In September, Sir Richard Branson, entrepreneur extraordinaire and Chairman of Virgin Group announced that he would build his own oil refinery to mitigate the rising cost of oil. Clearly this was not an idea of great ingenuity. An oil refinery takes at least 4-5 years to build and that's if you can find a location to build one. Most locales would be less than enthusiastic about an oil refinery going up in their backyard. A refinery hasn't been built on U.S. soil inside the past 29 years.
In Dubai for the Abu Dhabi World Leadership Summit and to promote Virgin's new daily service from London to Dubai, Branson announced a vastly superior solution, building cellulose ethanol plants. The Virgin Group has four airlines: Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Cargo, Virgin Nigeria and Virgin Blue (located in the Down Under). The four airlines collectively use 700 gallons of fuel to fly their 100 aircraft per annum.
His intention is to use cellulose ethanol which is comprised of organic waste (grass, straw, etc..) as opposed to traditional ethanol that is created from corn or sugar cane. Cellulose ethanol is preferred to traditional ethanol as it is created from agricultural residues (corn stalks, straw, fiber rich grasses like switch grass) and not product that can be sold for other uses like corn or sugar cane. Branson estimates that it will take at least 5-6 years to switch from traditional jet fuel to biomass. So, the daily flights from London to Dubai launching in March 2006 will not be fueled by biomass.
It's curious that he chose Dubai as the location to announce his switch from oil to cellulosic ethanol. Dubai is a new market for Virgin and a city whose prosperity was created through the rising cost of oil.
If only the rest of the world could conceive exchanging oil for biomass inside of three months. Branson provided few details on plant construction. It is my hope that if further research shows it prohibitively expensive for Virgin to build their own plants they will support existing makers of cellulose ethanol like Iogen Corporation.
1 comment:
Interesting note on the Virgin switch in fuels. I do suppose it is 'worth' the effort, although so many other factors are involved that, until they're isolated out and listed, I'm not sure that one 'gain' outweighs any other, and vica versa. I tend to think a wee bit differently on this - stupidly, probably. My ideas for solving the problems being addressed involved recognizing, quite simply, the facts of people travelling too much, and taking steps to curb that. Air travel, unfettered, need NOT be a given. The only thing killing us, in reality, is our prosperous habits.
By the way, thank you a million times for the note about my writing. I was really pleased to see that you slogged through and found value in it. I do hope we can stay in touch, perhaps exchanging ideas on further reads, etc.
http://garyjin.blogspot.com
email njabate@aol.com
Thanks.
Gary Introne
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