United leads airline initiative to support synthetic fuel production plant
By Megan Kuhn
United Airlines is looking beyond plans to demonstrate a 50% gas-to-liquid synthetic fuel blend on an Airbus A320 flight from Denver in June to how airlines will be able to secure adequate supplies of gas-to-liquid kerosene for future operations.
Robert Sturtz, United's managing director of strategic sourcing-fuel, told Flight International that fuel companies may not be prepared to risk investing in a new fuel, so he wants to discuss with other airlines the possibility of carriers supporting a production plant to produce scalable amounts of gas-to-liquid kerosene.
Sturtz says United expects to be the first US carrier to use a gas-to-liquid kerosene blend in revenue service with a late August flight, assuming certificating body ASTM International approves 50% gas-to-liquid kerosene blends in the middle of this year. The route and whether one or both engines will use the synthetic blend have yet to be decided.
Qatar Airways is also getting ready to test a gas-to-liquid kerosene blend on a revenue flight during the second half of this year, probably on an Airbus A340-600 operating between London and Doha.
Those two revenue flights will be the first to use a gas-to-liquid kerosene blend and come more than a year after Airbus conducted an A380 trial with one Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine burning a 40% blend of gas-to-liquid and standard jet fuel made by Shell International. Airbus expects ASTM to certificate a 100% gas-to-liquid fuel by 2013.
United is working with synthetic fuel producer Rentech on the A320 trial and commercial flight. Qatar has been working with Airbus, Rolls-Royce, Qatar Petroleum, fuel company Woqod and Shell International since November 2007.
Gas-to-liquid contributes to the diversity of aviation fuel supply in the near term, but Qatar is also interested in biomass-to-liquid kerosene in the long term, Schroeder says.
Qatar wants to establish the viability of gas-to-liquid and then move to other alternatives, says senior manager of fuel optimisation and environment Capt Chris Schroeder, although a timeline for biomass-to-liquid testing has not been determined.
Last year several airlines - including Air France-KLM, Air New Zealand, All Nippon Airways, Cargolux, Continental Airlines, Gulf Air, Japan Airlines, Scandinavian Airlines and Virgin Atlantic, which claim to collectively account for 15-20% of commercial jet fuel use - joined forces to form a Boeing-co-ordinated biofuels initiative, the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group, which aims to at least partially replace fossil fuels with biofuels from 2013.
