Airlines Concentrate On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum
It's bad enough for some propeller aircrafts to be referred to as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could begin having a dig at business airplane flying on whatever from cooking oil to melted algae.
With the civil air travel industry under increasing pressure from rising oil costs and ecological legislation, the race is on to find viable options to standard kerosene and these so far appear to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.
Not remarkably, the very first trials of alternative fuel were started by British aviation leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with restricted biofuel use in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each utilized different blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives consisting of some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil considered too bad for growing mainstream foods.
is a genus of roughly 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the family Euphorbiaceae.
In 2007 Goldman Sachs pointed out Jatropha jatropha curcas as one of the finest candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and insects, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil.
Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation relocated to carry out research and development into using biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as tactical experts for the project.
The current airline to start experimenting with new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has performed internal US flights using a mix of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mix, it is claimed, can cut harmful emissions by 10%.
One really encouraging development has been the relocation far from biofuels which compete head on with food consumers consequently preventing a cost spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in use of biofuels in cars and trucks triggered a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.
Hopefully in the future, airlines and motorists will focus biofuel consumption on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed true blessing certainly if some people ended up starving just to satisfy somebody else's green qualifications.