Biofuel-powered commercial flights could become standard operations within five to seven years, according to Lufthansa’s (LH) head of aviation biofuel.
Speaking in Washington Jan. 13, LH VP aviation fuel Joachim Buse said the airline’s burnFAIR project has proved that biofuels are completely feasible for commercial flights from a technological standpoint. The issue is how to produce sufficient and sustainable feedstocks at a viable cost. “From now on, it’s purely a commercial issue,” Buse told ATW.
Buse was speaking a day after the first biofuel-powered transatlantic commercial flight into the US–an LH scheduled flight from Frankfurt to Washington Jan. 12 using a Boeing 747-400 . The aircraft carried about 40 tons of biosynthetic fuel mix.
Between mid-July and the end of December, LH conducted four daily roundtrip flights between Hamburg and Frankfurt as part of its burnFAIR project. A single dedicated Airbus A321 was used on all flights, each about an hour long. Its starboard engine was powered by a 50% biofuel mix, while the other engine burned conventional Jet A-1 fuel.
Buse said when the engine was examined at the end of the trials, it looked brand new. He said this showed that biofuels were “fit for purpose and require no changes in operation.”
Government assistance and new commercial practices will be necessary, however. Some of the plants that provide the bases of biofuels take up to four years to establish and their yields must be increased to make them viable because they currently cost about two-and-a-half times the price of conventional fuel.
Buse said that the cost of the LH project was about €6.6 million ($8.4 million); the airline received €2.5 million of German government subsidies toward this.
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