It's bad enough for some propeller aircrafts to be referred to as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could begin having a dig at business aircraft flying on everything from cooking oil to melted algae.

With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from increasing oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to find feasible options to standard kerosene and these up until now seem to boil down to different types of biofuel.

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

jatropha curcas 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 curcas as one of the best candidates for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and bugs, and produces seeds consisting of 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation relocated to perform research and development into making use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as strategic specialists for the project.

The current airline company to start explore brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has performed internal US flights using a blend of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is declared, can cut harmful emissions by 10%.

One actually encouraging development has been the relocation far from biofuels which compete head on with food customers thus preventing a cost spiral. Not so long ago, a rise in usage of biofuels in automobiles caused a spike in maize costs as US farmers diverted corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airline companies and motorists will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a combined true blessing undoubtedly if some people wound up starving just to satisfy another person's green credentials.