Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

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

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

Not remarkably, 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 rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each utilized different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil considered too bad for growing mainstream foods.

Jatropha 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 mentioned Jatropha curcas as one of the very best prospects 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 study and advancement into using biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as tactical experts for the task.

The newest airline to begin experimenting with new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually performed internal US flights using a blend of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is declared, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.

One really motivating advancement has actually been the relocation far from biofuels which compete head on with food consumers thus preventing a . Not so long ago, a rise in usage of biofuels in cars and trucks triggered a spike in maize rates 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 mixed true blessing certainly if some people wound up starving simply to please another person’s green qualifications.