It doesn't really state if this fuel can REPLACE jet-A ?

 

Actually, that was a pretty crappy article. I try and pull the more meaningful ones out of my assorted news feeds, but I goofed on that one. All it says is that Boeing, Virgin and Quantas agreed to use 5% biofuel by 2015 in Australia (only I think) to avoid a carbon tax put there by the local government. It's a badly written article because it does not say much about that or even provide the name of the consortium. 5% isn't much biofuel either and I bet they have no support for the claim it is going to be made from camelina or any of a hundred other feedstocks.

What I do think you can get from articles like this one however badly written may be, is that some activity is going on around the world in terms of the development of biofuels and the politics that will affect them. Barring a major upset to the political or market stability of the present legacy oil markets, the more likely scenario for adoption of biofuels occurs across a lifetime or two. The investment costs are high and the costs of a gallon of biofuel is still way too high for widespread adoption.

New Standards Are Here, But How Will Aviation Biofuel Market Evolve?

(S. Leone, 7/18, RenewableEnergyWorld) New Hampshire, USA -- Jim Rekoske is a scientist and a businessman, so he doesn't much care for predictions. His expertise, though, is in a field that's fueled by predictions. As vice president and general manager of Honeywell’s UOP renewable energy and chemicals business, Rekoske is helping lead an effort that has a growing demand, yet so far little supply. To some, his predictions may seem bold, but so is the cause -- to create a clean energy market that will supply the fuel that powers the future of aviation. “The demand is there,” he said. “The ability to grow these oils in a way that does not impact the food chain also exists. There really is no reason [this couldn’t work] other than the normal inertia, which is present at the beginning of any new endeavor. So we need to overcome that normal inertia.” If the industry can get past that resistance, Rekoske envisions 1 to 1.5 billion gallons a year of plant-based oil being converted to jet fuels and being blended at up to a 50 percent mix with the 65 to 70 billion gallons of conventional jet fuel produced each year. Established industries, by and large, are not in the business of opening their doors to competition. That’s why the growing aviation biofuels industry is looking at policy and standards as avenues to a growing market. The effort to create an aviation biofuel market received a major boost earlier this month when ASTM International updated its aviation fuel standard to allow renewable fuels to be blended at up to 50 percent with conventional fuels for commercial travel. For Honeywell and others banking on demand, the revamped standards were the latest in a string of positive signs for the burgeoning industry. The European Union is trying to get airlines covered under its Emissions Trading Scheme, which has angered some governments that don’t want their businesses subject to a European cap-and-trade market. Depending on the outcome, says Rekoske, there could be a substantial boost for biofuels as airlines work to cut their emissions, which account for about 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. In August, Air China will embark on its first flight with biofuels grown in China through a partnership between Petro China and UOP. The hope for biofuel producers is that the Chinese government will use that event to put stronger emissions programs into place, which could further boost the demand and ultimately the supply...

US Air Force: We want to use biofuels.

(AFP, 7/19) WASHINGTON — The US Air Force is ready to switch to biofuels to help power its warplanes but the price of alternative fuels remains too high, military officials said Tuesday. Anxious to reduce its reliance on oil, the Air Force has approved the use of synthetic fuels for nearly all its aircraft and expects to get the green light for biofuels by the end of 2012, Undersecretary Erin Conaton said. "The big thing we're trying to do is to send a clear message to industry that the Air Force wants to be in a position to purchase biofuels and to use that operationally for our fleet," Conaton told AFP. "But in order to do that, we need industry to be able to produce in the quantities we need at a cost-competitive price." Biofuels cost a prohibitive $35 a gallon, about 10 times the price of conventional jet fuel, or JP-8. "The biofuels that are available now are just nowhere near the cost of what we can buy JP-8 for," Conaton said. With the biofuels industry still in need of more private investment, the US military has joined forces with commercial airlines "to try to send the right message" to the alternative fuels industry, she said. "We're ready whenever they're ready to produce it." Tests have shown fighter aircraft and cargo planes can fly on a blend of biofuels and traditional jet fuel with no sacrifice in speed or performance, she said. Conaton spoke as biofuels industry representatives and military officials gathered for an energy conference Tuesday in Washington where alternative fuels will feature high on the agenda. US officials see the country's dependence on foreign oil as a national security risk and an increasing financial burden. To promote energy "security," the Air Force has set a goal to have half of its domestic fuel needs drawn from alternative sources by 2016. The biofuels tested on military aircraft, known as hydroprocessed renewable jet fuel, are derived from the camelina plant, animal fat and various waste oils...

