An Encounter With A Microburst
It was a beautiful pre-summer afternoon as we took off from Bangalore for Coimbatore in our Dornier-228. We were required to position at Coimbatore for a routine charter flight. The weather forecast for the route was seasonal pre-monsoon weather with likely Cumulonimbus buildup during late afternoon. The enroute weather was generally good, except for a large cell visible on the weather radar slightly north of Coimbatore. Our track was fortunately clear and we expected no problems but for the northerly winds, which were pushing the cell slowly towards our destination. However, we expected to be on ground well before the CB could affect our destination. As we approached Coimbatore, the tower cleared a scheduled Boeing-737 flight to descend behind us and join the ILS final approach path directly ad told us to report overhead for a procedure ILS, as requested by us. However, as we reported overhead, the mighty CB had reached within 10 NM of the airfield and moving in fast. Winds were slowly picking up and we were anxious to be on ground as early as possible. In the meanwhile, the B-737 reported as having been established on ILS for R/W 23. As we joined the hold for the ILS, the jet reported some turbulence on finals. However, as the jet landed, the captain informed us that he had experienced severe turbulence on finals and advised us to approach the airfield from the other end, I e R/W 05.
Sensing an abnormal situation developing, we became adequately alert and decided to follow his advice. The CB was now within 5 NM from the airfield.
As we decided to join a southerly visual circuit, the winds too were veering and becoming favorable for our newly selected approach path. Consequently, we joined a descending circuit and were asked to report finals for R/W 05. By the time we turned base-leg, we had reached circuit altitude and began adjusting configuration for the final approach. We also noticed slight turbulence at this stage.
Further, one important variation was the requirement of higher power setting for the existing aircraft configuration and altitude. As we turned finals, the power setting requirement steadily increased. During descent, the power requirement increased uncomfortably and reached an abnormally high setting of 65% torque by the time we were 500 feet on short finals. The normal setting under the circumstances would have been 35% torque on finals and steadily decreasing during the final descent. In addition, there was a steady increase in turbulence level and situation had become uncomfortable at 500 feet. We were now in a full-fledged Microburst and slowly getting into a worse situation. The captain, on RHS who was silently monitoring the approach finally decided to takeover the controls and commenced a go around at about 400-500 feet. As he opened power, he found that the aircraft was barely maintaining height with even maximum power and turbulence was now severe,lightning at night especially for a light aircraft like Dornier. At this crucial stage, the Captain decided to leave current flight path and commenced a right turn away from the direction of winds and the approaching CB, which by now was very close to the far end of the runway. To his great relief the effect of strong winds of microburst began to fade away, the aircraft started to respond to power, and finally started a gradual climb at about 200 feet above ground level. With further change in direction, the aircraft comfortably climbed out and we decided to divert to the nearby airfield.
Aware that we had had a real close shave, the following points emerged during the mutual debrief:
* The caution from the Boeing was indeed a timely one regarding the oncoming situation.
* We had inadvertently entered a microburst and recovered just short of a sure disaster.
* There is no known equipment to accurately warn the pilots about an impending microburst, which can be present in clear weather in the vicinity of a CB.
* Within a microburst, the turbulence can drastically increase from an acceptable level to a dangerous one within a short descent of 200-300 feet.
The wind situation for us while in microburst changed sequentially from strong headwinds to strong updraft and then to a severe downdraft, the last condition being responsible for many aviation disasters where even maximum power from all the engines may be insufficient to climb out safely. Fortunately, we avoided getting into this last situation, as we decided to turn without waiting for the aircraft to initiate climb at fairly low altitude. Incidentally, the Captain vaguely remembers this action being recommended on a TV program on aviation disasters as a likely course of action for an airliner, which crashed due to a microburst some years ago. You never know which direction the help can eventually come from!
The decision to divert could have been taken right away. Although we did not expect to encounter a microburst, yet avoiding this situation altogether would have been a desirable course of action. However, we would have been deprived of this once in a lifetime experience of encountering a microburst first-hand, and coming out alive and safe. The encounter will never fade away from our memory. And of course, I have absolutely no desire to get into a similar situation in future.
