Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

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

With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from rising oil costs and legislation, the race is on to find practical options to traditional kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to numerous types of biofuel.

Not surprisingly, the very 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 use in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each utilized various blends of routine 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 curcas 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 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 major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation moved to perform research and development into using biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as strategic specialists for the job.

The current airline company to start explore brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually carried out internal US flights utilizing a blend 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 development has actually been the relocation far from biofuels which contend head on with food consumers thus avoiding a rate spiral. Not so long back, a surge 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, airlines and drivers will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended blessing undoubtedly if some people ended up starving just to please somebody else’s green qualifications.