Source: BusinessGreen

Dutch airline confirms weekly flights from New York to Amsterdam will use sustainable biofuels.

The fast-evolving market for aviation biofuels has reached another important milestone, after Dutch airline KLM announced one of its weekly flights from New York to Amsterdam will now be made using a sustainable biofuel made from old cooking oil.

The company announced late last week that Thursday’s Flight KL642 flight from John F. Kennedy Airport to Schiphol was made using biofuel, and confirmed the weekly flight will now continue to use the biofuel

The fuel is to be provided by aviation biofuel specialist SkyNRG and the project has been supported by a raft of KLM partners, including Schiphol Group, Delta Air Lines, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the companies in the airline’s Corporate BioFuel Program.

The news was welcomed by the Dutch Minister of Ecomomic Affairs, Henk Kamp, who hailed the project as evidence of KLM’s position as a “frontrunner in making air transportation more sustainable”.

KLM’s managing director, Camiel Eurlings, said the project was part of a wide-ranging initiative to deliver further carbon emissions reductions. “We are striving to achieve the ‘optimal flight’ together with research institutes, suppliers, airports, and air traffic control,” he said. “We are combining new and existing technologies, processes, and efficiency initiatives to achieve this.”

Significantly, KLM has started marketing its new biofuel flights to corporate customers. The company last year launched a service that allows corporate accounts such as Accenture, Heineken, Nike, and Philips who use the airline to fly using sustainable biofuel for a proportion of their flights, effectively cutting their own reported emissions.

The flight is the latest development in an industry-wide push to develop lower carbon fuels that will allow the aviation sector to reduce its fast-increasing carbon footprint.

Airlines such as KLM, Delta, BA and Virgin Atlantic are all investing heavily in a wide range of projects to develop jet biofuels made from waste or algae.

Concerns have been raised as to whether sufficient quantities of biofuel can be developed to support the global industry, but researchers are confident algae-based biofuels in particular could one day deliver large quantities of low carbon fuel.

The research comes in response to mounting pressure from policy-makers and customers to aviation to curb its carbon impact, most notably in the form of the EU’s move to place a levy on airlines carbon emissions.