Mission NewEnergy Ltd

Airlines Concentrate On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum

It’s bad enough for some prop airplanes to be described as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could start having a dig at business airplane flying on whatever from cooking oil to melted algae.

With the civil air travel industry under increasing pressure from rising oil prices and environmental legislation, the race is on to discover feasible alternatives to traditional kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to different types of biofuel.

Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic began London to Amsterdam flights with minimal biofuel usage in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each utilized different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives consisting of some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too bad for growing mainstream foodstuffs.

Jatropha is a genus of roughly 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 finest prospects for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and insects, and produces seeds including 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation moved to bring out research study and advancement into making use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would act as tactical experts for the task.

The most recent airline to start try out new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually performed internal US flights using a mix of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is claimed, can cut hazardous emissions by 10%.

One truly encouraging advancement has been the move away from biofuels which contend head on with food consumers thus avoiding a . Not so long back, a rise in use of biofuels in cars caused a spike in maize costs as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airlines and motorists will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed blessing undoubtedly if some individuals ended up starving simply to satisfy another person’s green qualifications.