America’s Best & Worst Airlines
Arriving on time is important for all sorts of reasons: making a connection; attending a big meeting; or even just starting your vacation on the right foot.
And when it comes to on-time arrivals, not all airlines are created equal. Sure, sometimes it depends what airports they fly into (which is why we rank the best and worst airports as well): after all, regulars at LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark have to deal with a lot more congestion than airlines flying into, say, Phoenix. But sometimes the arrival record is also a function of the airline itself.
So as we do each year, Travel + Leisure went to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which tracks the percentage of on-time arrivals for 19 airlines. We looked at the period from February 1, 2008, to March 31, 2009.
And we learned that there’s some good news out there. In 2008, the worst-performing airline (American) had an on-time percentage of 68 percent. But this year, the airline that claims last-place honors (not American, by the way) promptly arrived almost 71 percent of the time. And many other airlines showed improved performance as well. Ironically, though, the best airline did worse: it had an on-time arrival rate of 92 percent in 2008, while this year it was down to 89.5 percent.
Mostly, this year’s list is a reshuffling—airlines swapping spots and moving a couple percentage points up or down. But Northwest was a big exception: the airline jumped 6 percentage points from 2008, to almost 80 percent, and moved from No. 12 up to No. 7 in the rankings.
Other exceptions revolved around the regional carriers. American Eagle, for example, came in just 4 spots from the bottom, with only 71 percent of its flights arriving on time. This year, however, it has upped its game, with a rate of more than 76 percent. That didn’t move the airline into the top 10, but it got it very close. Another airline making a big move? Pinnacle, which operates flights for Northwest Airlink and Delta Connection. It did well in 2008—its 77.4 percent performance earned it the No. 6 spot. But this year, it jumped a full 6 percentage points, which was enough to move it to the No. 2 spot.
Pondering American and jetBlue: Most Interesting
Coming on the heels of last week’s post about Southwest and being jilted by Delta and US Airways in their reworked slot exchange, this morning we get an announcement that American and jetBlue are entering into a new commercial arrangement at key east coast cities. I will probably write later on the topic but wanted to jot a few things down before I leave for meetings.
* Each SkyTeam and STAR have enhanced their positions in the New York metro market in recent months. Given the importance of New York and the key east coast cities of New York and Boston, American enhances its presence as well as that of oneworld with this announcement.
* jetBlue has a relationship with Aer Lingus. Lufthansa invested in jetBlue. Now jetBlue enters into a commercial relationship with American whereby customers of each airline can enjoy interline capabilities with the other at each Boston Logan and New York JFK on non-overlapping routes.
* Is jetBlue becoming the Alaska Airlines of the east coast? Keeping itself most relevant in its home market by code sharing with many airlines?
* American intends to transfer eight slot pairs at Ronald Reagan National Airport and one slot pair at White Plains N.Y. to jetBlue. Three more than jetBlue would receive in the DL-US proposed transaction. So for jetBlue, will it be 5, 8 or 13 slot pairs at Ronald Reagan National Airport?
* jetBlue intends to transfer 12 slot pairs at JFK to American.
* This slot transfer business is getting very interesting.
* It has been a bad week for Southwest. Between their cry of being “left out” of the US – DL slot swap; talk of being jilted by WestJet; and now American teaming with jetBlue …….
I wonder what Southwest must be thinking?
Mainline Pilot Scope: Will Regional Carriers Be Permitted to Fly 90+ Seat Aircraft?
Today I had the pleasure of participating on a panel at the 35th Annual FAA Aviation Forecast Conference, my second consecutive year taking part in one of the breakout sessions. I shared a dais with the President of the Regional Airline Association, Roger Cohen, and long-time industry consultant, historian and photographer George Hamlin on a panel titled: New Decade……Dawn or Dusk for Regional Carriers? I had the hotseat – responsible for discussing the reliably controversial subject of mainline pilot scope clauses.
