Deep fat flyer: biofuels and air travel

Henry Rummins

29 July 2011

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I love fried food - and the deeper the better.

Nothing gets me salivating more than the prospect of something in golden batter, dripping with oil and guaranteed to clog my arteries the moment it passes my lips.

So hearing Thomson Airways' plans to fly one of its planes to the Majorcan resort of Palma fuelled by a mixture of 50:50 using cooking oil and jet fuel was music to my ears.

What a great way to make flying a bit greener, I thought - and find a good use for all that oil from chippies up and down the land at the same time.

That is, until I realised how much used cooking oil would actually be needed to power a Boeing 757. Quite a lot, it turns out.

In fact, the clever bods in our biofuels team have worked out that each passenger on the flight would have to collect used cooking oil for 100 years just to get from Birmingham to Palma.

That's an awful lot of oil - and certainly more than my odd indulgence in fried chicken would support.

Although this sounds like a great idea, quite how it could power all the planes that fly in and out of the UK every day has left me scratching my head.

It turns out I wasn't the only one struggling with this as in the end Thomson had to cancel the flight because it couldn't get the fuel to the plane from its supplier in the United States. Not a great start.

It seems to me we need planes that burn less fuel in the first place - and our experts here think that we might all have to fly a bit less, too.

Otherwise there'll always be the temptation to power them with biofuels - in particular crops grown especially for the purpose, most likely in developing countries and eating up vast tracts of land in the process.

And if there's one thing I've learnt, temptation - once there - is very difficult to resist.

Henry Rummins, Communications & Media Team