A Qatar Airways flight from London to Qatar has become the first passenger plane to be powered by cleaner-burning natural gas that was converted to kerosene.

“Today’s flight opens the door to an alternative to oil-based aviation fuel,” said Malcom Brinded, international executive director of Royal Dutch Shell, which is partnering with Qatar Petroleum to produce so-called gas-to-liquid (GTL) kerosene from Qatar’s abundant natural gas reserves.During the five-hour flight, the Qatar Airways Airbus A340-800 jet was powered by a 50-50 blend of GTL kerosene and conventional oil-based kerosene jet fuel. An Airbus spokesman called the flight “a major breakthrough which brings us closer to a world where fuels made from feedstocks such as wood-chip waste and other biomass is available for commercial aviation.”

The spokesman predicted that by 2030, 30 percent of jet fuel would be derived from GTL or biofuels. Shell and Qatar Petroleum are building a plant in Qatar capable of producing one million tons of GTL kerosene annually.

Article appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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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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Africa is the most under-supplied region of the world for electricity, and access to it is very different throughout the continent. While industry receives plenty of cheap power, 80% of the population lives off the power grid. As in other parts of the world, African economies utterly depend on electricity, “but levels of inequality are particularly pronounced here due to the inherent unevenness of ‘electric capitalism’ on the continent,” writes David A. McDonald in his recent book Electric Capitalism: Recolonising Africa on the Power Grid.

The international community is trying to improve the quality of life in Africa, and different sources of energy are being developed and installed. “Initial delivery of electric service to rural Africa is far from a ‘one size fits all’ technical solution, especially given the seasonal diversity of energy needs, as well as the availability and quality of candidate renewable energy resources”, argues S.R. Connors in an article titled “Providing Electricity Services to Rural Africa.

dissigno, a for-profit company based out of San Francisco founded by CleanTechies blogger Gary Zieff, is currently working in Tanzania on a project to distribute battery-powered LED lamps to users without access to the electrical grid. The project focuses on entrepreneurs with existing grid or solar power who lease the batteries and lights from dissigno, then sub-lease the equipment to end-users. The project aims to lower the use of inferior lighting fuels such as kerosene and to promote a healthier, safer environment in developing countries using clean technology.

Kathryn Nevard is working with dissigno in Tanzania to implement the project. She is a former Peace Corps volunteer who was stationed in West Africa, drawing on her field experience and local community development knowledge. I talked to her about her experiences in Africa and the development of clean technologies for this continent.

Q: What kind of challenges are international project developers like you facing in Africa?

Kathryn Nevard: Nothing in a developing country is ever easy, even if it looks clean and clear on paper. Once in the field, the troubles always begin. It sounds straightforward to businesses in America – stop using kerosene, use LED lights, both of which are not only more inexpensive but also better for one’s health and the environment. In Africa, the challenge is to educate people – who have never seen or heard about the consequences of inferior lighting fuels on the environment and health – on what is right and what is wrong. In Gambia, where I lived it as a Peace Corps volunteer, I sat by a fire nightly with my host family, holding discussions focused not on what they want but what they need. A rural village of twenty; using kerosene at night unaware of all the health consequences, the ground filled with polluted debris being used as the children’s playground, unsanitary drinking water from an uncovered well, and barely having the funds to afford a bag of rice while living on ground zero for the food crisis.

Q: How is your previous experience in Africa helping you with your current project?

KN: In Nepal, where I worked as a volunteer teacher, I lived in a similar poverty stricken environment at a school in the Himalayas. The only power source was miles away. At night, studying was impossible, our only option was to sleep. The children, mostly refugees from Tibet, and I slept on a wooden floor. At night, I heard stories of their life without light, water, and power – something that Americans couldn’t fathom to live without. To us, these are necessities, to them a convenience. At sunrise, the children and I walked a mile to bath at a community well, the line of villagers wrapping around the hillside and the foul smelling well being the only water source in town. All these countries and projects produce difficult challenges and endless questions. With these discussions and experiences, I have learned to make every effort to understand these communities’ values, expectations and strategies that they develop to meet their daily needs. With this understanding, we can then learn how to implement projects that will be sustainable and vital to the energy poor communities.

Q: More and more international companies are providing technological solutions in Africa. Is all help good?

KN: Unfortunately, I have also observed the effects of failed projects in the field. The solar panels that become broken and unused, computers that crash due to lack of power, water pumps damaged and in need of maintenance, water filtration devises that become toys for the young children, books that develop into the source for a families cooking fire; the list is endless. How do we produce clean technology without further polluting the planet and stop producing technology trash in developing countries? It is disappointing to see projects fail.

Q: Why do you think some Renewable Energy projects fail?

KN: Many failures come from lack of community surveys and ignorance of the villager’s culture and values. These daily challenges that the energy poor face – one can only learn how to attack this challenge by working out in the field where the obstacles begun. Asking the locals, going to the villages, and learning their lifestyle to figure out how to implement the appropriate project in that developing country. It is imperative to remember that even if projects sound flawless, it may not be suitable for the selected community.

Q: How do you feel about the LED lamp project your are working on – will it be successful?

KN: I believe dissigno is on the right track. We are implementing small businesses and working with local entrepreneurs to create a sustainable lifestyle and environment. By providing entrepreneurs with the skills and technology needed, they can proceed to take control of the evolving situation by using their own problem-solving techniques and providing the community with reliable income flow. This project, like all, will take steady monitoring, assessment, and on-site revisions in order to succeed. If managed properly and assessing the local’s needs, I predict we will come closer to our goal of helping developing countries create a sustainable, healthy, and safe environment that before long will stand on its own.

[photo credit: dissigno, Kalense Kid]

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