You’ll have probably heard on the news today that Virgin Atlantic flew an empty Boeing 747 from London to Amsterdam with one engine running on a 20% biofuel mix.
According to Flight Global , the biofuel was supposedly an algae derived fuel stored in a test-specific tank and used to partially power one of the 747’s General Electric CF6-80C2 engines. The engine which apparently had a short TBO was to be immediately removed and inspected after the flight. Other press sources today suggest that the biofuel was coconut derived.
I made a calculation a while back to find out the ammount of coconut plantation required for a Boeing 747 flight from London to Beijing, China.
- Distance London to Beijing: 5059 miles.
- Cruise Speed of Boeing 747-400: 576mph
- Fuel consumption of Boeing 747-400: ~3200 usg/hour
So, the flight time would be approximately 8 hours 47 minutes (not strictly counting takeoff and approach) and the average fuel burned would be about 28,096 US gallons.
Now, coconut plantations provide (at best) 230 US gallons of biofuel per acre.
This would mean that for one flight in one direction for a Boeing 747 100% fueled by coconut derived biofuel, you would need a plantation of 122 acres for one year.
This is equivalent to the area covered by about 60 football pitches. Where on earth (literally) are all these plantations supposed to go? Want to fly back from Beijing? Double the size of the plantation for that one return flight!
Note that the figures for the calculation aren’t checked as they’re hard to find authoritative sources for. Needless to say, the end result is never going to be a trivial figure.
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April 30th, 2008 at 4:47 am
Algae can produce up to 20,000 us gals of oil for biofuel per acre per annum