Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

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

With the civil air travel market under increasing pressure from rising oil prices and ecological legislation, the race is on to find feasible alternatives to standard kerosene and these up until now seem to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the very first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel use in 2008. This was quickly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives consisting of some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too poor for growing mainstream foods.

Jatropha is a genus of roughly 175 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 very best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to drought and insects, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to bring out research study and development into the usage of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as strategic consultants for the job.

The most recent airline to begin try out brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has carried out 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 damaging emissions by 10%.

One actually encouraging advancement has actually been the relocation away from biofuels which compete head on with food customers thereby avoiding a rate spiral. Not so long earlier, 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 motorists will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed blessing certainly if some individuals ended up starving simply to satisfy another person’s green qualifications.