Biofuel gets lift from Honeywell, Airbus, JetBlue

Algae may someday become a part of the jet set.

The pond plant is getting a boost from a joint biofuel effort announced Thursday that involves some marquee names in the aviation industry--Airbus and JetBlue Airways--along with International Aero Engines, Honeywell Aerospace, and a second Honeywell company called UOP. The group plans to study ways to make commercial aviation fuels out of so-called second-generation feedstocks such as algae.

Could the massive new Airbus A380 someday run on biofuel derived from lowly algae?

(Credit: Airbus)

Success with algae would be a salve for biofuel boosters who are feeling the sting of a backlash against early hype. Hailed just a few years ago as a potentially quick and easy alternative to petroleum-based products, biofuels derived from common agricultural sources such as corn, soybeans, and palm oil now carry some heavy baggage, including a role in increased food prices and deforestation. Algae as a fast-growing fuel source--and a gobbler of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas--is a notion that's been catching on with a number of start-ups and academic researchers.

But for the moment, biofuel from algae remains an experiment in progress, expensive to produce and still entangled in a number of technical challenges.

That's where the backing of established and heavyweight manufacturers such as Honeywell and Airbus could make a difference. Honeywell says that its UOP subsidiary, a specialist in refining technology, has been working for some time in a DARPA-funded project to convert natural oils and grease into military jet fuel and has commercialized a process for producing "green diesel" from biofeedstocks.

Earlier this year, biodiesel got off the ground in a Virgin Atlantic Airways flight from London to Amsterdam--a first, said Virgin, though it acknowledged that only 20 percent of the fuel burned came from plant sources, with the other 80 percent being standard kerosene-based jet fuel.

[mattinnohat]

Props to the Aibus led group. It bears pointing out, though, that you don't need to look across the pond for an airframer who has been working on algae as the preferred feedstock for bio jet fuel. As discussed here http://claytonbodiecornell.greenoptions.com/2007/06/08/algae-biofuel-may-be-future-for-aviation/, Boeing has also been working on this since well before mainstream acknowledgement of the folly of edible feedstocks.

[jetcitysound]

Not using food stock or useable farmland and reusing 95% of the water required, how is this not the answer to completely replacing the diesel & JET FUEL we are currently getting from oil? Algae sequesters carbon dioxide when growing to make up 2/3 of its weight, getting us much closer to a closed loop resource. Of course this is only a temporary solution until we replace internal combustion engines, but it would get us much closer to carbon neutral on these fuels. This company already has completed an 1/8 acre pilot that translates to enough biomass to produce 33,000 gallons of fuel per acre, per year.

www.valcent.net

Valcent Products has also solved the problems of shading and scalability.