Airlines Concentrate On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

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

With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from increasing oil rates and ecological legislation, the race is on to find practical alternatives to standard kerosene and these up until now seem to come down to various types of .

Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were initiated by British air travel leader, 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 utilized different blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too poor for growing mainstream foods.

Jatropha is a genus of around 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 dry spell and pests, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

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

The latest airline to start try out new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually conducted internal US flights using a blend of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mix, it is claimed, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.

One actually motivating development has been the relocation away from biofuels which compete head on with food customers therefore avoiding a cost spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in use of biofuels in automobiles caused a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted excessive corn to fuel processing.

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