It is my view that there can’t be an honest discussion on the shape or structure of the US domestic airline industry without talking about scope – the contractual clauses pilot unions negotiate to protect certain flying for their members. I believe that this round of contract negotiations at major carriers will be the most important since deregulation, and scope will play a pivotal role as the airlines take a hard look at economics. And mainline pilot scope agreements are all about economics.
Today’s industry architecture in which regional carriers fly large numbers of aircraft with 76 seats and less was drawn on the equivalent of vellum paper using compasses, triangles, French curves, triangular scales and protractors. The working structure did not come about easily. First, earlier era scope clauses were relaxed during the late 1990s and early 2000s to permit carriers to deploy 50-seat regional jets between hubs and markets that could no longer support the economics of a mainline jet. Delta and Continental had a significant head start on the rest of the industry in using these smaller aircraft because they had few limitations imposed through their pilot agreements.
Other mainline carriers: American, Northwest, United and US Airways, were late to the game. Scope-relaxed competitors were using the 50-seater to claim traffic that was traditionally the domain of the scope-constrained carriers still limited to feed markets within the turboprop drawn 400 mile radius around a hub. Now these little jets could overfly hubs, aggressively changing the competitive structure in the US domestic market.
So those carriers that needed the permission of pilots to compete on a level playing field recognized the need to relax restrictive scope clauses that limited what type of aircraft regional pilots could fly. And that made the scope clause important trading currency for pilot unions that agreed to relax scope protections only in return for improvements in other parts of the agreement. For example, when United pilots negotiated a new agreement in the Fall of 2000, the union leveraged scope relief to demand a weighted average 23 percent wage increase and two subsequent 4.7 percent increases, as well as a number of other contract enhancements that ultimately contributed to landing the carrier in bankruptcy.
I am convinced that, if not for bankruptcy, we would not be seeing mainline carrier’s regional partners flying aircraft 70 seats and greater in the numbers we are seeing today. So if today’s architecture was drawn with outdated tools, then tomorrow’s architecture will likely require Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. That, as old-school architects might say, is equivalent to replacing the pencil with a keyboard — limiting in that the digital world requires exact inputs rather than the less precise nature of sketching. And that has real implications for pilots and the carriers that employ them.
Tipping Point
From my perspective this next round of pilot negotiations could be the tipping point for scope: the critical juncture in an evolving situation that leads to a new and irreversible development. What if mainline pilots again treat the relaxation of scope as trading currency to make improvements in the collective bargaining agreement? Wouldn’t they ultimately be ceding mainline narrowbody flying in the US domestic market? I think so.
This approach would be a mistake for management, too, because scope relief has historically been assigned too much value in bargaining. There is value in the shift of flying from the mainline to regional partners to be sure. But the differences in labor rates between the mainline and the regional are nowhere near what they were before the last round of industry restructuring. Domestic revenues continue to suffer, particularly compared to the revenue environment when values were last ascribed to scope relief. And with little growth expected in US domestic flying, airlines must question where they’ll find the arbitrage.
I make this projection for domestic flying based in part on a comparison to historic growth rates. Today, the travel spend as a percent of GDP produces $35+ billion dollars less in revenue than did the high water-market in 2001. Labor rate differentials between mainline and regional carriers are significantly smaller than they were in 2001. Regulatory oversight of the regional industry will add expense that is not yet known or understood. Negative media coverage could undermine passenger acceptance and willingness to fly regional carriers. Most mainline airlines are ordering narrowbody equipment to replace aircraft in their fleets, not expand their fleets. And there are still thousands of mainline pilots on furlough.
Does Scope Produce the Intended Outcome?
In the most simplistic terms, scope is the definition of work for the class and craft of employees governed by the provisions of a collective bargaining agreement. Its purpose is to provide job security for those employees. But it is safe to say that most scope clauses produced unintended consequences. Between 2000 – 2008, legacy carriers reduced the number of narrowbody aircraft they fly by 800, and more than 14,000 pilot jobs have disappeared.
So, one could argue that scope is just another example of protectionism that failed. As economist Henry George, a sharp critic of protectionist policies, once said: “Protectionism teaches us is to do to ourselves in times of peace what enemies seek to do to us in times of war.”
