Thomson Airways, the TUI Travel airline subsidiary, has started a project for reducing carbon emissions: On 6th October 2011 the airline for the first time operated the Birmingham - Arrecife (Lanzarote) route with an aircraft powered partly by sustainable biofuel. This fuel is obtained, for instance, from recycled chip fat, but certain other vegetable oils can also be used, such as those from the spurge family of plants as well as from camelina. Daily flights using the biofuel will commence early next year.
The aircraft will operate one engine using sustainable aviation biofuel and one engine using standard fuel. Thomson wants to highlight the fact that there is a market for alternative fuels in the aviation industry. Chris Browne, Thomson Airways Managing Director, urges governments, especially the EU, "to remove the barriers so as to promote the use of sustainable biofuels". Browne is convinced that other airlines would also follow the lead of Thomson.
Technical modifications to the airplanes will not be necessary and passengers won’t notice that the planes are partly powered by biofuel. Biofuels have the potential to reduce aviation emissions in the long-term by up to 80%, because their consumption to a large extent is carbon neutral because the plants from which the fuel is obtained have already extracted CO2 from the atmosphere and converted it while they were growing.
By using biofuel Thomson Airways wants to strengthen its position at the forefront of sustainable aviation. The airline already boasts one of the highest load factors in the UK aviation sector. Its carbon emission values are significantly lower than average emission rates in the industry. Thomson Airways subsidiary plans to expand its use of sustainable biofuels across its fleet over the next three years.