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 liquefied algae.

With the civil air travel market under increasing pressure from rising oil rates and environmental legislation, the race is on to discover viable alternatives to conventional kerosene and these so far appear to come down to numerous kinds of biofuel.

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

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 jatropha curcas as one of the very best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and bugs, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation relocated to perform research and development into making use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would act as strategic experts for the project.

The most recent airline company to start experimenting with brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has actually carried out internal US using 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 motivating advancement has actually been the move away from biofuels which complete head on with food customers consequently preventing a price spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in usage 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 motorists will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended blessing indeed if some individuals ended up starving just to please another person’s green credentials.