Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

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

With the civil air travel market under increasing pressure from increasing oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to find feasible options to standard kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to numerous types of biofuel.

Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British aviation leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with minimal biofuel usage 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 considered too poor for growing mainstream foods items.

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

In 2007 Goldman Sachs mentioned Jatropha curcas as one of the best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and insects, and produces seeds including 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to perform research study and development into the use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would act as strategic specialists for the project.

The current airline company 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 mixture, it is declared, can cut harmful emissions by 10%.

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

Hopefully in the future, airlines and vehicle drivers will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a combined blessing certainly if some individuals wound up starving just to please somebody else’s green credentials.