 

U.S. assists two crop-for-aviation-fuel projects.

* Two companies will use camelina to make bio jet fuel
* Fuel is biggest cost for U.S. airlines
* Camelina is little-grown crop, seeds are high in oil
* Two other second-generation biofuel projects get aid

(7/26, Reuters) Farmers in four states in the U.S. West can qualify for a federal cost-sharing payment if they grow camelina, an oilseed, for conversion into jet fuel, the government said on Tuesday. The assistance would encourage large-scale production -- up to 51,000 acres (21,000 hectares) -- of camelina for sale to aviation biofuel makers AltAir Fuels LLC, of Seattle, and Beaver Biodiesel LLC, of Portland, Oregon. It would be the first time the Agriculture Department subsidized an aviation bio-crop. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the announcement coincided with the one-year anniversary of an initiative by the U.S. Agriculture Department, Boeing Co (BA.N) and the Air Transport Association, an airline trade group, to bring bio jet fuels to market. AltAir aims for a drop-in substitute for traditional jet fuels with production beginning in late 2012 in Bakersfield, California, and in 2014 at Tacoma, Washington...

Companies Testify On Plans To Build Jet Biofuel Plants.

(Seattle Times, 7/29, Bernton) reports, "Leaders of two Seattle-based companies testified Thursday before a US Senate subcommittee about plans to build plants in Washington state to produce jet biofuel that can be blended in equal parts with traditional jet fuels." The testimony Wednesday by AltAir Fuels and Imperium Renewables "underscored the recent progress in moving from a test phase for aviation biofuel to a new phase focused on how to spur production." Billy Golver, a Boeing Commercial Airplanes vice president, "said an important milestone for biofuels use in commercial jet aircraft was reached on July 1 as the 50 percent blend gained international certification by ASTM International, a global standards-setting organization."

 

Never heard of this and thought of sharing. Not sure if jet fuel is among the fuels they can make but interesting nonetheless.

Carbon Recycling: Mining the Air for Fuel

Recycling bottles, cans, and newspapers is on any short list of simple actions for a cleaner environment. If only it were as easy to collect and reuse carbon dioxide—that greenhouse gas waste product that the world is generating in huge volume each day by burning fossil fuels.

In fact, a handful of start-up companies and researchers are aiming to do just that.

Recycling carbon dioxide is a great deal more involved than setting out separate bins for glass, aluminum, and paper. But many scientists believe that it is not only worth the effort, but a crucial endeavor. The climate change threat to the planet is now so great, they argue, that any effort to address the problem will have to include so-called "carbon negative" technologies. That means actually sucking the greenhouse gas out of the atmosphere and doing something productive with it.

The idea of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal power plants or oil facilities and storing it underground has gotten plenty of attention. Several pilot projects are operating or under construction, although a major project in West Virginia was abandoned last month due to cost concerns.

There has been less focus on the idea of actually reusing or recycling CO2. But science has long known that it’s possible to recombine carbon from CO2 with hydrogen from water to make hydrocarbons—in other words, to make familiar fuels such as gasoline. The problem, ironically, has been that the process requires a lot of energy.

But pioneering researchers and entrepreneurs argue the technology is close at hand for recycling CO2 back into fuel for use in today’s engines. It might even involve technology to absorb carbon dioxide directly out of the air, instead of out of coal plant flue gas. (See related story, "Out of Thin Air: The Quest to Capture Carbon Dioxide") Instead of drilling for oil to power cars and trucks, they say, we could be pulling the ingredients to make hydrocarbons out of thin air.

"You have all this CO2—it’s nasty stuff—what are you going to do with it?" asks Byron Elton, chief executive of Carbon Sciences, a Santa Barbara, California start-up. "People are saying, ‘Compress it, hide it.’ We’re saying, ‘No, give it to us and we can turn it back into gasoline.’ "

Peter Eisenberger, a physicist who founded the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is cofounder of Global Thermostat, a company that is working on technology to capture carbon dioxide from air with the aim of recycling, not storage, in mind. "In my opinion, closing the carbon cycle and having the technology to combine CO2 and hydrogen is a wonderful future," Eisenberger says. "Imagine a future where the major inputs for fuel are water and CO2."