Scope negotiations have been divisive not only between labor and managements but just as much between the unions representing mainline pilots and those representing regional pilots. Ultimately airlines must determine whether the 90-125 seat flying of tomorrow should go to the mainline or be flown by their regional partners. To arrive at the right economic solution, it is time for organized pilot labor and management to stop putting a Band-aid on problems.
The Boyd Group International recently released an interesting fleet forecast that looks in part at new aircraft orders. So far, the only area of real growth is in the 75-125 seat category. Orders in other seat ranges are forecast simply as replacements from now until 2015.
Ironically, 2015 is when many regional contracts expire, primarily those for 50-seat flying. These expirations could eliminate nearly 500 existing airplanes currently under contract between now and 2016; with the lion’s share coming off contract in 2015. This is a conundrum for the regional industry for sure. There will be a thirst for new flying.
It Is All About the Economics
Perhaps a better way than scope for pilot unions to think about job protection is to find the economics that will employ the most pilots at the mainline. That challenge must acknowledge the fact that today’s industry is not the industry of yesteryear. If the regional industry has been used as currency to cross-subsidize pilots at the mainline; and assuming that the trading currency is not what is was as we engage in this round of bargaining, then something has to give.
There are two solutions as I see it: 1) relax scope in order to win bigger increases in wages, benefits and working conditions for pilots that remain at the mainline; or 2) embrace the absolute fact that contractual rates, work rules and benefits need to be lower for US domestic mainline flying. That type of carve out can be negotiated. Domestic market flying differentials can be the new trading currency used to adapt any pilot contract to the market realities of today. There is no way to “perfume the pig” here; the mainline did something similar in 1984 in order to average down labor costs to facilitate growth. When it was decided that the concept was not internally healthy, mainline pilot labor made the regional industry the new vehicle for cross-subsidization of mainline pilot terms of employment.
One trend is clear: the industry’s pricing structure cannot now support labor rates that keep pace with inflation. An unpopular message — yes. But there needs to be a structure in place that recognizes the different conditions in the US domestic market versus international markets. This structure must recognize that not all flying is created equal, just as the airlines are coming to appreciate that a one size fits all operation is not financially sustainable. There is a tremendous opportunity to put in place something better – if only the players at the table can let go of the past and come to terms with a new era in the airline industry.
Where Do I Come Out?
I recently saw a piece by Lori Ranson on the Airline Business blog titled: “A New Line In the Sand” that cites comments by long-time Raymond James analyst Jim Parker on the future of scope: “As employee groups seek to regain some concessions made early last decade as a host of carriers spent time in Chapter 11, there could be some leeway in the size of jets flown by mainline regional partners,” according to the analysis. James sees the potential to renegotiate current scope clauses, moving the dial from 70-seats to 90-seats.
I am not one to be on the other side of Parker often, but on this one I am. I do not believe that the mainline pilot unions can afford to make another mistake. Their arrogance toward regional jet flying led to their current predicament. The economics of US domestic flying is simply much more difficult now for the legacy carriers. If labor can’t let go of their memories of what the industry was 20 years ago to focus instead on where it’s going over the next 20 years, then they will have no one to blame but themselves if they fail to help position airlines – and the pilots they represent – for success. John Kennedy once said: “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
It won’t be easy for pilot union leaders to find a solution for a problem that they helped to create. Just as the US Airways East scope clause defines small, medium and large regional aircraft, it is time to define small, medium and large narrowbody equipment necessary to profitably serve the domestic market.
Once again, a call for pilot union leadership. My view is that management is indifferent as to which pilot group does the flying. I am thinking we are at that critical juncture in an evolving situation that leads to a new and irreversible development – mainline legacy carrier pilots performing narrowbody flying in the US domestic market 20 years from now – or NOT.
Green fuel for the airline industry?
IF YOU have become addicted to the fly-cheap philosophy espoused by budget airlines over the last decade, it could be time to rethink your travel plans. Airlines now find themselves facing a crude oil price that has doubled to more than $140 a barrel in just 12 months, pushing fuel costs to record levels. Around 10 small carriers have already gone under, and the industry as a whole is expected to lose $40 billion this year. Airlines are being forced to slash capacity and merge, and the knock-on effects for passengers are obvious: “Our customers must ultimately compensate us for the costs we incur flying them around,” warned Gerard Arpey, chairman of American Airlines, at an airline industry conference in June. With analysts predicting a further leap to $200 a barrel by 2010, there is no relief in sight.
