I routinely pan biofuels for use in automobiles, but for heavy lifting like aviation...

[kristopher]

...agriculture and construction, I am much more supportive of their use. There are 2 reasons: 1)the scale is much smaller and 2) the battery electric alternative isn't a viable option.

Quick Win: Aviation Biofuels Offers Breakout for Clean Energy
By Jim Lane, Biofuels Digest
October 13, 2011

In Copenhagen this week, a coalition of companies and associations involved in aviation biofuels made a strong case for the sector not only as a quick win for biofuels, but as a quick win for clean energy as a whole.

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“Aviation is hard at work with a spectrum of activities to reduce environmental impact. But we see aviation biofuels as a quick win. First, we have just 1700 airports as fuel points, versus distributing to and possibly retrofitting hundreds of thousands of gas stations around the world. Second, aviation biofuels involve no infrastructure change – they drop right into the existing engines. Third, you have a sector that has done everything it can to do the flight tests, the certifications, sustainability groups, and even participating with investment in biofuels, to stimulate production.”

The case is strong. To convert 20 percent of road transport around the world to biofuels — a threshold most would describe as a major clean energy “win” — would take a transformative infusion of capital, and require the aggregation of as much as 1.5 billion tons of biomass. The impact? Transformative. The logistics? Daunting. The timelines? Awfully long for a public which feeds on 24-hour news cycles and 1-2 year product life cycles.

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By contrast, converting 20 percent of aviation to biofuels would transform modern aviation, be a major signal that clean energy can work at scale, and offers a model for developing R&D, certification and supply chain consortia. It would take around 12 billion gallons of biofuels, and perhaps 120 million tons of biomass, distributed to 1,700 or so airports around the world...