Lufthansa has launched a six-month trial to use biofuel on all regular scheduled flights. It will operate an Airbus A321 on the Hamburg-Frankfurt-Hamburg route four times daily, with one of its engines running on a 50/50 mix of regular fuel and biosynthetic kerosene.
The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) has approved the biofuel jet engines. Biokerosene has similar properties to conventional kerosene so can be used for all aircraft types and doesn’t need to be modified to the aircraft or its engines.
Chairman and CEO of the Lufthansa Group Christoph Franz said: “Lufthansa is the first airline worldwide to use biofuel in scheduled daily flight operations. We are thus continuing to steadily implement our proven and successful strategy for sustainability.”
Franz said the point of the trial was to examine the effects of biofuel on the maintenance and lifespan of aircraft engines. The use of biofuel reduced CO2 emissions by up to 1,500 tonnes during the test period.
Is their any news on this? A move to greener transport can only be a good thing.
Hi! Not much new news, but from their website they say of the biofuel and its investment:
‘The fuel used by Lufthansa is produced by Neste Oil, a Finnish oil company. Neste has extensive experience in the production of biofuels and has been a successful partner of Lufthansa for many years.
‘Lufthansa puts the total costs of conducting the biofuel project at about 6.6 million euros. The German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology has awarded 2.5 million euros in funding for this project, which is part of a larger project known as FAIR (Future Aircraft Research) set up to examine other issues besides the compatibility of biofuels, including new propulsion and aircraft concepts and other fuels such as liquefied natural gas (LNG).’
Wow – I’d heard of biodiesel and ethanol fuel – but I didn’t realise a similar fuel existed for planes! That’s a pretty interesting development.