European Airlines Testing Increasing Biofuel Use In Commercial Flights
October 12, 2011 Kyriaki (Sandy) Venetis Iberia Airlines launched, last week, Spain’s first commercial flight using a biofuel. The Iberia Airbus A320 flew from Madrid to Barcelona, burning a mixture of conventional A-1 jet fuel and a biofuel synthesized with the use of a plant the Spanish call camelina sativa.
The Iberia Airbus A320. Photo courtesy of Airliners.net.The airbus needed no modifications to burn the mixture of second-generation biofuel.
In other parts of the world, the plant is also known as linseed dodder, German sesame, and Siberian oilseed. It’s native to northern Europe and to central Asia, but has also been introduced to North America.
A lot of the camelina plant’s appeal as a biofuel is that it needs little water or nitrogen to flourish. It can be grown on marginal agricultural lands and does not compete with food crops.
Repsol, the Spanish oil company that provided the fuel, said that the fuel’s characteristics were identical to those of conventional aviation fuel, with a 25 percent content of biofuel made from the plant.
Repsol blended and distributed the fuel, which was produced by Honeywell-UOP. Iberia estimated that using the fuel mixture resulted in a reduction of nearly 1,500 kgs of CO2 emissions.