Energy In, Energy Out

Of course, the oil drilled and pumped from underground holds the energy of eons' worth of sunlight energy collected by plants and stored as organic matter. Over millions of years of heat and pressure, the energy in that organic matter has been further concentrated to yield hydrocarbons such as oil, natural gas, and coal.

(Related: "Is Motor Oil a Renewable Resource? Re-Refiners Say Yes")

Anyone who wants to create hydrocarbon fuel above ground will have to supply the energy to isolate the hydrogen and carbon atoms and put them together. "There’s no free lunch," says Hans Ziock, a technical staff member at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Los Alamos National Laboratory, coauthor of a white paper on carbon capture from air.

"You have to put energy in to re-create the fuel," he explains. "And because re-creation is never 100 percent efficient, you end up putting more energy in than you get out." Due to the "energy penalty" of creating hydrocarbon fuel indirectly, he says, it has always made more sense for society to use the liquid fuels made directly from crude oil as long as crude oil is available. "If nature has done this for you for free, why not use it?" says Ziock.

However, in a world that is now pumping its crude oil from ultra-deep water, squeezing it from tar sands, and looking for it beneath Arctic frontiers, the time may be ripe for alternatives. Ziock says he believes the hope for greater domestic self-sufficiency for fuel alone makes research into carbon dioxide recycling worthwhile. But he warns that as a means to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the benefits of this approach will be limited unless the energy to create the hydrocarbon fuel comes from a source other than the burning of more fossil fuel.

(Related: "Photos: Four New Offshore Drilling Frontiers")

That’s why the focus of the "Sunshine to Petrol" project at U.S. DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Livermore, California, has been on creating a high-efficiency chemical heat engine based on concentrated solar energy to power its process for making fuel.

"Hydrocarbon fuel has a lot of energy packed in," says Ellen Stechel, who manages the Sandia project. "All the energy came from the sun, and must again come from the sun—just faster and with greater efficiency." To create hydrocarbon fuel, she says it is possible to use solar energy, just as nature does. "But we need to collect it from a wide area to pack it into something very dense," she explains. "People say the sun is free, and that’s true, but the collectors to collect all that sun are not free."

(Related Quiz: "What You Don't Know About Solar Power")

The prototype solar reactor that the Sandia researchers have developed is designed to use a huge array of mirrors to collect and concentrate the sunlight into a very strong beam that is funneled onto metal oxide rings inside each reactor. The rings rotate in and out of the sunlight, heating to a temperature of more than 2,550°F (1,400°C), and then cooling to less than 2,010°F (1,100°C). These rings are then exposed either to carbon dioxide or to water. At the high temperature, the metal oxide rings release some oxygen and at the lower temperature the rings steal oxygen atoms from either the CO2 or the H2O molecules. That thermochemical reaction leaves behind carbon monoxide or hydrogen gas (the mixture is often called "syngas")—the building blocks of hydrocarbon fuel.

The Sandia prototype’s solar collector has an area of about 20 square meters (215 square feet) for a reactor the size of a beer keg, Stechel says. About 300,000 acres (121,400 hectares) of mirrors would be required to collect enough sunshine to make the equivalent of 1 million barrels of oil per day, she says. (The world currently consumes about 86 million barrels per day of petroleum and other liquid fuels, including biofuels.)

Stechel says that durability of the hardware remains an issue, and the researchers are continuing to work on making the system as efficient as possible so it can be commercially successful and used on a large scale.

Catalyst for Change

Elton’s firm, Carbon Sciences, focuses on the post-collection phase: turning carbon into fuel. It does this by combining CO2 with natural gas in the presence of a proprietary metallic catalyst it has developed and licensed. (The company says it is made of the common metals, nickel and cobalt, supported by aluminum and magnesium.)

Carbon Sciences says its test facility is successfully melding CO2 with methane (the primary constituent of natural gas) to produce a syngas that can be converted into ordinary fuels.

The process of turning syngas into transportation fuel is a well-established technology, and there are already commercial gas-to-liquids facilities in the world. But those processes rely on steam or oxidation to produce the syngas. Carbon Sciences argues that its process—CO2 reforming, or dry reforming, of natural gas—would be a game changer because it would produce fuel while using up waste CO2 that otherwise would be emitted to the atmosphere. Also, says Elton, using readily available CO2 as a reactant should make capital and operating costs significantly lower than current commercial approaches that use oxygen, since that’s expensive and capital-intensive.

