Recently in Biofuel Category

Well I suppose the headline above is pretty well guaranteed to spark the critics into action, but the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group launched by Boeing, Honeywell, a group of ten airlines, and two environmental groups has had a remarkably neutral reception. In the tinderbox of the aviation environmental debate that's quite a success.

Another noteworthy feature of this project is that it was kept quiet until launch - also quite a feat in the leaky aviation world. The two points may not be unconnected. Obviously the new group now has to deliver, but in the short term it's difficult to argue with its aims, and opponents may just be drawing breath.

Meanwhile, I've scoured the blogosphere and just about nobody has a rude word to say about it - for now. This blog is from Liz Barratt-Brown at the Natural Resources Defense Counsel (NRDC) which is one of the partners in the group - but it's an interesting viewpoint all the same.

Student journalists learn early on that the word 'first' is a dangerous one to throw about casually, but anyway...Solazyme of San Francisco is claiming "to have produced the world's first microbial-derived jet fuel". The fuel is derived from algae and Solazyme says it passes the ASTM D1655 standard for aviation turbine fuel.

I don't know them personally, but they do seem to have had some success in raising reasonably serious money, and at least some biofuel watchers are suggesting they're closer to producing something usable on an industrial scale than anyone else. More opinions and info welcome.

British Airways and Rolls-Royce have finally gone public on a programme to investigate alternative fuels that has been much rumoured for the last few months. This one's important - Rolls-Royce in particular has been scathing of any activity related to non-sustainable biofuels.

Last week I reported this on our premium news service Air Transport Intelligence: Director engineering and technology, Colin Smith, told a pre-Farnborough airshow briefing today: "We are not willing to work on biofuels that are not sustainable. That has been unpopular sometimes - we refused to do one demonstration because of that.

"We need to create a biofuel from biomass that does not compete with foodstuffs. It is just barking mad to compete with foodstuffs."

He adds that the company will also only work on projects aimed at yielding a "drop-in" fuel that could be used as a direct replacement in existing engines. "And they also must not absorb water," he adds.

Smith says: "Most of the current biofuels are just plain daft from an aerospace point of view. They only work down to about -5ºC."

He notes that kerosene has numerous desirable properties and is not easy to replace, but says: "In a few more years you will be able to manipulate any biomass for this purpose. We will work on any biofuel if it is sustainable."

The full text of the BA/RR announcement is below.

In a guest editorial in Flight's Airline Business magazine, Greenpeace chief scientist Doug Parr argues that biofuels are simply not going to work as an acceptable substitute for kerosene.

Parr makes three broad points: there's not enough arable land to grow the required crops; opening up virgin land to fix that has unacceptable knock-on efects; the knock-on effects of using biofuels are anyway unpredictable and it is quite likely that their use will in fact increase greenhouse gas emissions.

I would say it wouldn't I, but I'm pleased to see Airline Business hosting this kind of piece, and I'm just as pleased to see Greenpeace making good use of it.

Jeff Gazzard of the Aviation Environment Federation is predictably scathing of the whole exercise, under the heading Stuntman? Or Saviour?. (See the text of their press release below as it doesn't seem to be on the web.) It's a bit of a rant frankly. But he does also reference a much more interesting analysis by someone called Almuth Ernsting of relatively new pressure group Biofuelwatch. Oh, and just in case there were any more vacancies for biofuel detractors, in the UK the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds took out full-page newspaper ads this week campaigning against it (though aimed at motorists rather than aviation.) More positively for Virgin, my somewhat distant colleague Simon Robinson, who blogs on biofuels for our chemicals group ICIS, is back from holiday and thinks the airline has contributed something useful.

So the Virgin Atlantic Airways biofuel flight duly took place and everyone lived to tell the tale. Whether it will achieve much I'm not sure. You can read here in The Independent and here in The Guardian that not everybody is exactly overwhelmed. The World Development Movement is particularly scathing on the grounds that biofuels don't reduce CO2 emissions enough to matter, and that they displace the production of staple foods.

This press release from Imperium Renewables who make the stuff pretty much contains the positions of everyone involved. Imperium talk it up quite a bit as you'd imagine, but Boeing and General Electric are notably cautious in their comments.

Virgin says the fuel used doesn't compete with food or freshwater sources.