Aviation can be far more sustainable right now, with Maxime Meijers of Estuaire

Meet Maxime Meijers, co-founder of Estuaire, a company that is working across the aviation industry to reduce its climate effects.

In this episode we talked about:

🛩️ The often overlooked impact of contrails on our climate and how their strategic mitigation can put a dent in aviation's climate footprint 
💰 The power and influence of aviation finance in shaping the sector's environmental trajectory  
🚀 The growth trajectory and ambitions of Estuaire as they seek to assemble a dream team in the intersection of aviation and sustainability

#ClimateTech #AviationInnovation #Flying #Aviation 

Transcript

Ryan Grant Little: 0:06

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Maxime Meijers is co-founder of Estuaire, which works across all aspects of the aviation industry, from airports to airplane finance, to reduce the climate impact of the industry. I was blown away in this conversation to hear how easy it is to make a major reduction in negative climate outcomes from flying, just through better planning. I reached Maxime in Paris. I am Ryan Grant. Little Thanks for being here, Maxime welcome to the podcast.

Maxime Meijers: 0:39

Glad to be here. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Grant Little: 0:41

So about a year and a half ago, you founded Estuaire, a data platform to track and reduce the climate impact of aviation. Talk a bit about the product itself and what kind of problem you're solving.

Maxime Meijers: 0:54

Yeah, sure. So we are building a data platform at Estuaire and our core knowledge is really data fusion technology and climate modeling. So aviation is incredibly transparent as a sector, right? You can track any flights on a mobile application, and so we leverage that transparency. You can take flight trajectories, you can take digital weather, aircraft passenger load factors so basically all sorts of data layers and put them on top of one another to build a kind of aviation and climate digital twin, and that's what we're up to. And we collaborate with the full aviation value chain. So think airlines, airports, aviation finance companies, aircraft builders and we help them monitor their climate efforts and take the best decisions based on that data.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:54

I'd love to hear a bit about the numbers in the space. I think everybody knows when they hop on a Ryanair flight for a short holiday to Sicily, like I just did last week, that they're contributing to the climate crisis. But for context, how bad is the aviation industry kind of, in raw numbers, and also relative to other industries, how big is the problem?

Maxime Meijers: 2:15

Okay, so aviation globally, if we just speak about CO2 emissions, stands at 900 million tons of CO2. That's direct emissions from aircraft engines commercial aircraft engines in the world in a year, and that picked up significantly since the COVID crisis. Now that globally represents about 2.5% of the worldwide CO2 emissions. But the climate impact of aviation does not stop with CO2 emissions. You also have to look at the so-called non-CO2 emissions, out of which a large contributor are contrails, so the white clouds behind aircraft, and we especially focus on those effects because we think they are the most ripe for reduction in this decade. And so, putting it all together, you can estimate that aviation is responsible for 4% of the world's anthropogenic global warming.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:21

I wanted to ask you about that. So contrails or condensation trails left behind planes? So what's interesting about this issue?

Maxime Meijers: 3:27

So we've all seen right white clouds behind aircraft with this linear shape, and so not all contrails are bad.

Maxime Meijers: 3:52

So what happens is when aircraft fly high enough, sometimes in very humid and very cold air, so the water condenses and forms those little tiny ice crystals which really compose the cloud.

Maxime Meijers: 4:06

Now the cloud has two effects.

Maxime Meijers: 4:08

So on one side it reflects sunlight, so it has a cooling effect actually, and on the other side it traps heat that would have normally gone from Earth into space.

Maxime Meijers: 4:19

So there's a warming and a cooling effect, and what we're able to do is estimate that balance between cooling and warming on a flight per flight basis. That's during the day, but at night there is only the warming component that remains because there's no sunlight anymore, and so that's why, globally, contrails have a net warming effect, and the IPCC has been agreeing on this for decades now, but only now do we start having the data and the tools to actually help aircraft navigate around the control areas and avoid forming them when they are especially potent, and an interesting statistics is that, globally, between 2% and 5% of the flights are responsible of 80% of that effect. So you really need to target. You don't need to reroute or adapt every flight plan, you only need to target the so-called big hits or climate bombs, however you want to call them and actually reroute those flights. So all arguments regarding air traffic congestion and changing a full system are not really valid, because you're only working on a few flights to achieve massive climate savings.

Ryan Grant Little: 5:34

And it's done through rerouting. So that's the solution to it. Or are there other kind of aviation tricks? Or is it about how the plane is flown or how the engines are used? Can a plane turn off its contrail if it wants? You can work on several levers.