"We believe our approach will be the key to cost-effective transformation of greenhouse gases to fuel on a global scale," he says.

Although there have been efforts at dry reforming in the past, Carbon Sciences says its catalyst is uniquely robust and able to stand up to the harsh industrial process of making the fuel. The catalyst also is comprised of more affordable and abundant metals than those used in earlier efforts.

Of course, because the fuel produced will be a drop-in replacement for ordinary gasoline and diesel, driving will still release CO2 to the atmosphere. But Elton says there are significant advantages in using recycled fuel. "The carbon . . . is used twice, instead of it going into the air," he says. "It also finally addresses the issue of energy security"—as the fuel can be made domestically from two abundant resources in the United States—CO2 and natural gas.

Outside scientists say the CO2 advantages of the system will depend on how it is designed, including where it gets its energy. Elton says minimizing net energy will be a high priority, with the potential for an integrated system that reuses some of the energy or fuel created in the process. He maintains that Carbon Sciences’ process for creating fuel is CO2-neutral, in contrast to the refining of ordinary crude oil into gasoline, which results in energy use that releases CO2 before the fuel even gets to the gas tank. After encouraging test results earlier this year, Elton said in July that his company is working on a demonstration project to produce samples of diesel fuel that can be used by existing diesel vehicles, like trucks and buses.

It is important to note that in the reforming process, natural gas provides some of the hydrocarbons in the fuel. Other efforts at CO2 recycling-into-fuel aim to get all of the hydrocarbons from CO2 alone.

In the United Kingdom, Air Fuel Synthesis aims to use atmospheric CO2 and wind energy to produce aviation fuels in a concept demonstration at an initial rate of 1 liter (about one-quarter gallon) per day.

Filling Up With Renewables

Although the challenges are great, the research is important, says a policy brief issued last month by the Centre for Low-Carbon Futures in England. Researchers from the University of Sheffield and the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands said that what they call "Carbon Capture and Utilization" could overcome many of the drawbacks of carbon capture and storage, including the difficulty in finding enough underground storage space, the possibility of leakage, long-term liability issues, and problems with public acceptance. Creating something of value also would help offset the costs of carbon capture, the researchers said.

And creating liquid fuels through carbon recycling could be important in the long run for a society that aims to reduce its dependence on oil. Although there’s been much excitement about electric cars, the report noted that electric batteries still can’t provide the needed range for aviation and long-haul sea and road transport. The recycling of CO2 could be the path for putting renewable energy into the fuel tanks of ordinary combustion engines, the report said.

That’s why Stechel, of Sandia, says the benefits of "reversing combustion" or "closing the cycle" on CO2 could be enormous. "We could have a technology that could produce the same fuels we get from petroleum and preserve today’s infrastructure," she says, "fuels that could go into the vehicles of today as well as the ones of tomorrow."

 

Obama Administration Pledges $510 Million for Biofuels

(S. Pope, eFlying, 8/18/11) The Obama Administration this week announced a plan to invest up to $510 million over three years in advanced drop-in aviation and marine biofuels as part of an initiative to cut America's dependency on foreign oil. President Obama announced Tuesday that the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Navy will be investing in partnerships with the private sector to produce biofuels for commercial and military transportation. With the announcement, the federal government becomes a major investor in aviation biofuels, which are alternative aviation fuels that can be mixed with existing jet fuels to provide the same or more efficient performance, and marine biofuels, both of which can be used effectively for commercial and military purposes. The investment will also require a one-to-one match of cost sharing from the private sector...

Cantwell touts camelina crop to farmers

(8/24/11, AP) — Farmers are being urged to join a federal program that pays them to grow camelina, a crop that some researchers consider a potential alternative to overseas oil. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said the new U.S. Department of Agriculture effort is intended to jump-start the creation of a camelina-to-fuel industry. But The Spokesman-Review reported Wednesday that unless many more Western U.S. farmers grow camelina, few companies will invest money in production facilities to turn camelina oil into biodiesel or "green" aviation fuel...

