Virgin Atlantic is attempting to become the first airline to power a jumbo jet with biofuel, it was announced today. Virgin and its partners at Boeing and General Electric plan to have a biofuel-powered 747 flying by 2008, and are currently testing around eight biofuels to find the most efficient.
The announcement is seen as something as a surprise, as it had been thought that developing biofuels for aircraft propulsion would be a very long-term project. However, Virgin believe they can make operating biofuelled aircraft commercially viable in just five years.
The airline will begin testing the fuels on the ground and during test flights on which no passengers will be carried.
“If somebody develops clean fuel, we will put it in our planes,” a Virgin spokesman said. “Everyone was saying that flying a plane with alternative energy sources was a decade away, but it is going much faster than that. The demonstration by a 747 next year will be a milestone in the airline industry’s attempts to reduce its CO2 emissions and cut its fuel bills.”
“Everyone has said that it will be a long time before we do this, but it doesn’t mean we are not going to try,” said Virgin’s chief executive Steve Ridgway.
“If the industry is to keep growing it has to do what it can to look at new technology, whether it be lighter planes or new fuel. It is important that the airline industry is being seen to do something.” Added the executive.
Virgin Atlantic CEO, Sir Richard Branson, last year announced that his Virgin Fuels consortium would invest $3 billion over the next decade in research into alternative energy sources.
“We must rapidly wean ourselves off our dependence on coal and fossil fuels… We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment.” Said the entrepreneur said at the time.
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There’s another story behind this, namely the stated desire by the US administration to become less dependent on Arab oil. However, by diverting food crops into fuel, the price of food staples like maize increases, hurting the poorer countries. This is happening in Mexico now where the price of maize flour for tortilla has increased threefold. Also the poorer tropical countries are destroying rainforests by ’slash & burn’ farming to produce palm oil for export, thereby causing irreparable damage to the environment. Everything has consequences.
Comment by Tim James — April 30, 2007 @ 10:25 am
So has Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Atlantic and several other travel companies, gone green? Not a bit of it.
The problem is this: that the climate change crisis has to be addressed right now. We can’t wait for a new fuel to be developed in the unspecified future. Unless massive steps to curb carbon emissions are taken immediately, it will be too late to prevent some of the worst effects of global warming. The fastest-growing contribution to climate change is aviation’s, and because there are currently no viable technological substitutes, the only immediate answer to the problem is greatly to reduce the number of flights we take.
But Branson intends, like all airline operators, to keep expanding his fleet. Earlier this year, Virgin Atlantic published its three-year growth plan. This is “aimed at capturing greater business market share, with products tailored towards premium passengers at the heart of the strategy. The airline is targeting an increase of at least 10% in the number of business travellers over the next year.”(2) Expanding the number of economy seats is bad enough. But because business class travellers take up more space, their carbon emissions are higher than those of the other passengers. Perhaps because there are so many business seats on Virgin Atlantic planes, its customers produce 0.126 kg of carbon dioxide per person per kilometre(3), or 13% more than the average for longhaul flights(4). Virgin Atlantic’s website boasts that “a large increase in the number of business travellers helped to boost profits and achieve record sales in the last financial year.”(5)
The same press release reveals that in financial year 2005/6 the company carried 4.9 million travellers. All its flights are long-haul(6). Let’s assume (this is quite generous to the airline) that its average return journey-length is 12000 km.
This would mean that Virgin Atlantic’s planes produce 7.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. According to the calculations I explain in Heat, the sustainable level of carbon dioxide production per person per year - which we must reach by 2030 - will be 1.2 tonnes. So Virgin Atlantic is responsible for the total annual carbon allocation of 6.2 million people. Carbon dioxide is only part of the story. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the other gases planes emit (mostly water vapour) boost their total climate-changing effect by 2.7 times(7). Branson’s operations are responsible for the sustainable global warming impact of 16.7 million people, or 28% of the population of the United Kingdom. This is to say nothing of the activities of the other Virgin airlines: Virgin Express, Virgin Blue and – one day – Virgin Galactic.
Branson can make the $3 billion he claims he will spend only by expanding his existing businesses, especially the airlines. His investment plan depends to a large extent on the success of the Virgin America airline he is about to launch in the US(8). His vision could be summarised thus: we must destroy the planet in order to save it.
It’s plain that any substitute for aviation fuel (kerosene) that Virgin Fuels might discover is a long way off. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change discovered that “there would not appear to be any practical alternatives to kerosene-based fuels for commercial jet aircraft for the next several decades.”(9) The British government, which is generally sympathetic towards the airlines, agrees. “There is no viable alternative currently visible to kerosene as an aviation fuel”(10).
Branson’s announcement is remarkably short on detail, and it is striking that the Virgin Group has yet to produce a press release or any other document about it. This raises the suspicion that it might – like some of his other initiatives – be an empty gesture, which is not expected to come to much. But let us, for now, take the little he has said on the subject at face value.
“We are going to start building cellulosic ethanol plants”, he tells us. “I believe it’s the future of fuel … We use around 700 million gallons of fuel a year between the four airlines. I hope that over the next five to six years we can replace some or all of that.”(11)
If that’s true, then turnuptheheat has some advice for you: don’t travel on a Virgin plane. A long and detailed report by researchers at Imperial College, London looked into the potential for using ethanol as an aviation fuel. It has a flashpoint of 12°C, which “would present major safety dangers.” It also emits acetaldehyde at low power settings, “bringing localised health problems around airports, especially for ground support staff.” For these reasons, ethanol is “unsuitable as a jet fuel”(12).
Virgin Fuels might also investigate biodiesel. If it does, it will find it has a “cloud point” much higher than kerosene’s. At low temperatures, oils go cloudy, and at a couple of degrees beyond that point they form a gel. This can block an engine’s fuel filters, fuel lines and plugs. Even a mixture containing as little as 10% biodiesel can raise the cloud point from minus 51° to minus 29°(13). This, because of the low temperatures in the upper troposphere, could stop the engines if the plane flies at normal heights. The cloud point can be lowered by repeatedly chilling the fuel and filtering out the crystals which form at low temperatures. Unfortunately, this requires a good deal of energy.
But the biggest problem is that biodiesel currently causes far more climate change than it prevents. The cheapest source is palm oil, which is the main driver of deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia. World trade rules forbid countries from banning its importation(14). If you specify biodiesel at the moment, the chances are that you are specifying palm oil. In fact, almost every economically-viable source of biodiesel, as Heat shows, carries major problems either for food supply or for the environment. Branson’s company might develop a new source, but if so it is a long way off.
This appears to leave only hydrogen. Jets can use it as a fuel today, but because it contains much less energy per volume than kerosene, they wouldn’t have room for any passengers. Only craft with a much larger body (or airframe) would have room for the fuel and their customers. This means much more drag, which in turn means they would have to fly supersonically – in the stratosphere. The water vapour produced by burning hydrogen in the stratosphere causes a total global warming impact 13 times that of ordinary planes burning kerosene(15).
Would it be too cynical, even for turnuptheheat, to suggest that Branson’s initiative is just another publicity stunt? Might it be a means of distracting attention from the need to ground most of the world’s planes, by offering a miracle solution which doesn’t yet exist? And will this money ever materialise, or will it be yet another unredeemed promise of corporate philanthropy?
Comment by Scott Stewart — April 30, 2007 @ 9:38 pm