Airline passenger news and views

Lufthansa has become the first airline to run regular commercial flights using a mix of biofuel and kerosene in daily transfers between Hamburg and Frankfurt.

The six month trial will cover eight of its 28 daily flights of less than an hour between the two cities,

which will reduce CO2 emissions by up to 1,500 tonnes during that period, according to the company.

However, the initiative is not welcome by everyone: "Lufthansa is painting itself green with biofuels - but these flights are anything but environmentally friendly," said Robbie Blake, biofuels campaigner for Friends of the Earth (FoE) Europe.

"Biofuels exacerbate poverty and hunger, drive land grabbing and deforestation, push up food prices, and make climate change worse," he added.

Lufthansa says that the production of its biofuel is not in direct competition with food production and that no rainforests are destroyed. Its biosynthetic kerosene is derived from pure biomass and consists of jatropha, camelina and animal fats.

They also say that their suppliers (the Finnish oil company Neste Oil) must provide proof of the sustainability of their processes and meet the criteria stipulated by the European Parliament and the Council in the Renewable Energy Directive.

"Our interest is to have sustainable resources in the future, to have an alternative to offer flights at affordable prices to everyone," said Aage Dünhaupt, Lufthansa's director of corporate communications for Europe.

FoE highlights that jet biofuels can actually increase carbon emissions if at planting palm, jatropha and camelina forests and grasslands are eradicated.

Biofuels are in theory carbon neutral because they only release the carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere by a plant as it grows. But studies have suggested that the side effects of producing biofuels can have a negative overall impact.

The problem comes when biofuel crops such as soy competes for land with food crops, which are then displaced on to land that has been cleared of forests.

An analysis carried out for FoE by environmental consultants Scott Wilson in 2009 estimated that the result of clearing forests for biofuels was equivalent to an extra 1.3m tonnes of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere in one year.

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