Slowly but surely, an extraordinarily important new industry is slowly taking shape, with the potential to transform the global economy.

After years of existing largely as an environmentalist’s fantasy, commercial production of biofuels for the world civil aviation industry is slowly becoming a fact, with production starting up across three continents.

The leading contenders for biofuel feedstocks are jatropha and camelina, both of which have their fervent supporters. While currently neither is capable of production at a price approaching that of Jet A1 civil aviation fuel derived from hydrocarbons, research and extensive investment are nevertheless investigating the possibilities.

While little is certain in the emerging picture, it is increasingly clear that despite the United States being one of the leading producers currently of renewable energy in the form of ethanol, that the United States nevertheless will be an also-ran in these developments.

In January 2010 Qatar Airways revealed plans to work with Airbus and other Qatari state entities to draw up “a detailed engineering and implementation plan for economically viable and sustainable biofuel production.” At an event marking the launch of the Qatar Advanced Biofuel Platform consortium, airline chief Akbar al Baker hailed its European project partner as “more proactive than Boeing in experimenting with alternative fuels.”

Fast forward to this March, when a European consortium of Airbus, Romanian state-owned airline Tarom, Honeywell’s UOP and CCE (Camelina Company España) announced plans to establish a bio-fuel production center in Romania to manufacture civil aviation fuel, using camelina as a feedstock.

Farther east, last month China National Petroleum Corp. announced that it had delivered 15 tons of jatropha oil to help Air China operate the country’s maiden biofuel-powered test flight, tentatively scheduled for later this year. According to a posting on its website, CNPC, Asia’s largest oil producer, is proving that it has the ability to produce biofuel from non-grain feedstocks to clean up the environment.

On Monday, Mozambique’s Agencia Informacao Mocambique news agency announced that Sun Biofuels Mozambique, a subsidiary of U.K.-based Sun Biofuels, has exported the first batch of 30 tons of jatropha oil produced from its fields in the central Mozambican province of Manica to Germany’s Lufthansa airline.

The biggest single impetus to the development of biofuels for civil aviation occurred on 8 June, when the international standards certifying body ASTM International announced its approval of its BIO SPK Fuel Standard, to be made official later in the year, allowing the use of hydro-treated renewable jet (HRJ) Jet A-1 fuel in commercial aviation.

Currently these biofuels are “drop ins,” and must be blended in a 50-50 mixture with Jet A-1 fuel derived from traditional fossil fuel kerosene.

The biggest single independent meant at present to a wide scale production of jet biofuel is its inordinate cost. Biojet fuel delivered last year to the U.S. armed forces for evaluation cost more than $70 a gallon to produce, a price which obviously makes it at present supremely uncompetitive with fuel derived from traditional hydrocarbon sources. Supporters of biofuel production argue that processing costs will decrease in direct proportion to rising volumes of production.

Both Brazil and the United States have viable biofuel production in the form of ethanol, in the case of Brazil derived from sugar cane, in the United States, produced from corn.

Ironically it is the very success of this production in the United States that will limit the near term growth of an alternative renewable fuels industry, because the ethanol lobby has ensured the farmers not only receive significant subsidies, but crop insurance as well, neither of which is available to other farmers wishing to dabble in the production of biofuel from camelina or other assorted feedstocks. These limitations exist despite the fact that the U.S. is the world leader in camelina research.

What is clear at this juncture however is the fact that renewable biojet fuels have been certified, and furthermore, that production is beginning, albeit at on a limited scale with relatively high production costs.

As noted earlier in this article, a critical momentum is building on three continents to advance production of biofuels, and when major players such as Airbus become involved, the viability of such projects is no longer in question, only the timeline.

Last but not least, an additional benefit of biofuels in a world concerned about global warming and emissions of greenhouse gases is that biofuels reduce carbon emissions by jet aircraft by up to 80 percent.

The technology is in place, the product has been certified, and at the end of the day, one is talking about an agricultural product which, depending on where it is sown, can produce one or even two harvests a year.

While discussion rages about the production of biofuels in poorer nations having the possibility of diverting land needed for food production, in terms of energies impact on the environment, biofuels are certainly more benign than other more traditional forms of energy as evidenced in the 2010 BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill, or more recently, in the March nuclear debacle in Japan.

