Carbonoffcast.com Blog

With much fanfare, Sir Richard Branson launched a Virgin Atlantic flight from London to Amsterdam last week with some biofuel in the tank. While this brought some much needed PR, and more needed hope to the plight of making air travel less of an impact on global warming, the PR is about all it was. Let's face it: at 20% biofuel in 1 of 4 engines, the overall 5% biofuel burned amounted to a negligible improvement on GHG emissions from the flight. In fact the only improvement they cite is the reduction in emissions that comes from refining the biofuel rather than refining petroleum.

On another continent, without much fanfare at all, another pioneering flight took place last fall. Green Flight International completed the world's first Jet aircraft flight powered by 100% biofuel on October 2, 2007. Two pilots flew an L-29 Czechoslovakian-made military aircraft rated to fly on a variety of fuels including heating oil. According to their website, "Out of concern for our global environment, Green Flight International was conceived by Douglas Rodante in April 2006 to serve as a platform for future development in the use of environmentally-friendly fuels in aviation and elsewhere."

While the world is awaking to the demands of reducing or eliminating carbon emissions, air travel has proven to be a quandary. Emissions from air travel have been steadily rising, and emissions released in the atmosphere have a much larger impact on global warming. ( The David Suzuki Foundation explains this nicely) In fact, many of the emissions calculators you'll find online for air travel have a 2.7 multiplier to factor in the larger impact of emissions released from planes at altitude. (Carbonoffcast.com's flight calculator does not). And the problem is exacerbated by it's difficulty. There are no obvious efficiency gains to apply to air travel; nor are we going to see electric, hybrid aircraft anytime soon.

The gap between these 2 pioneering flights lies in commercial viability. While on paper a 100% biofuel flight looks a lot more impressive than a 5% one, there's a big difference between flying a 2 person plane for 37 minutes to flying commercial planes on any % biofuel on any regular or occasional basis. Let's hope that seeing a little progress on both sides of the spectrum ignites some innovation in this space to close that gap. Green Flight International is working on it from their end, aiming for a 100% biofueled Lear jet flight series in 2009.