Lufthansa reminds us after our Boeing story that it will this Thursday make the first commercial trans Atlantic flight using a bio-kerosene blend in a 747-400 operating a scheduled flight between Frankfurt and Washington DC.

The German carrier says that by burning 40 tonnes of biofuel that has been refined to the same thermal output and liquid handling qualities as aviation grade kerosene the 747 saves releasing the amount of fossil sourced carbon that would have been emitted had it burned 38 tonnes of normal jet fuel.

Thursday’s flight follows an intensive short haul proving program by Lufthansa between Hamburg and Frankfurt, during which it made 1187 flights over six months in an A321 in which one of the two engines ran on a 50:50 blend of bio-kerosene and traditionally refined kerosene.

In relation to its carbon content, the bio-kerosene cycle begins by removing or borrowing  carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in a biological refining process, and ends with its being exhausted or returned back into the air after the added energy has been released by combustion in the jet engine.

In the oil based refining process, the carbon isn’t ‘borrowed’ from the short term natural exchange cycles, but added to them after combustion, transferring carbon that was in a state of fossil immobilisation into an environment where these shorter term cycles associated with photosynthesis or biological activity have become increasingly over burdened by excess carbon.

That process, which involves complex feedback mechanisms, has by lifting atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, reduced the rate at which heat energy can be re-radiated into space, in what is popularly termed the ‘greenhouse effect’ and increased the dissolved carbon dioxide content of the oceans, reducing among other things the dissolved oxygen available to marine life, and damaging the marine food chain in other ways, including the capacity of sea life to build shells or skeletal structures.

The current limited but growing application of refined bio-kerosene to turbine engines is fraught with cost, policy and land use challenges, not to mention chemical and biological processes that are not widely discussed or understood  in society other than through hateful slogans and rabid misrepresentation on all sides.

They are intended to lead to new energy technologies with wider applications and lesser policy challenges.

The technology has by and large not been a product of altruism or high principles, or anything necessarily associated with climate change, but more out of the need to break dependency on fossil fuels largely produced in unfriendly places and run by oil cartels.

Or in other words,  self-interest, on the part of the airlines and aircraft manufacturers.  It is, by coincidence, something of far wider interest to those who care what sort of a world their children and children’s children will live in.