Biofuel: February 2008 Archives

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.