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It's bad enough for some propeller aircrafts to be referred to as being powered by rubber bands. Now the skeptics might begin having a dig at industrial airplane flying on whatever from cooking oil to melted algae.

With the civil aviation market under increasing pressure from rising oil prices and ecological legislation, the race is on to discover viable to standard kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to numerous kinds of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the very first trials of alternative fuel were started by British air travel leader, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic began London to Amsterdam flights with limited biofuel use in 2008. This was quickly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used various blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives consisting of some from made from jatropha curcas which can grow in soil considered too bad for growing mainstream foods.

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

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation relocated to bring out research and development into the usage of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airline companies Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as tactical consultants for the job.

The current airline company to start explore 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 claimed, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.

One actually encouraging advancement has actually been the move far from biofuels which contend head on with food consumers consequently avoiding a cost spiral. Not so long earlier, a surge in use of biofuels in cars triggered a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airlines and motorists will focus biofuel intake on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed true blessing indeed if some people ended up starving simply to please somebody else's green credentials.