Enlarge Yesterday a commercial Alaska Airlines plane pumped with a blend of traditional jet fuel and wood biofuel flew from Seattle to Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. The flight was the first to use a 20 percent blend of biofuel made of leftover wood from timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest. It’s not the first to use a biofuel mixture in general though—in June, Alaska Airlines flew two test flights on jet fuel mixed with biofuel made from non-edible parts of corn, and in March of this year, United Airlines pledged to use a 30 percent biofuel mixture on its flights from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The United Airlines fuel is produced by a company called AltAir Fuels that depends on a variety of biological source materials “from used cooking oil to algae.” Alaska Airlines’ wood-based fuel was developed by a Colorado-based company called Gevo , which partnered with the Northwest Advanced Renewables Alliance (NARA) to develop the wood waste into isobutanol, which it then converted to jet fuel. Gevo also created the corn waste biofuel mixture that Alaska Airlines flew with in June. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Wood waste alcohol converted to jet fuel, used in Alaska Airlines test flight