Maxime Meijers: 5:48

Actually, you could distinguish two categories. So first of all, you could have like a strategic approach and say, okay, I have this flight, I could maybe, you know, if I have the flexibility take another aircraft or another engine type, or if it's not a scheduled flight but a charter flight, I could choose to fly it in the morning instead of the afternoon or at night. I could also choose to load a specific control prone flight with what is called sustainable aviation fuel, which not only provides reduction CO2 reductions on its life lifecycle, but also is a cleaner fuel, and because it's cleaner, it will lead to a shorter cloud and contrail lifetime. So those are all strategic decisions that you can take pre-flight and then you can take tactical in-flight decisions. You can check in-flight where the contrail areas are and you could adapt the flight altitude, which would be a pilot decision, in order to avoid the contrail area and avoid that climate effect.

Ryan Grant Little: 6:54

And we believe the sector needs to act on all effects Okay, so this is also probably providing lots of fodder to the QAnon people out there who think that there's more happening with contrails when they hear that they can be modulated, but that's a whole other topic. I wanted to ask about you specifically and the team, because, if I put my investor hat on as a kind of team market or team problem, fit, estruera is really incredible, and that is founded by both you and your brother, nikola, and both of you have masters of science in aerospace engineering. You're both pilots, you both worked in the aviation industry and at airports on the ground and you come from an aviation family. So where does this passion in your family for flying come from?

Maxime Meijers: 7:43

I guess it comes first of all, I mean, it comes from growing in Toulouse, which is a city that lives with aerospace. There's like a strong history, lots of companies that worked and that have built airplanes that started over there, and then, I guess, with a personal touch, what I also like about aviation is the change of perspective that it brings, the better, the taking a higher stance and understanding better the world we live in by connecting it actually. And that's what deeply motivates me. And so I've looked at different aspects and previously at Airbus, I was working on electric aviation actually and trying which is one lever actually to improve the climate footprint of the sector.

Maxime Meijers: 8:23

But after four years there I wanted to take a step back, look at the full picture, truly answer the question what is the full climate impact of an individual flight? You know, taking CO2, non-co2, the life cycle effects as well, right, what about building that aircraft? It costs a lot of energy, et cetera, and answering that question quantitatively. And that led us ultimately to work on non-CO2 effects, on contrails and the other non-CO2 effects, because non-CO2 is not only contrails, and we joined forces with my brother, so he comes actually, so I brought kind of also the aviation and environmental layer, but he's really the tech expert on flight data analytics. He did a master thesis at MIT and later worked in an AI company looking at, you know, satellite imagery analytics, and so there, with this technical background and the aviation and sustainability angle, we found that there was like something to be done.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:23

Yeah, and so Toulouse. Is that where Airbus comes from, in fact?

Maxime Meijers: 9:27

Yeah, airbus comes from Toulouse. So Airbus is a European company, but it's true that the headquarters are in Toulouse and some aircrafts are manufactured in Toulouse. One of them is only made in Canada but, yeah, the short-haul and long-haul models are made in Toulouse at the commercial airport that is also used for regular airlines to fly in and out.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:50

And when you worked for Aerobus, you were based in Munich in Germany and, as you mentioned, you worked on vertical takeoff and landing electric planes, which, first of all, sounds like the coolest thing in the world the coolest job I've heard in a long time. What is that? You know? Whatever you can say about that, I think people are curious about what. That's, how that space is developing. How far from electric taxis are flying electric taxis Are we? And what are other cool things Are you looking at in that space, or did you see that we can kind of look forward to when is our Jetsons moment?

Maxime Meijers: 10:22

Yeah, there's a lot of progress in the space and I'm quite confident that in the in the next year or the following one, we'll start seeing commercial operations. Now I would be a bit more cautious regarding the use cases that we make out of those machines. So those machines are basically yeah, as you said right, electric machines that take off and land vertically, and I really see the first use cases as being public services. Think about carrying a surgeon from hospital to hospital, or even if it's a substitute for helicopters, right. Take the shorter helicopter flights, like I don't know, flying above, like a side-sync flight. A 20-minute side-sync flight, well, could be perfectly done with those machines because they are quiet, there's less energy that is used during the flight and they're electric. So I think it'll be a step-by-step until maybe a Jetson's moment, but I think we need to remain also pragmatic about the first use cases.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:23

Yeah, fair, and I've read a fair bit about these being much more like helicopters in terms of than planes, in a lot of different.

