Can the aviation industry finally clean up its emissions?

27 Sep 16

When a South Africa Airways scheduled flight flew from Johannesburg to Cape Town last month, it carried nearly 300 passengers. Neither the passengers or the pilots would have noticed any difference between that flight and any other. But instead of the usual petroleum-based jet fuel, the plane was burning thousands of litres of a clear liquid derived from the oil of nicotine-free tobacco plants grown by farmers on acres of under-used land in the country’s Limpopo province. Boeing, KLM, South African Airways, the Dutch government and others who partnered in the trial were cock-a-hoop with the results, which came as part of something called Project Solaris. But despite successful tests and trials with different crops and waste streams, is there any hope in the forseeable future of aviation biofuels taking off on the scale needed to make even the slightest dent in the 300bn litres of jet fuel used worldwide every year? Worldwide, flights produced nearly 800m tonnes of CO2 in 2015, or up to 5% of all CO2 emissions.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/sep/27/can-the-aviation-industry-finally-clean-up-its-emissions

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