sustainable future of travel, with a particular focus on decarbonizing aviation.

She shares her insights with Sustainability Magazine.

What is Amex GBT and how does it positively contribute to lower emissions and energy efficiency?

Amex GBT is the world’s leading travel, expenses, meetings and events software and services company.

With almost 20,000 customers of all industries and sizes, we are responsible for managing business travel for millions of people around the globe every year – we move the world of work.

We are relentlessly focused on driving measurable environmental progress and helping customers make business travel more sustainable.

Through our marketplace, we help aggregate our customers’ demand and connect them with our network of preferred suppliers and business partners.

We offer solutions that help customers track and report carbon emissions from business travel, influence traveler choices during the booking process, procure more environmentally by adding a price on carbon emissions from business travel, residual emissions through independent, to offset third-party verified offsets and ultimately invest in net zero through decarbonization solutions and SAF.

We are helping move the industry towards net zero by accelerating the decarbonization of aviation with SAF and unlocking investment. We are committed to making SAF available for business travel as usual.

Today, SAF accounts for less than 1% of all aviation fuel used worldwide. We envision a future in which billions of gallons of SAF will replace fossil fuel.

Such a transformation is only possible with a public-private partnership. In order for SAF quantities to increase meaningfully, investments must be aligned with supply and demand in order to develop new technologies, production routes and sustainable raw materials.

The private sector can help scale SAF through the power of procurement.

What impact will the new SAF commitments from the UK government and other countries have on the energy and aviation sectors?

SAF is widely seen as a critical solution to reducing emissions from air travel and achieving the industry’s net zero target by 2050.