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Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

It’s bad enough for some prop planes to be referred to as being powered by rubber bands. Now the skeptics could start having a dig at commercial airplane flying on everything from cooking oil to melted algae.

With the travel market under increasing pressure from rising oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to discover practical options to conventional kerosene and these up until now seem to come down to numerous kinds of biofuel.

Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were initiated by British air travel pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel usage in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used various blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too bad for growing mainstream foodstuffs.

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

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

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to perform research study and development into making use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as tactical consultants for the task.

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

One really encouraging advancement has actually been the relocation far from biofuels which contend head on with food consumers thus avoiding a cost spiral. Not so long ago, a rise in usage of biofuels in automobiles caused a spike in maize costs as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airlines and vehicle drivers will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed blessing indeed if some people ended up starving just to please another person’s green credentials.