Biofuels are clean, green, and… for the moment, expensive.

Article by John C.K. Daly, appearing courtesy OilPrice.com.

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An extraordinary convergence of recent events seems poised shortly to make aviation biofuels the belle of the investor’s ball.

The first is that on 8 June the follows the international standards certifying body ASTM International announcing its approval of its BIO SPK Fuel Standard, to be made official later in the year, of the use of hydrotreated renewable jet (HRJ) Jet A-1 fuel in commercial aviation. The potential financial implications are massive, as together the airline industry and the U.S. military use more than 42.25 million gallons (1.5 million barrels) of jet fuel a day.

One of the leading contenders for ramping up production of Jet A-1 HRJ is camelina, which has undergone extensive testing by both civilian airlines and the U.S. military. Camelina HRJ qualifies as a “drop-in” fuel, which can simply be mixed with regular Jet A-1 in a 50-50 ratio, allowing jet engines to function without any modifications.

In March 2010 Biomass Advisors released their 116-page study, Camelina Aviation Biofuels Market Opportunity and Renewable Energy Strategy Report, projecting that by 2025 one billion gallons of camelina biofuel would be produced for the aviation and biodiesel sectors, creating 25,000 new jobs and producing over $5.5 billion in new revenues and $3.5 billion in new agricultural income for U.S. and Canadian farmers. Biofuels Digest is projecting that global advanced biofuels capacity will reach 4.003 billion gallons by 2015, based on company announcements to date, with capacity reaching 718 million gallons in 2011, 1.522 billion by 2012, 2.685 billion by 2013, and 3.579 billion gallons by 2014.

Fuel and oil comprise 25 percent of civilian airlines’ operating costs. When the price of jet fuel rises one cent, it increases the global cost of aviation $195 million.

The second development is that the critical mass of HRJ fuels on both civilian and military aircraft has been completed, with various military and civilian aircraft flying with HRJ additives made not only from camelina, but jatpropha, algae, babasu and coconut oil, among others. Production is set to soar from small “designer” batches of HRJ produced up to now for testing.

Quick of the block in playing to the big boys, Neste Oil will showcase its NExBTL HRJ renewable aviation fuel at the Paris Air Show later this month and airlines in the Virgin Group are collaborating to attempt to develop and share aviation biofuels at their common port of Los Angeles International airport. More airlines are sure to follow.

Another unexpected development leveling the playing field for aviation biofuels was the unexpected vote on 16 June by the U.S. Senate to repeal tax credits worth about $6 billion annually for producing ethanol, produced from U.S.-grown corn. With its 73-27 vote, the Senate passed an amendment to end the 45-cent-a-gallon subsidy the government gives oil companies for blending ethanol into gasoline and the 54-cent-per-gallon tariff it places on imported ethanol to protect the domestic market. Other biofuel producers for years have complained about the subsidies, which, contrary to popular imagery, go primarily to the oil companies, not small-time farmers.

Ethanol is the most heavily produced biofuel in the U.S., with nearly one third of U.S. corn production diverted to producing it while Brazil distills its ethanol from sugarcane, as an additive to gasoline. Other biofuel producers have complained that the subsidies both gave an unfair advantage to bioethanol producers but also soaked up much of the investment funding that might have other supported other renewables.

Between receiving formal approval for civilian airline use and the federal government preparing to end its support for U.S. ethanol welfare queens, sharp investors will be looking for potential winners on a playing field that is suddenly becoming much more level. And I haven’t even mentioned Pentagon interest in biofuels – yet.

A story for another time.

Article by John Daly, appearing courtesy OilPrice.com

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For some time now, the adoption of biofuels in aviation as an alternative to pricey fossil fuels has been on the minds of the various branches of the United States Armed Forces. Each branch has their own plan when it comes to adopting biofuels and each has been testing them out over the years. Last year, the U.S. Air Force flew an A-10 Warthog entirely under the power of biofuels and the U.S. Navy has done testing with a biofuel mixture on board the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Most recently, the Air Force announced the success of a partially biofuel powered flight of the F-22 Raptor.

