May 09, 2010

Lufthansa is set to become one of the first airlines to mix biofuel with traditional kerosene on commercial flights as carriers seek ways to cut high fuel costs, its chief executive said.

The German flag carrier will start running its engines on some flights on a mix of biofuel and kerosene within two years, Wolfgang Mayrhuber said.

A spokesman for Lufthansa added the airline will likely decide on a more precise schedule by the end of this year.

Aircraft account for an estimated 2-4 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which scientists say could cause global temperatures to rise, triggering widespread disease, famine, flooding and drought.

Experts say global aviation emissions could reach 2.4 billion tonnes in 2050, which would be 15-20 percent of all CO2 permitted under a global agreement and a nearly four-fold increase on current levels.

Lufthansa rival KLM, part of Franco-Dutch Air France-KLM, last year was one of the first airlines to test biofuel in a passenger plane, running one of four engines on a Boeing 747 with biofuel for a 1.5 hour test flight.

The carrier has said it aims to make commercial flights which use biofuel from 2011.

Mayrhuber said Lufthansa had no plans to run individual test flights at this point. Instead, the carrier would wait until it could start using biofuel regularly on some routes to gather reliable data over a longer period of time.

In the long run, the use of biofuel is expected to save airlines money.

"First, we are hoping to get some resource security, and second, we hope that we will have some advantages in our costs for emissions trading," Mayrhuber said.

The European Union is set to extend its Emissions Trading System (ETS) to airlines from 2012, and the less kerosene airlines use every year, the fewer certificates they have to buy permitting them to pollute the air.

Lufthansa has estimated its annual costs from the ETS at EUR€150 million - EUR€350 million (USD$201 million - USD$470 million) once airlines join the scheme.

(Reuters)

Source: http://news.airwise.com/story/view/1273418061.html