It's bad enough for some propeller planes to be referred to as being powered by rubber bands. Now the skeptics could start having a dig at industrial airplane flying on whatever from cooking oil to melted algae.

With the civil air travel industry under increasing pressure from increasing oil rates and environmental legislation, the race is on to discover viable alternatives to traditional kerosene and these up until now appear to boil down to numerous types of biofuel.

Not remarkably, the first trials of alternative fuel were initiated by British aviation pioneer, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Atlantic began London to Amsterdam flights with restricted biofuel usage in 2008. This was quickly followed by Lufthansa and Air New Zealand who each utilized various blends of regular fuel and bio derivatives including some from made from jatropha which can grow in soil considered too bad for growing mainstream foods.

Jatropha is a genus of around 175 succulent plants, shrubs and trees (some are deciduous, like Jatropha curcas), from the family Euphorbiaceae.

In 2007 Goldman Sachs cited Jatropha curcas as one of the finest prospects for future biodiesel production. It is resistant to dry spell and insects, and produces seeds containing 27-40% oil.

Recently, US aerospace giant Boeing, Brazilian aeronautical major Embraer and the Sao Paulo state Research Support Foundation transferred to perform research and development into making use of biofuels to power jet airliners. It was reported that Brazilian airlines Azul, Gol, TAM and Trip would function as strategic consultants for the project.

The most recent airline to start try out brand-new fuels is the Alaska Air Group which has performed internal US flights using a mix of 80 % petroleum based fuel and 20% biofuel made from cooking oil. This mixture, it is declared, can cut harmful emissions by 10%.

One actually encouraging advancement has been the move away from biofuels which contend head on with food customers thereby avoiding a rate spiral. Not so long earlier, a rise in usage of biofuels in vehicles caused a spike in maize rates as US farmers diverted too much corn to fuel processing.

Hopefully in the future, airline companies and motorists will focus biofuel consumption on non-food sources such as jatropha and algae. It would be a mixed true blessing certainly if some individuals ended up starving just to please another person's green qualifications.