It's bad enough for some prop planes to be explained as being powered by elastic band. Now the might start having a dig at business airplane flying on everything from cooking oil to liquefied algae.
With the civil air travel market under increasing pressure from rising oil rates and environmental legislation, the race is on to find feasible options to standard kerosene and these up until now seem to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.
Not surprisingly, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic began London to Amsterdam flights with minimal biofuel use in 2008. This was quickly 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 considered too poor for growing mainstream foods.
Jatropha is a genus of roughly 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha jatropha curcas), from the family 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 including 27-40% oil.
Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation moved to perform 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 start exploring with brand-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 damaging emissions by 10%.
One actually encouraging development has been the relocation away from biofuels which compete head on with food customers consequently preventing a price spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in usage of biofuels in cars and trucks caused a spike in maize prices as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.
Hopefully in the future, airlines and vehicle drivers will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended true blessing certainly if some people wound up starving just to satisfy somebody else's green credentials.
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Airlines Concentrate On Biofuel Trials Gather Momentum
Claribel Quezada edited this page 2025-01-18 06:07:17 +01:00