U.S. Moves To Kick-Start Biofuels Industry

(8/23/11, G. Warwick, AviationWeek) The aerospace industry will be asked shortly for ideas on how $510 million in government money should be spent over the next three years to build an aviation and marine biofuels supply chain in the U.S. It also will be asked how much money it is willing to put into what the government intends to be a public/private partnership. The pending release of a request for proposals (RFP) follows last week’s signing of a memorandum of understanding between the U.S. Navy and the Energy and Agriculture departments to begin a cooperative effort to support development of a commercial biofuels industry. Each of three agencies is putting $170 million in existing funding into the initiative to help pay for the construction or conversion of refineries for the production of biofuels that are drop-in replacements for petroleum-based aviation and marine fuels. “The joint plan will require substantial cost-share from private industry of at least a one-to-one match,” the White House said in a statement announcing the agreement last week. The government will not specify what fuels or feedstocks should be funded. “We are neutral on what the fuel is,” says Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. “We will see what industry comes back with.” The key requirements are that the biofuels be drop-in replacements, domestically produced and geographically distributed, priced competitively with petroleum, with a lower carbon footprint, and do not take land out of food production, he says...

 

Seems like every week the feedstock for this changes to some other source...

Biofuel Initiatives...

(9/7, G.Warwick, Aviationweek) Engine manufacturer General Electric has joined an Australian consortium established to develop and commercialize aviation biofuel derived from native eucalyptus trees. The consortium includes Virgin Australia, Canadian biofuels company Dynamotive Energy Systems, its Australian licensee Renewable Oil Corp., and the national Future Farm Industries Co-operative Research Center. The venture's focus is on converting mallee, or multi-stemmed, eucalypt trees into biofuel, using a fast pyrolysis process developed by Dynamotive. Pyrolysis produces a “bio-crude” oil by rapidly heating biomass to a high temperature in the absence of oxygen. The consortium plans to have a pilot biofuel production plant operating in Australia by 2012, and to have a commercial-scale plant operational by as early as 2014. GE will assist with development and certification of the fuel. Future Farm Industries, a joint venture of southern Australia’s leading agricultural R&D organizations, will conduct the required R&D for on-farm mallee production under its “energy tree cropping" initiative. GE Aviation, meanwhile, has participated in test flights in Brazil of an Embraer 170 with both GE CF34-8E engines fueled by a 50:50 blend of biofuel and conventional jet fuel. The hydro-processed fuel was derived from camelina...


San Diego-based company to plant 75,000 acres of jatropha in Brazil

(9/14, S. Neilsen, Bloomberg) Closely held SG Biofuels, also supported by the Inter- American Development Bank, will produce unrefined jatropha oil that will sell for $75 a barrel, President Kirk Haney said in an interview yesterday. Refined jet fuel cost about $126 a barrel in New York Harbor spot market on Sept. 12, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. High petroleum prices and government pressure to lower greenhouse-gas emissions linked to climate change are prompting airlines to experiment with plant-derived fuels. Grupo Aeromexico SAB de CV flew the first commercial transcontinental flight with a plant oil-kerosene blend on Aug. 2. Test flights have shown that planes can fly on fuel made with weeds, wood chips and algae. Jatropha “is the most practical way of blending with jet fuel today,” Haney said. The plant produces inedible oil and grows well in low-quality soils. The development of higher-yielding seeds is expected to bring prices down to $38 a barrel in ten years, he said. Manufacturing so-called bio-kerosene from jatropha oil is already “cost-effective” with crude oil prices at $112 a barrel, he said. SG Biofuels will develop its plantations with Bioventures Brasil in west-central Brazil, according to the statement. The seeds will be crushed into 45 million liters (11.9 million gallons) of oil once the plantations reach maturity in 2015 and then processed into fuel in the state of Sao Paulo, Haney said...

--------------
Not a jet, but...

Navy Completes Unmanned Biofuel Flight.

(P. Bergqvist, 11/04, Flying)

The United States military is continuing its quest for a greener aircraft fleet and the Navy has now completed the first biofuel flight in an unmanned helicopter – an MQ-8B Fire Scout. Powered by a blend of JP-5 aviation fuel and a plant-based fuel, the helicopter took off from the Naval Air Station Patuxent River’s Webster Field in St. Inigoes, Maryland, controlled by the Navy’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Directorate. The Naval Air Systems Command Public Affairs office claims the biofuel blend “reduces carbon dioxide output by 75 percent compared to conventional aviation fuel.” Rear Adm. Bill Shannon, program executive officer for Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons said, “I am very pleased we can add MQ-8B to the list of successful bioflights completed at Pax River this year, bringing us one step closer to achieving the Navy’s energy goals.” One such goal is the Navy’s Great Green Fleet initiative to power its whole fleet of aircraft, ships and submarines with biofuels by 2016. Seven types of Naval aircraft, including the Blue Angels’ F/A-18s, have been tested so far. The plant-based portion of the fuel blend used in the Fire Scout flight is from the camelina plant, a member of the mustard family that has also been used as massage oil, cooking oil and lamp fuel. Camelina-based biofuel has also been successfully tested in business jets and the commercial airlines...