Maxime Meijers: 11:30

you know that carries four people at a time you know a mass transport Cities are looking to connect to their airports with like mass transport systems. So it's either a freeway or a train and maybe that use case I would, you know, postpone a little bit. Yeah, fair, Unless it's for regional connectivity and you go further and you increase the airport catchment area, for example.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:08

I love the idea of it being surgeons or, you know, rushing organs for transplant versus, you know, I don't know bachelor parties or something like that. It's much more heartwarming. And so, you know, there's this a lot of talk in transportation in general, of course, about electrification versus kind of more traditional fuels. I actually had this conversation last week with someone who works in this space and who's talking about aviation, as you know, the role of biofuels in aviation. I mean, my guess is that the answer is probably both. As you know, in so many cases it's and and not or. But I wonder if you could just talk a little bit for those of us not in the space about, you know, is there a race right now between biofuels and electrification and aviation, or are these different use cases as well?

Maxime Meijers: 12:52

No, I think if you speak to any aviation professional right now, they'll answer that it's always end. It's a list of solutions and they'll all play a part and actually there's. If we're honest with ourselves, even putting them side by side, it will be very hard for aviation to meet its climate goals by 2050. But, yes, sustainable aviation fuels, so either biofuels or electrofuels, new types of aircraft powertrains, either battery, electric or hydrogen fuel cells will also have to play a role. Our hydrogen fuel cells will also have to play a role.

Maxime Meijers: 13:29

Simply, on the existing systems, we've been promised for years that efficiencies can be gained from flight operations right, having a smoother trajectories, continuous descent and landing, for example, and those savings. For a large majority they still need to be achieved. And control mitigation as well. Right, addressing those non-CO2 effects which are almost half of aviation's climate impact. So you put all of that side by side and you have a nice curve that goes all the way to 2050. That hits somehow like a net zero target.

Maxime Meijers: 13:58

But behind each of those levers are like massive investments are needed because you have SAF refineries. A new aircraft costs, you know, billions to certify, needs to be saved. That's obviously a prerequisite. So behind each of those technical levers. There's a lot of capex constraints and to us the only one that stands out right now is contrail mitigation. We want to make kind of contrail mitigation the sexy way to reduce aviation's climate impact because it can be done with a software, it can be done on flights today and in a matter of years we can really address right 30 to 40% of aviation's climate impact. If that's done at scale and a lot of people are Wow, those are huge numbers.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:46

Yeah, it's huge numbers. Yeah, on the topic of and versus, or what are some of the other things through the SQR platform that you're tracking. So what are the various ways that you know that your things that you're measuring, that you want to be then managing through it?

Maxime Meijers: 15:02

So, basically, you have to think about our platform as a flight-by-flight analytics and for each flight, you would have contextual information origin, destination. You have the airline, the number of passengers on board, and then you have the climate data. So you have the CO2 emissions, the non-CO2 effects and also lifecycle values, right? What about refining the fuel and delivering it to airports? What about the energy usage at airports? So we have models for each of those components. So think about a platform as kind of dynamic, a life cycle assessment of the sector, right. That speaks to an environmental engineer, right? This life cycle assessment concept. And then the impact of transportation doesn't stop with climate change. You have health issues as well. You need to care about ocean eutrophication, you need to take care about biodiversity. So we see a whole array of other indicators coming up. It's true that one of our priorities as a society is climate change and temperature surface temperature, basically and how it affects our societies, but there's those other effects as well that we gradually add into the platform.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:18

Sure Okay, how noise affects migratory Noise. Yeah, noise is a big one for aviation.

Maxime Meijers: 16:24

Aviation has been doing good progress on noise. When you go near an airport and you see between, like, an old generation aircraft and a new one, the difference is striking actually.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:35

Yeah for sure. So this is a product that's for. You mentioned everything from airlines to airports and everything kind of in between there. You mentioned also the airline finance sector and I'm interested to hear you know. I think that's probably a pretty opaque area for most people who aren't involved in this sector and probably a pretty fascinating space as well. But I wonder how they are involved or what levers we can pull with them to improve the sustainability of the industry.

Maxime Meijers: 17:03

Yeah, so you have to think that it's quite a big area that a few people know of the aviation finance sector.

