Move in line with airline sector's green aims: halving carbon emissions by 2050
Ven Sreenivasan, Business Times 10 Jun 09;
COMMERCIAL airliners could be powered by a mixture of bio-fuel and traditional jet kerosene within six years, according to the International Air Transport Association (Iata).
Paul Steele, Iata director of aviation environment, said that testing is at an advanced stage, the results are positive - and alternative fuels could be in use as early as 2015.
'We could have commercial viability between 2015 and 2021. It is now a question of scalability and how quickly we get there,' he told journalists on the sidelines of Iata's 65th annual general meeting in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
Most of the development work on alternative fuels has been done by non-traditional players such as Honeywell, he said. The big oil companies have shown little interest.
Bio-fuel is produced from renewable biological resources, primarily plant material. The advantages are that besides being non-fossil fuel, the plants that are harvested absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide from the environment.
Second-generation bio- fuel feedstock includes plants such as jatropha, camelina, algae and Halophytes - which grow in harsh non-arable environments where they do not compete with crops.
Several airlines - including Air New Zealand, Japan Airlines and Virgin Atlantic - have carried out successful tests with alternative fuels.
'There has been a huge interest in their development over the past 18 months, and by 2015 we may have something that makes a difference,' said Mr Steele.
Alternatives could form as much as 10 per cent of the jet fuel mix by 2017, he reckons.
Development work is progressing towards certification of the fuels, he said. 'We are looking at a 2011 timeline for certification.'
The rapid move towards bio-fuel is in line with Iata's aim to ensure that the industry is carbon neutral by 2020 and cut its carbon emissions by half by 2050. Other measures that Iata is counting on to achieve this are fleet renewal by airlines, enhanced technology and better air-traffic management.
The rush to cut carbon output comes amid a myriad of emission regimes being rolled out by various countries - particularly in the European Union - which could have a devastating impact on the already troubled aviation industry.
'We are facing a multiplicity of regulations. We need political joint thinking,' Mr Steele said. 'Aviation emissions are mobile and the industry should pay for them only once. There is a need to look at aviation as a sector - not a state-by-state approach.'
Still, with the race to develop alternative fuels, more fuel-efficient planes and better navigation in full swing, he reckons that the industry could slash its carbon emissions by 80 per cent if all these factors align. The carbon footprint of air transport is expected to shrink 7 per cent this year. Of this, five percentage points are due to the global recession and the rest, to efficiency gains.
