Aircraft

United Airlines is looking beyond plans to demonstrate a 50% gas-to-liquid synthetic fuel blend on an Airbus A320 flight from Denver in June to how airlines will be able to secure adequate supplies of gas-to-liquid kerosene for future operations.

Robert Sturtz, United's managing director of strategic sourcing-fuel, told Flight International that fuel companies may not be prepared to risk investing in a new fuel, so he wants to discuss with other airlines the possibility of carriers supporting a production plant to produce scalable amounts of gas-to-liquid kerosene.

Sturtz says United expects to be the first US carrier to use a gas-to-liquid kerosene blend in revenue service with a late August flight, assuming certificating body ASTM International approves 50% gas-to-liquid kerosene blends in the middle of this year. The route and whether one or both engines will use the synthetic blend have yet to be decided.

© United Airlines

Qatar Airways is also getting ready to test a gas-to-liquid kerosene blend on a revenue flight during the second half of this year, probably on an Airbus A340-600 operating between London and Doha.

Those two revenue flights will be the first to use a gas-to-liquid kerosene blend and come more than a year after Airbus conducted an A380 trial with one Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine burning a 40% blend of gas-to-liquid and standard jet fuel made by Shell International. Airbus expects ASTM to certificate a 100% gas-to-liquid fuel by 2013.

United is working with synthetic fuel producer Rentech on the A320 trial and commercial flight. Qatar has been working with Airbus, Rolls-Royce, Qatar Petroleum, fuel company Woqod and Shell International since November 2007.

Gas-to-liquid contributes to the diversity of aviation fuel supply in the near term, but Qatar is also interested in biomass-to-liquid kerosene in the long term, Schroeder says.

Qatar wants to establish the viability of gas-to-liquid and then move to other alternatives, says senior manager of fuel optimisation and environment Capt Chris Schroeder, although a timeline for biomass-to-liquid testing has not been determined.

Last year several airlines - including Air France-KLM, Air New Zealand, All Nippon Airways, Cargolux, Continental Airlines, Gulf Air, Japan Airlines, Scandinavian Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, which claim to collectively account for 15-20% of commercial jet fuel use - joined forces to form a Boeing-co-ordinated biofuels initiative, the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group, which aims to at least partially replace fossil fuels with biofuels from 2013.