Green fuel rises

From all outward appearances it was just another scheduled commercial flight when a Lufthansa Airbus A321 took off from Hamburg in early July en route for Frankfurt. In time though, the flight may be seen as a landmark in the history of aviation, because one of the aircraft’s jet engines was powered by standard kerosene-based jet fuel and the other by a mix of jatropha, camelina and animal fats. It was the first time a commercial airline anywhere has flown passengers on a scheduled route using green fuel.

Suddenly, the commercial aviation industry has got some respite. Rocked by the volatile and rising price of fuel, the world’s airlines are rushing into a series of experiments with biomass in the hope it will prove cheaper, at least in the long run, than the fossil power that has kept them aloft since the pioneering days of flight.

In September, Finnair will start flying out of Amsterdam Schiphol with a hybrid fuel that’s half recycled vegetable oil and half jet fuel, while Britain’s Thomson Airways launched in late July a once-weekly ‘green route’ between Birmingham and Palma.

The industry’s also been kicked into action by carbon-conscious governments, in particular the EU, which will ban jets from January next year unless they reduce carbon emissions to mandated levels. The laws will affect no less than 4,000 airline operators.

And seeing the writing on the wall, industry trade body IATA has thrown its weight into the debate by setting a target of 10 percent biofuel power in just over five years. “Extraordinary progress has been made in the past 12 months,” enthused Tom Vilsack, Barack Obama’s secretary of agriculture at the Paris air show back in June. “I think we’re near a tipping point.”

That may be, but for too many years the industry was asleep at the joystick as all its aeronautical science went into making aircraft lighter, faster and bigger while the fuel basically stayed the same. For this, environmentalists largely blame reluctance of oil firms to invest in a potentially planet-saving technology.

Already, the race to develop biofuel in sufficient quantities and at commercial prices is turning into a geo-political battle for supremacy. The US regards sustainably-powered aviation as a security issue, which is why the defence department has started filling some of its fighters with biofuel. Simultaneously, China is working up its own standards for biofuel while attacking the EU’s forthcoming penalties for “dirty” aircraft.

High stakes are involved. America’s BioJet International has a $6bn, 10-year investment programme in place to develop a vertical supply chain from biomass farming to the fuel pump at an affordable price. Currently  biofuel is at least 60 percent more expensive than jet fuel. The high development costs involved are already taking casualties – in July, Germany’s Choren Industries, a leader in biofuel technology, collapsed into administration. Meanwhile, another ecologically advanced aircraft has set the cat among the pigeons. In June, a two-seater flew out of Vienna powered mainly by a Siemens-developed battery to make the first hybrid-powered flight. It took off and landed almost in silence, which may be the next breakthrough for people who live near airports.