Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

It's bad enough for some prop aircrafts to be referred to as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could start having a dig at business airplane flying on whatever from cooking oil to liquefied algae.


With the civil air travel market under increasing pressure from increasing oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to discover feasible alternatives to conventional kerosene and these up until now seem to boil down to different types of biofuel.


Not remarkably, the very first trials of alternative fuel were started by British aviation pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel use in 2008. This was rapidly followed by and Air New Zealand who each utilized various blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil considered too bad for growing mainstream foodstuffs.


jatropha curcas is a genus of around 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 finest candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and bugs, 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 relocated to perform research study and advancement into the use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as strategic specialists for the project.


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


One actually encouraging development has been the move away from biofuels which complete head on with food consumers consequently avoiding a price spiral. Not so long back, a surge in usage of biofuels in cars and trucks triggered a spike in maize prices as US farmers diverted too much 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 blended blessing certainly if some people ended up starving simply to satisfy another person's green credentials.