Yet as bad as things look, the soaring cost of oil is not the biggest problem the industry and its passengers face. More fundamental is the need to replace kerosene with another source of energy altogether, for two pressing reasons.
First, the airline industry is turning out to be the cuckoo in the nest of carbon reduction. The UK, for instance, is now legally bound to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent to 65 million tonnes a year by 2050, but under the government’s “best case” projection, the country’s aviation industry alone will emit 15.7 million tonnes that year, almost a quarter of the economy’s entire carbon ration. According to experts at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change near Norwich, UK, if additional indirect impacts of aviation – such as the effect of contrails – are taken into account, that figure could rise to over 100 per cent. Neither scenario is sustainable.
Second, aviation is uniquely vulnerable to the consequences of peak oil – the point at which global oil production begins its inevitable decline. Whereas land-based transport could in theory be completely electrified, powered by batteries charged from renewable sources, there is no alternative to energy-dense liquid fuels for jet engines. There is a growing consensus that global oil production will peak in the next decade or so and then go into terminal decline. Some analysts believe it already has: output has been essentially flat since 2005 despite soaring demand, which is why the price is heading skyward. Even the traditionally optimistic International Energy Agency now foresees an oil “supply crunch” from 2012. For airlines the problem could soon be not just whether they can afford jet fuel, but whether there is enough of it to go round.
If airlines are to have any chance of staying aloft in a post-peak, carbon-rationed world, they must quickly find an alternative fuel with low emissions that also matches the stiff technical standards of jet kerosene. Because planes have to lift their fuel into the sky and carry it for the entire journey, this fuel has to be energy dense. Because they fly at high altitude, it needs to remain fluid at -50 °C. Because they fly long distances, chemically identical supplies must be available all over the world. And because airliners have long lives, the new fuel must be compatible with the existing fleet. What’s needed, in other words, is an exact replica of old-fashioned jet kerosene – a so-called “drop-in” replacement – that also emits substantially less CO2 per unit of energy. “Meeting all these conflicting demands is a very tall order,” says Mike Farmery, global fuel technical and quality manager at Shell Aviation. “There are lots of exciting ideas, but it will be hard to achieve quickly.” So what are our alternatives?
Until recently it was widely thought that using biofuels like bioethanol or biodiesel in aviation was a non-starter. Scientists have known since the 1940s how to turn vegetable oil into biodiesel using a process called transesterification, in which the oil is processed using alcohol and an acid catalyst. This produces fuels that work well on the ground but not at altitude: the natural freezing point of such oils is too high, so they would congeal at 33,000 feet. They also contain too much oxygen, which adds weight but not energy content.
However, it now seems those technical problems have been cracked. Finnish oil company Neste has devised a way to produce an oxygen-free biodiesel called NExBTL, which could in theory be used to make jet fuel. Neste already has two plants manufacturing NExBTL and has another two in the pipeline.
Meanwhile in February 2008, airline Virgin Atlantic conducted a test flight using a biofuel made from coconut and babassu oil produced by Imperium Renewables, a Seattle-based company that has developed a patented method of reducing the freezing point. A second test flight with an Air New Zealand plane is planned later this year.
The problem with so-called first-generation biofuels – made using conventional fermentation and distillation procedures from wheat, say – remains the amount of feedstock and land required. During Virgin’s test flight from London to Amsterdam, the Boeing 747 consumed 22 tonnes of fuel, of which only 5 per cent was neat biofuel. Producing even that much required the equivalent of 150,000 coconuts, says Brian Young, Imperium’s director of international business development. Had this single flight been run entirely on biofuel, it would have consumed 3 million coconuts – an astronomical number that highlights the scale of the problem. However, Virgin and its partners Boeing and GE stressed that the flight was simply a “proof of concept”, and accepted that producing useful amounts of fuel would require “next generation” feedstocks: those made from non-food crops, waste biomass or by converting existing fuels to liquid form.