Maxime Meijers: 17:12

Roughly 50 to 60% of commercial aircraft worldwide are not owned by airlines. They are owned by those lessors, operating lessors or financial companies that list them to airlines, typically on like five to seven years contracts, and then, because an aircraft can be remarketed quite easily, the aircraft goes to like three, four different operators over its lifetime, and so we have this whole array of companies that are kind of financial intermediaries and that airlines need, because airlines run on very thin margins and aircrafts aircraft are very expensive to buy, so they need those partners operating lessors, banks as well, and there's a lot of debt in the space. And so those companies basically sometimes own aircraft that emit, have an impact on climate, but emissions that they don't control because they don't operate the aircraft, and so they need access to data in order to report on what's called their scope three emissions, in that case of leased assets. And so that's where we help characterize the different aircrafts, the different typologies of operations, and in order to drive actually more sustainable investment practices.

Ryan Grant Little: 18:29

Okay, I mean, that's a huge lever also. So I mean that, combined with contrails, contrail prevention could be. We could be talking about huge numbers in terms of CO2 and other forms of reduction. I hadn't thought of the scope three factors there on the financing side. I hadn't thought of the scope three factors there on the financing side.

Maxime Meijers: 18:46

Yeah, and when you see the price of reducing the climate impact of the sector, this will have to rely on financial partners as well. In a similar fashion, the thing is now you're moving, maybe, to a different investment thesis. Right, maybe you're operating a leasing business on aircraft. Has been, you know, study and running since the 80s, 90s. Now you're talking a bit more about a bet on technology. So other investors more from you know the venture side also entering the space and looking at aviation, there's been like a dedicated funds from airlines.

Maxime Meijers: 19:20

For example, jetblue has been active. Emirates Contas in Australia has, have you know, dedicated aviation and sustainability funds, airbus as well Safran Corporate Venture. So those guys all look at future technologies in order to make the right bets. So there's also an array of new investors in the space that are not the legacy financial partners of airlines legacy financial partners of airlines.

Ryan Grant Little: 19:49

Speaking of financing, you're dotting the I's and crossing the T's on your own funding round, which means that you can move away from that process and focus on kind of the operational side of putting that funding to use. What do the milestones sort of in the year or so ahead, look like for you? What are you hoping to accomplish?

Maxime Meijers: 20:04

Yeah, so I mean mean we estuary's mission is to to monitor and reduce the climate impact of aviation and ultimately we'll be judged on a tonnage of co2 equivalent that is avoided. That'll be one of our kpis on top of, you know, financial kpis that we track for the company and that's coming already this year Now, in the very short term. My number one occupation is focused on building a team. Right, we're still young. We're two co-founders, we also have two employees and freelancers, so say, a team of five. But now we want to grow and as founders, we want to build something bigger than ourselves and we want, like rock stars in the aviation and sustainability industry, to join us both on the sales and tech side.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:58

Do you want to talk a little bit about those roles. Let's use this as a chance to reach the audience, because there might be some people out there who are a fit. So go ahead and use the time.

Maxime Meijers: 21:07

Yeah, sure. So on the sales and marketing side, we're looking here for a sales profile and marketing profile as well. We feel our topic is complex and there's a lot of need for education and simplification, as well as sometimes hard to grasp climate metrics, models, concepts. So that's really the role of the marketing person we're looking for. On the tech side, we're looking for a senior data scientist, so someone that has expertise in dealing with flight data, basically and we're also looking for a head of science. We found that, in order to be good, there's so many labs worldwide working on our topic we need to stay connected, get the best out of it, launch, finance PhDs as well in order to develop new models, validate them and bring them to the industry. So keeping that connection with the academic world is extremely important for the future of the company.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:10

And is that the number one need that you have as an early stage company to achieve your mission? Are there other things you're looking for as well? Are there other types of boosts?

Maxime Meijers: 22:20

We're looking for other types of boosts. So we are working on our funding round right now and we also have data expenses. We need to optimize also the cloud computing, but the team remains the number one priority. Very cool.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:35

I assume you probably have those roles posted on your website yes, it's on actually the.

Maxime Meijers: 22:41

We'll market them a little bit more, but it's on actually on. If you look at Station F, our accelerator, and they have like a job board and that's where we post all our offers. They'll soon be on the website and then we market them through like channels, like LinkedIn and other HR platforms.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:01

Station F is the amazing accelerator and space in Paris for startups working on this type of thing. I'll put links to the Station F page in the show notes and, of course, I'll link to you as well, maxime, in LinkedIn, in case people want to get in touch and help out as well. Yeah, maxime, thanks so much for joining.

Maxime Meijers: 23:19

Yeah, thanks for having me on the show I'm happy and thanks for relaying the good word that something can be done in aviation and sustainability.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:28

Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climate tech pod dot com. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.