The flight, which took place last Friday at Edwards Air Force Base in California, was a part of the Air Force’s overall goal to determine the effectiveness of biofuels based on camelina. The formula itself is derived from the weed like plant and is meant to be blended in with standard petroleum based jet fuels in order to reduce the overall cost of fuel. While it is not necessarily the jump to fully adopting biofuels that some are looking for, it is a step forward in the Air Force’s plan, which is shared by other branches of the Armed Services, to reduce their overall carbon footprint in coming years.

According to the 411th Flight Test Squadron, the successful test involved a variety of exercises to determine the functionality of the blend. The test involved a variety of take off procedures on the ground as well as several in-air maneuvers that culminated in the Raptor flying at Mach 1.5 at 40,000 feet without the use of afterburners in what is referred to as a supercruise.

The Air Force is intending to use the results found in the F-22 as a template for use in other fighter craft in the future. With each new success, the military comes closer and closer to finding new ways to achieve their goal of reducing their carbon footprint and fuel costs.

Article by Richard Cooke, appearing courtesy Justmeans.

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Biomass Advisors announces the release of a Camelina Feedstock Report, an abbreviated version of the consulting firm’s Camelina Aviation Biofuels report released in March (see One Billion Gallons in Camelina Biofuel by 2025).

Meanwhile, UOP LLC, a Honeywell company, announced yesterday that Honeywell Green Jet Fuel powered a U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet flight as part of the Navy’s efforts to certify the use of alternative fuels in military aircraft.

The F/A-18 Super Hornet, dubbed the Green Hornet by the Navy, was fueled with a 50/50 mixture of Green Jet Fuel made from camelina oil and petroleum-derived military jet fuel. The flight is one of a series of biofuel test flights that will be conducted by the Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet test program and marks the first flight of a supersonic jet with afterburners flying on a biofuels blend.

It comes on the heels of a similar flight by the U.S. Air Force with an A-10 Thunderbolt in March (see Novel Intel: Air Force Camelina Flight Marks Milestone). The aircraft also flew with a 50/50 blend of Green Jet Fuel made from camelina and petroleum-derived military jet fuel in both engines.

The fuel was produced by Honeywell’s UOP business unit using its Green Jet Fuel process technology under a project for U.S. Defense Energy Support Center (DESC). Honeywell’s UOP is producing up to 190,000 gallons of fuel for the Navy and 400,000 gallons for the U.S. Air Force from sustainable, non-food feedstocks, including animal fats, algae, and camelina.

The Navy plans a total of 17 flights as part of the certification program.

Mackinnon is editor and publisher of Biomass Intel, a law and policy resource for sustainable energy, and co-author of Camelina Aviation Biofuels: Market Opportunity and Renewable Energy Report.

photo: mashleymorgan

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The last several months have seen a flurry of activity in the aviation sector, as fuel price volatility and impending greenhouse gas regulations have goaded major airlines to ink deals for renewable jet fuel.

The latest involves British Airways, which struck a deal with Solena Group for 16 million gallons of jet fuel from waste.

The moves highlight the tremendous pressure airlines are under to keep costs low in an increasingly oil constrained world and regulated marketplace. During the last oil spike, fuel expenses, which historically ranged from 10 to 15 percent of US passenger airline operating costs, averaged more than 35 percent in the third quarter of 2008. According to news coming out of the International Air Transport Association, the marketplace for cheap fuel is about to get much more crowded.

Speaking in Singapore earlier this month, IATA director general and CEO Giovanni Bisignani reports that Asia-Pacific region has overtaken the US to become the world’s largest aviation market. According to AirCargo World, during the last decade, China replaced Japan as Asia-Pacific’s largest player. Today the country has an airline fleet of 1,400 aircraft compared to Japan’s 540.

Giovanni Bisignani notes, “The global air transport industry will triple in size when Asians travel as much as those in the U.S.”

The figure below from Boeing shows projected growth in the Asian-Pacific region:

As more of the world’s oil production is snapped up to meet growing Chinese and Indian oil demand as well as the needs of a growing Asia-Pacific aviation industry, the race is on for U.S.-based airlines to find alternative sources of jet fuel to offset petroleum price increases.

