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It's bad enough for some prop planes to be referred to as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics might begin having a dig at business airplane flying on everything from cooking oil to melted algae.

With the civil air travel market under increasing pressure from increasing oil rates and environmental legislation, the race is on to discover feasible options to conventional kerosene and these so far seem to boil down to various kinds of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the first trials of alternative fuel were initiated by British aviation pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic started London to Amsterdam flights with restricted biofuel use in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used different blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too bad for growing mainstream foods items.

Jatropha is a genus of roughly 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the family Euphorbiaceae.

In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha curcas as one of the very best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to drought and insects, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation relocated to perform research and development into using biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as tactical specialists for the job.

The current airline company to start experimenting with brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has performed internal US using a mix of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mix, it is claimed, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.

One actually encouraging advancement has actually been the move away from biofuels which compete head on with food consumers thus avoiding a rate spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in use of biofuels in automobiles triggered a spike in maize prices as US farmers diverted excessive corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airlines and drivers will focus biofuel usage on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended true blessing undoubtedly if some individuals wound up starving just to satisfy someone else's green credentials.