The Virgin Atlantic flight used only sustainable aviation fuel to cross the Atlantic Ocean from London to New York on Tuesday. It’s a step toward zero-carbon flight.

Biofuels like this have some very significant scale constraints, and quite literally amount to burning food. Per the article:

Virgin Atlantic’s 100% SAF flight is a one-time stunt, and the airline won’t regularly offer all-SAF flights. Standard jet engines aren’t designed to run on only sustainable fuel, and it is too expensive and rare for it to be practical for airlines to run all-SAF routes.

  • Treczoks
    8•1 year ago

    They did test flights here with “bio-kerosine” made from old kitchen fat. While this is a nice thing, it is a mere publicity gadget. We did some back-of-the-envelope calculations about this. Starting from the amount of kerosine currently sold in this country, over the relative low output of usable “bio-kerosine” from recycled kitchen oils and fats to the production specifics, we got a result.

    Even if we turned each and every piece of arable land - fields, meadows, pastures, wine yards, commercially used forests, gardens - everything from the sea to the mountains into rapeseed fields, every year, without crop rotation, we still won’t get enough of this “bio-kerosine” out of it to keep commercial planes in the air at current levels.