Airlines Concentrate 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 might start having a dig at business aircraft flying on everything from cooking oil to melted algae.
With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from increasing oil prices and ecological legislation, the race is on to find feasible options to conventional kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to different types 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 minimal biofuel use in 2008. This was quickly followed by Lufthansa 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 thought about 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 finest prospects for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and bugs, and produces seeds including 27-40% oil.
Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation moved to bring out research and development into the use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would act as strategic specialists for the job.
The to start explore new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has conducted internal US flights utilizing a blend of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is declared, can cut hazardous emissions by 10%.
One really encouraging development has actually been the relocation far from biofuels which complete head on with food customers thereby preventing a cost spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in usage of biofuels in cars triggered a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.
Hopefully in the future, airline companies and drivers will focus biofuel consumption on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed blessing indeed if some people ended up starving just to satisfy somebody else’s green credentials.