Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

It’s bad enough for some propeller airplanes to be described as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics might begin having a dig at business aircraft flying on everything from cooking oil to liquefied algae.

With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from increasing oil costs and ecological legislation, the race is on to discover viable options to standard kerosene and these up until now seem to come down to different types of biofuel.

Not surprisingly, the very 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 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 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 dry spell and bugs, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation moved to perform research and development into using to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as strategic consultants for the task.

The latest airline company to begin explore brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually performed internal US flights utilizing a mix of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is claimed, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.

One truly motivating advancement has actually been the move away from biofuels which contend head on with food consumers thus avoiding a rate spiral. Not so long back, a rise in usage of biofuels in automobiles triggered a spike in maize costs as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airline companies and vehicle drivers will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed true blessing indeed if some individuals wound up starving simply to satisfy somebody else’s green qualifications.