Greening the skies

Volume 10 Number 4 April 14 - May 11 2014

 

The push for ‘greener’ energy solutions extends beyond the home and the car, with researchers in Australia and India working towards a more sustainable fuel for the world’s aircraft. By David Scott.

It’s only a matter of time before airlines and plane manufacturers make the switch to ‘bio jet fuel’. Or at least, that was one of the key takeaways from a recent workshop in northern India between Australian and Indian experts.

Bio jet fuel is derived from biological feed stock, using anything from waste crops to dedicated energy crops like grasses or woodchips, to derive an energy source for planes which is greener and more renewable than standard petroleum-based fuels.

“There is a genuine need for this to happen,” says Dr Greg Martin from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Melbourne, who helped lead a recent Australian delegation to an international workshop in India to discuss progress toward bio jet fuel. 

“High-energy-density fuel is ultimately going to be required from a source other than petroleum, and eventually sustainably produced bio jet fuel will have to fill this gap,” he says.

“However while it would be nice to explore a whole range of potential bio jet fuels, the reality is that there is still a gap in investment for further work on the development of so-called “drop-in” biofuels that can fit with the current stringent specifications, which were designed with petroleum fuels in mind,” Dr Martin says.

“There is some suggestion that these rules are not set in stone, that there is some room to move to accommodate fuels with slightly different properties, however it is going to be up to us, the producers, to come up with efficient means of producing fuels that meet the right specifications and can be used safely by existing aviation infrastructure.”

Held in Dehradun, north-west of New Delhi, the workshop brought together aviation and bio-fuel experts from the University of Melbourne, the CSIRO and RMIT with those at the Indian Institute of Petroleum. Representatives were also present from major companies such as industrial firm Reliance, Canadian aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, Virgin Australia and petrol giant Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited (HPCL), as well as two pilots from Air India.

The project was supported by the Australian Government’s Australia-India Strategic Research Fund.

A University of Melbourne PhD graduate, Dr Mo Garg, now the Director of the Indian Institute of Petroleum, drove the gathering, after he had seen a similar workshop on Australia-America collaboration on bio jet fuels at the Geelong Air Show. 

According to Dr Martin, India has a real advantage over Australia in its ability to rapidly implement promising technologies at an industrial scale which allows demonstration of these processes and the production of useful quantities of bio jet fuels. 

“For instance, a lot of the current work in India is using jatropha, which is considered a weed here but is widely available there,” Dr Martin explains. “They’ve been able to demonstrate that they can convert the oil from the plant into a fuel that meets aviation specifications, and so now they’re building a processing plant to produce enough fuel to get some demonstration flights happening. It’s difficult to see things move that quickly in Australia.”

However the workshop has sown the seeds for future collaboration. Dr Martin’s own work has centered on the use of microalgae – or specifically, the oils derived from these algae – as a potential feedstock, leading to the possibility that oil extracted from algae grown in Australia could be converted and tested for fuel suitability in India. 

At the heart of it all though is the issue of money, even as the cost of petroleum continues to rise while the cost to produce biofuel continues to gradually come down. “There was a lot of talk about a potential tipping point,” Dr Martin says, “but it’s a bit like gazing into a crystal ball to find out where the two cost ‘lines’ are going to coincide. We could be 10 years away, or 20.

 

“While we know that airlines would like to be in the position to pay a premium for bio jet fuel, as it stands their margins are just too tight. While government intervention could bring the timeline forward, policies to support biofuels need to be clearly defined into the future in order to attract the necessary substantial investment to get a bio jet fuels industry established.”