One option, which Virgin’s Richard Branson suggested at the launch of his airline’s test flight, would be to produce fuel from the nuts of Jatropha curcas. This hardy bush grows in the tropics on relatively poor land with little water or fertiliser, so it needn’t displace food production. However, the amount of land required to fuel the world’s jet planes would still be prodigious
Aviation currently consumes around 5 million barrels of jet fuel per day, or 238 million tonnes per year. On current Jatropha yields – 1.7 tonnes of oil per hectare – replacing that would take 1.4 million square kilometres, well over twice the size of France. To put this in context, D1 Oils, the British company pioneering biofuel from Jatropha in countries such as India, Zambia and Indonesia, plans to plant 10,000 km2 over the next four years.
If vegetable oil looks likely to remain in short supply, another approach would be to make jet fuel from plant material using the Fischer-Tropsch chemical process developed in Germany in the 1920s. Originally designed to produce synthetic diesel from coal, the Fischer-Tropsch process also works with a wide range of organic matter. The feedstock is heated without oxygen to create a synthetic gas that is then converted to high-quality liquid fuels using high temperatures and iron-based catalysts. This makes it possible to create a synthetic jet fuel that is indistinguishable from conventional kerosene. Depending on the feedstock, the fuel could in principle have very low carbon emissions and not compete with food production. Unfortunately, though, all the feedstocks have significant drawbacks.
For example, Fischer-Tropsch jet fuel is already produced from coal by Sasol in South Africa, and planes refuelling in Johannesburg get a half-and-half blend of kerosene and coal-to-liquids (CTL) fuel. The problem with CTL is that life-cycle emissions are roughly double those of kerosene, making CTL-powered aviation even more damaging to the climate.
The Fischer-Tropsch process also works with natural gas. Gas-to-liquids (GTL) jet fuel was tested by Airbus and Shell earlier this year. Well-to-wing emissions are lower than CTL, yet no better than conventional kerosene, because the Fischer Tropsch process itself consumes so much energy. According to Airbus’s rival Boeing, GTL jet fuel emits 1.5 times as much CO2 as kerosene.
The only realistic hope of producing Fischer-Tropsch jet fuel with substantially lower emissions is to use some form of plant material such as wood or straw as the feedstock – so-called biomass-to-liquids, or BTL – as championed by the German company Choren, which plans to start full-scale production by 2012. The company boldly proclaims a vision of “potentially infinite production of renewable energy”, but a closer look at the numbers suggests the real outlook will be more modest.
In a presentation at the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi in January, Choren CEO Tom Blades said the company’s BTL fuel could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 91 per cent, and insisted it would not compete with food production. One reason for this is that a large proportion of the feedstock will come from waste construction timber and existing forestry – initially. However, Blades acknowledged that further BTL expansion would require increasing amounts of specially grown “energy crops” such as willow or miscanthus. Supplies of waste timber aren’t expected to grow, so within 10 years, more than half of Choren’s feedstock will need to come from energy crops, again raising the issue of land use.
Blades cites the EU’s Biomass Action Plan report of December 2005, which suggests that Europe has the potential to produce around 100 million tonnes of energy crops annually by 2030, and that total available biomass, including waste and forestry contributions, could amount to 315 million tonnes. Since Choren’s BTL process takes 5 tonnes of dry biomass to produce a tonne of fuel, this would produce just over 60 million tonnes of fuel per year. That sounds a lot until you remember that in 2006 the EU consumed more than 700 million tonnes of crude. “We’re not replacing oil,” Blades admits, “just making it last a little bit longer.”
In the context of global aviation, the numbers are even more daunting. Meeting today’s global demand for jet fuel from BTL would require – assuming the average crop yields 10 tonnes of biomass per hectare – nearly 1.2 million km2. That’s well over three times the size of Germany, and makes no allowance for the predicted rapid growth in aviation. On the same assumptions, replacing all current transport fuel with BTL would require more than 10 million km2 – an area bigger than China. This demolishes any claim that second-generation biofuels wouldn’t have to compete with food production.
