Airlines Focus On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum
It’s bad enough for some propeller aircrafts to be explained as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could begin having a dig at industrial aircraft flying on whatever from cooking oil to melted algae.
With the civil aviation industry under increasing pressure from rising oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to find feasible alternatives to standard kerosene and these so far seem to boil down to numerous kinds of biofuel.
Not surprisingly, the very first trials of alternative fuel were initiated by British aviation 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 poor for growing mainstream foods.
Jatropha is a genus of around 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the household Euphorbiaceae.
In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha curcas as one of the very best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to drought and bugs, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil.
Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to perform research and development into using biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would act as strategic experts for the project.
The current airline company to start explore brand-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 mix, it is claimed, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.
One really motivating advancement has actually been the relocation far from biofuels which complete head on with food consumers thus avoiding a price spiral. Not so long back, a surge in use of biofuels in vehicles caused a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.
Hopefully in the future, airline companies and vehicle will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended blessing indeed if some individuals wound up starving just to please somebody else’s green credentials.