 

Airlines Weigh the Advantages of Using More Biofuel


(NYTimes,B. Wassener, 10/09/11) HONG KONG — The world’s airlines will carry 2.8 billion passengers and 46 million tons of freight this year. They will burn somewhere between 210 million and 220 million tons of fuel and generate 650 million tons of carbon emissions in the process. Strong growth, particularly in Asia, will see to it that those numbers keep rising. Add to that the fact that the price of fuel is likely to keep rising and that the pressure to reduce fuel emissions has never been higher, and what you get is a huge increase in recent years in the airline industry’s efforts to develop biofuels capable of powering aircraft.The speed of the progress in recent years has been remarkable, leaving many of the airline and aviation executives who gathered in Hong Kong for a conference on aviation and the environment in late September shaking their heads in near disbelief.
“I have been amazed at how quickly we moved forward,” said Tony Tyler, the former chief executive of Cathay Pacific, who took the helm of the International Air Transport Association in July. Just a few years ago, Mr. Tyler said, the concept of using biofuels to help power aircraft seemed “very pie-in-the-sky and futuristic.” Now, he said, biofuels are no longer just theory — they are a reality. Less than half a decade has passed since a handful of carriers staged the first test flights using fuel derived from plants. At least six airlines, including KLM, Lufthansa and Finnair, have now used biofuel on flights carrying passengers. Many of the executives who attended the recent conference broadly agreed that significant amounts of biofuels could find their way into aircraft tanks during the course of the next decade. This would help the airline industry achieve its goal of “carbon neutral” growth — in other words, of increasing the business but without increasing emissions — by 2020. Even more ambitious, the industry aims to halve emissions by 2050.As airlines currently account for about 2 percent of all man-made carbon emissions, this is an important factor in the drive to reduce global emissions. Much progress has already been made on fuel efficiency. Improved designs and materials mean that aircraft and engines today are 70 percent more fuel efficient than those built 40 years ago, said Mr. Tyler of International Air Transport. But aviation efficiency can go only so far, so biofuels are a key building block in the drive to lower emissions. “I believe that the most significant leap forward in the industry’s environmental performance in the coming years will be the commercial use of sustainable biofuels,” Mr. Tyler said. Now, however, comes the other hard part: getting enough of the stuff to airlines, at a competitive price and without running into trouble on issues like land and water supply.
At present, aviation biofuels exist only in minuscule amounts and cost three to five times as much as conventional jet fuel, according to Paul Steele, executive director of the Air Transport Action Group, a nonprofit association that includes a wide range of aviation industry players. (The International Air Transport Association estimates that the airline industry’s total fuel bill will top $200 billion next year.) The oil companies that supply carriers with traditional jet fuel have yet to embrace biofuels in a major way. A host of small outfits, like Cosmo Biofuels in Malaysia, are working to develop jet fuel from various plant sources. But the process takes time and does not enjoy government support of the kind seen for biodiesel, which is used in cars..."

 

I get about 150 pounds of fuel per pax, about 23 gallons of Jet-A. Much more efficient than I would have imagined.

And that's factoring in the freight flying for free.

 

Using the data from the article, I get 157 lbs of Jet A per passenger not counting any freight. You are beating the average by 7 pounds fuel per passenger, or 4.46% less. Pretty good.

 

Military Working Towards Using Biofuels In Battle.

(Bloomberg News 10/19, Morales, Downing) reported, "Biofuels face their biggest test yet -- whether they can power fighter jets and tanks in battle at prices the world's best-funded military can afford." The article notes that the Army, Navy, and the Air Force are looking to end their dependence on oil, with the USAF "set to certify all of its 40-plus aircraft models to burn fuels derived from waste oils and plants by 2013, three years ahead of target, Air Force Deputy Assistant Secretary Kevin Geiss said." Furthermore, these military test results have been given to commercial airlines and "helped ASTM International, formerly the American Society for Testing & Materials, in July approve the fuels for use in commercial planes."