It's bad enough for some prop aircrafts to be referred to as being powered by elastic band. Now the skeptics could begin having a dig at business airplane flying on everything from cooking oil to liquefied algae.

With the civil air travel market under increasing pressure from rising oil costs and environmental legislation, the race is on to find practical alternatives to traditional kerosene and these up until now seem to boil down to different types of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the first trials of alternative fuel were started by travel pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic began London to Amsterdam flights with minimal biofuel use in 2008. This was rapidly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each used different blends of routine fuel and bio derivatives consisting of some from made from jatropha curcas which can grow in soil considered too poor for growing mainstream foods.

jatropha curcas is a genus of around 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the family Euphorbiaceae.

In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha curcas as one of the very best prospects for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and bugs, and produces seeds including 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aerial significant Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to bring out research study and development into the usage of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would serve as strategic experts for the job.

The current airline to start experimenting with new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has performed internal US flights utilizing a mix of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is declared, can cut damaging emissions by 10%.

One truly encouraging development has been the move far from biofuels which contend head on with food customers thus preventing a rate spiral. Not so long earlier, a rise in usage of biofuels in automobiles caused a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted excessive corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airline companies and vehicle drivers will focus biofuel consumption on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a combined true blessing indeed if some individuals ended up starving just to satisfy somebody else's green qualifications.