From next year onwards, Lufthansa Group will use a bio kerosene mixture to power its aircraft operating from Oslo, Norway.
Lufthansa has signed a contract with the Norwegian oil company Statoil Aviation to supply 5% sustainable bio jet fuel.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and SAS are also participating in the initiative.
The state owned Norwegian airport operator Avinor played a key role in the commercial scale purchasing agreements by offering a unique airport incentive for biofuel powered flights, which is open to all airlines.
For a period of one year beginning March 2015, Statoil will supply 2.5 million gallons of sustainably produced, certified biofuel into the tanks at Gardermoen airport in Oslo.
The approximately 5,000 flights that Lufthansa Group operates under the brand name Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian Airlines, German wings, Brussels Airlines from the Norwegian capital will fly on the sustainable fuel mixture.
Oslo airport is the world’s first large commercial airport to offer continuous provision of biofuel over a long period and to fuel aircraft with biokerosene directly from its hydrant system.
In 2011, Lufthansa was the first airline in the world to run regular flight operations with a biokerosene mixture by operating an Airbus A321 between Frankfurt and Hamburg for a six month period as part of its now concluded burnFAIR project.
As a part of the project, on 15 September 2014, Lufthansa operated its flight LH 190 from Frankfurt to Berlin Tegel using a ten percent blend of the new biofuel component farnesan.
This was the first scheduled flight in Europe to run on this fuel mix. Farnesan is a sugar-based bio-kerosene developed jointly by the TOTAL oil group and the U.S.-based biotech company Amyris, which in April of this year received RSB(Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials) Certification.
Currently the maximum permitted blend of renewable and conventional kerosene is 50 per cent for each engine.
Lufthansa is gradually establishing an alternative fuel supply system as a step towards realizing the aviation industry’s climate protection goals by reducing carbon footprint.
Sustainable aviation fuels is estimated to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 80 per cent per tonne of fuel, resulting from the total life cycle of alternative fuel production.