While feedstocks like algae, camelina, and jatropha derived renewable jet fuel show promise as a drop-in replacement, the industry finds itself having to compete with an EPA-mandated 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022 (see RFS2) for producers’ attention. With aviation accounting for only 12 percent of transportation fuel demand in the U.S., the auto transportation sector will maintain a distinct market advantage over aviation.

Mackinnon Lawrence is an attorney, principal consultant with Biomass Advisors, and editor & publisher of Biomass Intel.

photo: Gary Hayes

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Biofuels – made from algae and non-food plants – are emerging as a potentially viable alternative to conventional jet fuels. Although big challenges remain, the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could be major.

Earlier this year, a Continental jet accelerated down the runway at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Nothing out of the ordinary for Capt. Rich Jankowski, who countless times in his 38-year career had eased such two-engine Boeing 737-800s into the sky. Except on this experimental flight, one of the engines Jankowski relied on was burning fuel derived from microscopic algae to push the 45-ton aircraft into the air and keep it aloft — a first in aviation history.

Last year, Virgin Atlantic flew the first commercial jet on biofuels, a 40-minute jaunt between London and Amsterdam in which one engine burned a mix of 80 percent conventional jet fuel and 20 percent biofuel derived from coconuts and babassu nuts. Other test flights have followed, culminating in a 90-minute Japan Airlines flight with one engine burning a blend of biofuel from camelina — a weedy flower native to Europe — and regular jet fuel at the end of January.

As global economies strive to wean themselves off fossil fuels, one of the most daunting challenges is to find a replacement for the liquid fuels that power the world’s aircraft. Biofuels made from algae and non-food plants are now the leading contenders. While homes, cars, and offices can be powered by electricity produced from such renewable sources as solar, wind, and hydropower, there is little likelihood in the near future that battery power will be lifting a jumbo jet into the sky. And the global aviation industry uses an enormous amount of jet fuel — energy-dense kerosene — frequently referred to as Jet A or JP-8: The U.S. commercial airlines alone burn about 50 million gallons of jet fuel every day, at a cost of roughly $150 million.

That’s a lot of greenhouse gases, released right where they can do the most damage — high in the atmosphere. The warming properties of jet fuel exhaust are intensified at high altitude, where nitrogen oxides from the jet’s turbines react with other molecules in the upper atmosphere to increase levels of ozone, which traps heat, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The water vapor that forms contrails and other chemically active gases emitted during flight also contributes to climate change. Although the amount of emissions from aircraft compared with other vehicles is relatively small — roughly 3 percent of total worldwide greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning — the mix of compounds in jet emissions and their release in the upper troposphere intensifies their heat-trapping power.

The environmental appeal of biofuels — especially if they are produced from algae or other non-food sources — is strong. Preliminary results from an Air New Zealand test flight in December show that burning biofuels — in this case jet fuel refined from jatropha oil — can cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60 percent compared to conventional fuel. And, as a bonus, about 1.4 metric tons of fuel could be saved on a 12-hour flight using a biofuel blend.

This month, the International Air Transport Association set a goal of achieving “carbon neutral growth” — meaning an increase in air travel would not emit any more CO2 than the present fleet and flight schedule — by 2020. The keys will be increasing fuel efficiency by 1.5 percent per year and using biofuel blends, according to IATA.

The overwhelming challenge is how to produce enough biofuel to supply even a fraction of the more than 60 billion gallons of jet fuel burned every year by the world’s aircraft. Relying heavily on biofuels made from food crops — such as soybeans, sugar cane, or canola — would not only affect food supplies and increase food prices, but would produce significant greenhouse gases during the planting and harvesting of these crops, as well as from forest clearing for more agricultural land. Non-food plant sources, such as jatropha and camelina, are promising, but difficult to produce in large quantities and can end up displacing food crops or lead to deforestation if the price of fuel rises high enough. Finally, making large amounts of jet fuel from algae represents a major hurdle, from perfecting the algae’s growth to extracting the oil cost-effectively.

Nevertheless, industry and government interest is driving research and testing into the development of biofuel-based jet fuels. Boeing has been conducting tests with various plant sources, including camelina. And the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force are working on the development of alternative fuel sources to free the military from its reliance on fossil fuels.