The one remaining alternative for low-emission jet fuel that doesn’t compete with agriculture are algae, which can be grown in ponds of seawater built on non-productive land. Given the right conditions, some species multiply quickly and produce oil, which can then be extracted and refined. It is widely agreed that such a system could take up less space and deliver much higher yields than oil crops such as palm or Jatropha – although quite how much higher is still controversial.
The technology itself is not new. Ami Ben-Amotz, a senior scientist at Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography in Haifa, has been farming algae commercially for more than 20 years to produce beta-carotene food supplements for the Japanese market. In 2004 he founded a new company, Seambiotic, to produce algae for biofuel at a coal-fired power station on the coast at Ashkelon.
It is an undeniably neat arrangement. Warm water from the power station’s cooling system is diverted through the ponds before returning to the sea. Meanwhile flue gas from the station’s chimney supplies CO2 to feed the algae, and energy for pumping and harvesting is available at minimal cost. The harvested algae are then reduced to a concentrated paste and mixed with solvents to separate the oil, which can be turned into biofuel by transesterification. Seambiotic is delighted with the results and aims to complete a larger, 50,000-square-metre pond on the site by the end of the year. Ben-Amotz says that refineries could offer similar opportunities.
Algae have stirred up huge excitement, not only because they have the potential to help mop up CO2 emissions, but also because of the sheer amount of fuel they might produce. Shell, which is building a pilot facility in Hawaii, claims algae could be 15 times as productive as traditional biofuel crops. Boeing believes algae could produce 85 to 170 tonnes per hectare per year (10,000 to 20,000 US gallons per acre per year), yielding all the world’s jet fuel in an area the size of Belgium. Yet the scientists who have done most research into algae production look askance at such claims.
The fundamental problem, explains Al Darzins, who coordinates alga research at the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, is that although algae grow very quickly, most of their biomass is usually carbohydrate. To trigger a higher proportion of oil, you have to stress the algae in some way – starve them of nutrients such as nitrogen, say – which in turn limits their growth rate. As a result, Darzins thinks 42 tonnes per hectare is a more realistic target.
Ben-Amotz is even more cautious. To grow algae cheaply means using open ponds, which are prone to invasion by local alga species that do not produce oil, or by predatory micro-organisms. There are also the day-to-day problems of keeping temperature and salinity constant, so theoretical levels of productivity are hard to maintain on large scales and over the long term. “If people say it’s possible, let them show me,” Ben-Amotz says. “But usually they only show me a bucketful.”
With over 20 years’ production experience, Ben-Amotz is convinced that the maximum practical yield is 25 grams of biomass per square metre per day, of which 40 per cent might be oil. That equates to about 36 tonnes per hectare per year, meaning that to replace current jet fuel consumption would take about 65,000 km2, roughly the area of Ireland. Massively better than BTL, but still enormous.
Nevertheless there is intense interest in algal jet fuel in both civil and military aviation – hardly surprising, since jet fuel eats almost 60 per cent of the US Department of Defense’s annual fuel bill, burning up over $6 billion in 2006. America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is sponsoring research into ways to produce JP-8 military jet fuel from crop oils, including algae. The target is to produce a fuel that achieves at least 60 per cent conversion efficiency from the crop oil to jet fuel, eventually rising to 90 per cent, all for less than $3 per gallon. Three contractors will deliver fuel samples this autumn, and DARPA is assessing proposals for further research.
Algal jet fuel also has its fans in civil aviation, including Virgin and Boeing, which is no surprise since it seems to offer the best bet in a gamble where the stakes are literally sky-high: nothing less than the survival of aviation as we know it. However, the main concern may not be space so much as time. At the launch of the Virgin biofuel test flight, Branson suggested that algae might produce enough fuel for the entire airline industry, and that such technological breakthroughs represented the only chance of mitigating peak oil, which he said could arrive within six years. But when asked if fuels like Jatropha or algae could be ready by then, he did not sound so confident: “We have to try our best to make them available as fast as we possibly can.”
