It's bad enough for some prop planes to be described as being powered by rubber bands. Now the skeptics might begin having a dig at business aircraft flying on everything from cooking oil to liquefied algae.

With the civil air travel industry under increasing pressure from increasing oil prices and ecological legislation, the race is on to discover practical options to traditional kerosene and these up until now appear to come down to numerous types of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the very first trials of alternative fuel were initiated by British air travel pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic began London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel usage in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used various blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives consisting of some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil thought about too bad for growing mainstream foods.

Jatropha is a genus of roughly 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the household Euphorbiaceae.

In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha jatropha curcas as one of the finest candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to drought and insects, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation moved to bring out research study and development into making use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would act as tactical experts for the project.

The current airline to start try out brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has carried out internal US flights utilizing a blend of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mix, it is claimed, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.

One actually motivating advancement has been the relocation far from biofuels which contend head on with food customers thereby preventing a rate spiral. Not so long back, a rise in use of biofuels in cars and trucks triggered a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airlines and motorists will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a blended true blessing undoubtedly if some people wound up starving just to please somebody else's green credentials.