The bulk of the initial bio-jet fuel for test flights has come from jatropha — a poisonous shrub native to Central America — and camelina. Both plants produce oil-rich seeds. Terasol Energy — a company based in the U.S., India, and Brazil and the supplier of the oil for the Continental flight — can squeeze 242 gallons of jatropha oil per acre of farmland in India and Tanzania.

But jatropha and camelina have their own issues, such as the inevitable competition between crops grown for food and crops grown for fuel. The answer to that conundrum might be the microscopic plants known as algae. The tiny plants are not typically a food crop, are capable of producing 60 percent of body weight as oil under the right conditions, and can be grown in salt or wastewater, says David Daggett, Boeing’s technology leader for energy and emissions.

Algal oil can also be precisely tuned via genetic modification, or good old-fashioned breeding, to be the equivalent of crude oil. A host of companies, from San Diego-based Sapphire Energy to San Francisco-based Solazyme, are now experimenting with this potential fuel of the future.

Bio-jet fuels have delivered consistent high-quality results in ground tests and experimental flights. These fuels seem to have overcome the problems that their energy density might be too low (think ethanol versus gasoline) and that they could gel at the low temperatures found at high altitudes (think diesel on a cold day).

“All the characteristics are here to make it a very high quality fuel,” says Billy Glover, managing director of environmental strategy at Boeing. “The fuels we’re testing now have equal or better energy content than the Jet A requirements.”

Tim Zenk, vice president of corporate affairs at Sapphire Energy, said the company hopes to produce 300 barrels of oil from algae grown in brackish ponds at its test facility in New Mexico by 2011. In five years, the output should reach 10,000 barrels a day, costing between $60 and $80 dollars per barrel, he says, compared to more than $300 per barrel today for the algae industry as a whole.

Chemical engineers at the University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center have also successfully turned oil from canola, coconuts and soybeans into jet fuel that rivals the conventional liquid, U.S. government tests show. And facilities to refine such algal oil are already being built. UOP — a refinery business of Honeywell that processed the biofuels used in the Continental test flight — opened the first “ecofining” facility in Livorno, Italy, last year, with a capacity to eventually produce 100 million gallons of diesel fuel for ground vehicles. A Portuguese company, working with UOP, is building a second “ecofining” facility in Sines, Portugal.

“Going to biofuels doesn’t mean we have to make compromises,” says chemist Jennifer Holmgren, general manager of the renewable energy and chemicals business for UOP. “We are already making fuels that look exactly like the real thing, or better. The real limitation is going to be feedstock.”

Industry and the U.S. government are working on a solution to that problem, through a partnership dubbed the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI). As part of that group, the Federal Aviation Administration’s chief scientific and technical advisor, Lourdes Maurice, testified at a Congressional hearing in March that “we believe we have a path for achieving biofuel approvals at a 50 percent blend level over the next two years.”

She also argued that bio-jet fuels represent a unique opportunity within the transportation sector, because air travel relies completely on energy-dense liquid hydrocarbons distributed to a small number of locations. Supplying biofuel to just 35 major airports in the U.S. would cover 80 percent of all jet fuel use in this country, Maurice said.

Any of today’s biofuels produced in quantity would still have to be blended with jet fuel because they lack aromatics — the hydrocarbon rings common in petroleum-based jet fuel that interact with seals in engines, helping swell them shut. “We fully expect that the first fuels will be 50–50 blends or less,” Boeing’s Glover says.

But even such a blend would deliver significant climate benefits. According to Glover, camelina is a particularly promising biofuel source, with one camelina-jet fuel blend reducing carbon emissions by more than 80 percent. Such a blend would also not require any modifications to existing aircraft engines or infrastructure.

That was certainly the case for the FAA’s experimental flight of the Continental 737-800. Engine shutdowns at altitude did not phase the bio-jet fuel, nor did sudden accelerations and decelerations. By the time Jankowski brought the plane back down to Bush Intercontinental at 1:45 p.m., roughly two hours after takeoff, he had burned through some 3,600 pounds of the biofuel, slightly less than the 3,700 pounds of regular jet fuel in the other engine.

“The airplane performed perfectly,” he said at a press conference afterwards. “There were no problems. It was textbook.”

By David Biello, appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

[photo credit: Lee Jordon, Nguyen Dai, James Gagen, .jowo., jurvetson]

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