Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

It’s bad enough for some propeller airplanes to be referred to as being powered by elastic band. Now the cynics could start having a dig at business 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 discover viable options to conventional kerosene and these up until now seem to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with minimal biofuel usage in 2008. This was quickly followed by and Air New Zealand who each used different 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 items.

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 cited Jatropha curcas as one of the finest prospects for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to drought and bugs, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial significant 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 airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as tactical experts for the job.

The most recent airline company to begin explore brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually carried out internal US flights utilizing 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 motivating advancement has actually been the relocation far from biofuels which complete head on with food customers thus avoiding a cost spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in usage of biofuels in cars and trucks caused 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 blended true blessing certainly if some people ended up starving just to please another person’s green credentials.