Will Virgin Atlantic Airlines fly on hemp?
Richard Branson thinks that the biofuel is the future of fuel, and within 30 years will replace fossil fuels.
At the Abu Dhabi World Leadership summit Richard Branson said that the fleet of his company Virgin Atlantic Airways is going to use biofuels produced from plant waste.
In an interview with a reporter from Reuters he said, that he was looking for alternative fuel sources and that even he was planning to start building cellulosic ethanol plants (to make) fuel that is derived from the waste product of the plant. He believes that the future of fuel is in this environmentally friendly technology, which over the next 20 or 30 years actually will replace the conventional fuel.
The idea of producing biofuels from waste biomass is not new, but only in the recent time it has been shaped into a realizable form. In the countries where it is possible to obtain two annual crops the issue was not as "hot" as in the northern countries. The South could cover its demand for fuels by local crops processed in the traditional way to ethanol used as a fuel (i.e. Brazil). The next generation of biofuels may be easier for northern countries to produce economically.
Instead of getting fuel from sugar or oil-a tiny part of the total plant-upstart companies are building new factories that convert a plant’s entire "biomass" into fuel. Present fermentation technology leaves the cellulose-a stiff material that gives plants their structure-as waste. (In the case of biodiesel, oil is pressed from the seeds; the rest of the plant is discarded.) Last fall, Canadian firm Iogen inaugurated the world’s first commercial plant that takes leftover straw from surrounding farms and turns it into ethanol. The trick is to use genetically engineered enzymes-only now becoming cheaply available-that can convert the cellulose in straw to glucose, which is then fermented to produce ethanol. Shell Oil has invested $46 million for Iogen to complete a bigger facility that will produce 200,000 tons of ethanol a year-at an estimated cost of $1.30 per gallon-once it goes online in 2008.
In Germany, Volkswagen is financing Choren Industries, which is developing a process to synthesize a premium-quality diesel fuel from the cellulose in trees and straw. Cars at Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters already use the fuel from Choren’s pilot facility, and a commercial-size plant will go online in 2007. "This will drastically cut the amount of land needed to produce biofuels," says VW’s Steiger.
Bushka Bryndova
