Airlines Concentrate On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

It’s bad enough for some prop airplanes to be described as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could start having a dig at industrial aircraft flying on everything from cooking oil to melted algae.

With the civil air travel industry under increasing pressure from rising oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to discover practical alternatives to traditional kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose began London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel use in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about 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 prospects for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and insects, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation relocated to carry out research and development into making use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as tactical specialists for the job.

The current airline to begin explore brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually carried out internal US flights using a blend of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is declared, can cut harmful emissions by 10%.

One truly motivating advancement has been the move away from biofuels which complete head on with food consumers consequently preventing a cost spiral. Not so long ago, a surge in use of biofuels in vehicles caused a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airline companies and vehicle drivers 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 simply to satisfy somebody else’s green credentials.