Airlines Concentrate On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

It’s bad enough for some prop airplanes to be explained as being powered by rubber bands. Now the cynics might start having a dig at business airplane flying on whatever from cooking oil to liquefied algae.

With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from rising oil rates and environmental legislation, the race is on to find feasible options to conventional kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.

Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British aviation pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with restricted biofuel use in 2008. This was quickly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used various blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives consisting of some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil considered too poor for growing mainstream foodstuffs.

Jatropha is a genus of roughly 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the household Euphorbiaceae.

In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha curcas as one of the very best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to drought and bugs, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation moved to perform research and development into using biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as tactical consultants for the job.

The current airline company to begin try out brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has conducted internal US flights utilizing a blend of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mix, it is claimed, can cut harmful emissions by 10%.

One truly motivating advancement has actually been the relocation far from biofuels which compete head on with food customers thus avoiding a rate spiral. Not so long earlier, a rise in usage of biofuels in cars triggered a spike in maize costs as US farmers diverted excessive corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airline companies and drivers will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended blessing indeed if some people wound up starving simply to please somebody else’s green qualifications.