It's bad enough for some propeller airplanes to be referred to as being powered by rubber bands. Now the skeptics could begin having a dig at commercial aircraft flying on everything from cooking oil to melted algae.
With the civil aviation industry under increasing pressure from increasing oil prices and environmental legislation, the race is on to find feasible alternatives to conventional kerosene and these up until now appear to come down to various kinds of biofuel.
Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were initiated by British air travel leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic began London to Amsterdam flights with restricted biofuel use in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha curcas which can grow in soil thought about too poor for growing mainstream foodstuffs.
jatropha curcas is a genus of approximately 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 best prospects for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and insects, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil.
Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to carry out research study and advancement into using biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as tactical specialists for the project.
The current airline company to begin try out new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually 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 damaging emissions by 10%.
One truly motivating development has been the relocation far from biofuels which compete head on with food consumers thus avoiding a cost spiral. Not so long back, a rise in use of biofuels in automobiles caused a spike in maize prices as US too much corn to fuel processing.
Hopefully in the future, airline companies and motorists will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended blessing indeed if some people ended up starving just to satisfy another person's green qualifications.
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Airlines Concentrate On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum
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