Etihad, Boeing in quest for jet biofuel

American aircraft giant Boeing is working with Etihad Airways, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company's Takreer, Total and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology on a new initiative to produce environment-friendly aviation biofuel in Abu Dhabi, according to a senior Boeing official.
The project - first announced in January 2014 - will involve planting a highly salt-tolerant halophyte plant called salicornia bigelovii that yields an oil from which biofuel can be made.
In a video conference with a group of journalists from the Arabian Gulf, Julie Felgar, managing director for environmental strategy and integration for Boeing commercial airplanes, said the project involves the use of nutrient-rich water from local aquaculture projects to irrigate the salicornia fields.
"The water has a lot of nutrients in it due to the waste that comes out of the aquaculture organisms," she said. "We're using that water to irrigate through to the salicornia fields.it grows the salicornia plants. You can harvest the salicornia plants and use the oils from the salicornia plants to create biofuels. That's the idea."
Felgar added that a test farm in Abu Dhabi will be completed in the next three or four months, after which "a small pilot programme" will begin.
Scaling up
"We'll take a year to 18 months to run through a couple of harvest rotations and see what the opportunities are to scale that up," she said. "It's not a big demonstration project. You're looking at around an acre."
"It's really a technology testing area," she added. "We're looking at some of the technology pathways used to convert the oils into synthetic jet fuel down the road. It's going to take a little bit of time to get it up and going. We need to ensure that we can get the plants growing to scale and get the yields of the oil out of the plants to the point where we can get enough oils out to go ahead and make a significant quantity of jet fuel."
The project is just one of 19 biofuel projects that Boeing is involved in around the world, which the company hopes will significantly reduce the aviation industry's carbon footprint.
"We have 50 to 80 per cent lower life cycle emissions by using sustainable aviation biofuels," Felgar said. "The fuel is technically viable, and what it has proven over time is that it is actually a higher quality standard then Jet A [currently the most commonly used jet fuel]."
"If you put it in layman's terms, you can actually fly further on a gallon of biofuel than on regular Jet A," she added.
In January 2014, Etihad conducted a 45-minute demonstration flight in a Boeing 777 powered - in part - by UAE-produced biofuel.
In 2011, the airline conducted the region's first biofuel flight by delivering a 777 from Boeing's manufacturing facilities in Washington to Abu Dhabi using a mixture of plant oil and petroleum-based jet fuel.
- bernd@khaleejtimes.com