Take-off for biofuels?

First ever biodiesel flight launches amidst controversy

A Virgin Atlantic test flight has boosted biofuel enthusiasts’ belief in its technical viability as aviation fuel. Yet the breakthrough comes as European targets to raise overall biofuel use are called into question – over the environmental and food security implications of large-scale production.

On the jumbo jet flight from Heathrow to Amsterdam – with no passengers on board – three engines ran on straight jet fuel, and one on a tank containing 80% conventional fuel and 20% biofuel. Virgin head Richard Branson said it marked “a biofuel breakthrough for the whole airline industry”. It certainly allayed concerns that biofuels necessarily freeze at high altitudes, but hasn’t yet solved another important question: where the biofuel comes from.

The company carefully sourced the fuel for the one-off flight – from existing coconut and babassu plantations – but Branson suggested that airlines would have to revert to a biomass which doesn’t take up valuable land. He talked of the need to develop “the fuels of the future, fuels which will power our aircraft in the years ahead through sustainable next-generation oils, such as algae”. Within the next five to ten years, however, it could well be jatropha oil which provides a significant amount of air fuel for some parts of the world, predicts Virgin’s corporate sustainability and responsibility manager, Siân Foster. [See ‘Ethical Oilman’ for more on jatropha.]

The experimental flight took place just weeks after the UK Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee called for a “moratorium on biofuels”, arguing that the government and the European Union “should not have pursued targets to increase the use of biofuels in the absence of robust sustainability standards and mechanisms to prevent damaging land use change”. Studies published around the globe this year, including one from the Royal Society, have continued to show that many biofuels have a greater overall environmental impact than fossil fuels, causing loss of forests, farmland and biodiversity.

So it’s welcome news that the government has ordered a review of the environmental and economic downsides of biofuels production. The Renewable Fuels Agency is to report back in the summer on whether the UK and the EU’s current targets cause more problems than they solve. However, the government says it intends to implement legislation in April requiring 5% of all UK road fuel sold on forecourts to come from a renewable source by 2010.

The EU is also taking a long, hard look at its own target that biofuels should make up 10% of transport fuels by 2020. European Commission president José Barroso announced in January that the EC had plans for “the most comprehensive and sustainable system anywhere in the world for the certification of biofuels”, and would promote the development of second generation biofuels – those which maximise the fuel content of biomass by using the ‘woody’ parts of the plants, or the leftovers from the distillation process [see ‘What has sustainability got to do with… biofuels?’].

It’s exactly these ‘advanced biofuels’ that the Carbon Trust is encouraging here in the UK by offering £5 million of R&D money over the next three to five years. The government-funded body is pinning its hopes on pyrolysis as the way forward for bio-oil production. If the production method, which involves heating biomass in a vacuum to create oil, is ‘bolted on’ to existing refineries, says the Trust, it could be an economical way of turning anything from food waste to forestry thinnings into a crude-like oil. – Hannah Bullock

25 March 2008

Hannah Bullock