According to CNET News' Green Tech, "Air New Zealand, along with Boeing, Rolls-Royce and Honeywell, retooled one of the four Rolls-Royce RB211 engines on a Boeing 747-400 to run on an unusually fruity blend of half Jet A1 fuel and half jatropha oil, according to Air New Zealand.

"Jatropha is a flowing succulent plant commonly grown in the semi-arid areas of India that produces seeds containing an oil which can be harvested and processed into a biofuel."

"International Air Transport Association (IATA) lists Jatropha a promising next-generation biojet fuel for the airline industry because the hardy plant can be grown in poor quality soil needing little water."

The experiment is truly impressive, and it blends the organizational capabilities of major industry with the use of an otherwise "useless" feedstock that can be grown by poorly capitalized farmers in areas now lacking commercial crops. I've been working for the past three years with a local biodiesel manufacturer whose feedstock is another waste material.

There is an important economic and political challenge in all this. Every project I've studied in this arena that has had any success has become a target of big business or other solely selfish interests, whose agenda is to own the technology or to destroy it to preserve a competing process or product.

The opportunity for mankind is to expand our energy resources in ways that allow more, not fewer, people and places to participate. We should enable the jatropha farmer and other producers of alternative crops yielding food and energy to visit our tourist attractions as we visit his, to study in our universities as we study abroad. The new fuel technologies, with lower capital requirements and greater sustainability, offer a path to more equitable distribution of the income and wealth that proceed from modern, energy-dependent economies. We should not waste this opportunity.

CNET article