Another BioFuel Airline Flight

When Richard Branson flew a jet powered partially by biofuel nearly two years ago I wondered if he was just trying to follow a fad that would disappear when it got too expensive. Now it's starting to look like biofuel may be catching on. KLM recently flew a 747 with one engine using a 50/50 mix of biofuel. This flight was a big deal for two reasons: First, they claim their fuel is "sustainable." Second, they operated the flight with 40 of their execs as passengers.

The other significant part of this flight is it coincided with the formation of SkyEnergy, a consortium that aims to develop biofuel as a realistic and economical jet fuel alternative.

The flight lasted 1.5 hours and involved circling around Amsterdam. I've been wondering why airlines have been mixing their biofuel 50/50 with normal jet fuel, but apparently that's the mixture at which no engine tweaking is required for the new fuel. I am still wondering if 50/50 mixes are the plan for the future or if GE and others are working on engines that can operate on 100% biofuel.

The company supplying the biofuel for this flight is a Honeywell subsidiary called UOP. They provided the biofuel for several of the notable test flights that have taken place in the last few years. This time the fuel was made from Camelina which is apparently an inedible plant that grows in places where other important plants wont. That's a valuable quality because biofuel would be pretty pointless if we had to decrease the world food supply to produce it.

So, KLM has joined a list of several other companies (and the US military) to fly a jet using biofuel. They may soon be followed by British Airways. Even that doesn't seem to be the end of it. DARPA has awarded UOP a contract to supply 600,000 gallons of biofuel to the USAF and US Navy for testing.

Considering that military jets burn fuel at rates of up to tens of thousands of gallons per hour, this won't last long, but I'd still say its a good step. It will test UOP's ability to produce their fuels on a large scale and will show whether or not it really is sustainable.

I'll officially go back on my skepticism of last year and say that it looks like biofuels are on their way in. I think it'll still be a long time before we see a revenue-generating passenger flight burning these new fuels in all its engines, but I can see it happening eventually. I still don't see UOP or anyone else as having a good plan to grow enough plants to produce fuel in the quantities that airliners will need. Hopefully, they can find a way to do this though. We'll let you know as we hear more.

Picture via KLM Press Link