It's bad enough for some propeller airplanes to be described as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could start having a dig at business airplane flying on everything from cooking oil to liquefied algae.
With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from rising oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to find feasible alternatives to standard kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to numerous types of biofuel.
Not remarkably, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel use in 2008. This was quickly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too poor for growing mainstream foodstuffs.
jatropha curcas is a genus of around 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the family Euphorbiaceae.
In 2007 Goldman Sachs mentioned Jatropha 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 aerial significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation relocated to perform research study and advancement into the usage of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as strategic specialists for the task.
The most recent airline company to start try out new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually conducted internal US flights using a mix 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 advancement has been the relocation far from biofuels which contend head on with food customers consequently avoiding a price spiral. Not so long ago, a rise in use of biofuels in automobiles triggered a spike in maize costs as US farmers diverted excessive corn to fuel processing.
Hopefully in the future, airline companies and vehicle drivers will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended blessing undoubtedly if some individuals wound up starving just to please someone else's green qualifications.