The industry has already mounted a great show of committing itself to cutting emissions and improving the efficiency of aircraft, something it has seen notable success in, but the nature of modern flying realistically provides very little scope for any further significant impact on its oil demand or consumption.
In a well-attended presentation to airline delegates, Piccard explained his $130 million Solar Impulse project. His aim is to design and build the world's first aircraft that is not only emission free, but is capable of indefinite flight powered only by the sun.
As you'd imagine, delegates listened particularly attentively but at the end of the presentation, Piccard conceded that aviation would remain the last form of mass transport to be weaned from its oil habit.
Why? Consider the average Airbus A380, the largest commercial airliner in the world. 20 are already in service with airlines, with Airbus boasting total orders of over 200.
The A380 stands 80 feet tall and, at 240 feet, is twice as long as the distance covered by the Wright brothers' first powered flight. It has a typical passenger capacity of 525 people, but in a single class configuration it could accommodate over 800.
Slung below its wings, which together have a surface area of half a square mile, most A380s have four Rolls Royce Trent 900 engines, capable of producing 80,000 lbs of thrust each. The aircraft's tanks carry up to 84,500 US gallons, or 250 tons, of jet fuel.
Together, the four engines can hurl the aircraft's maximum take off weight of 560 tons to a cruising speed of 630 mph at a maximum altitude of 43,000 feet for 10,000 miles.
At that altitude, the environment is hostile with air temperature outside likely to be in the region of minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 70 degrees Celsius.
That asks a lot of any fuel. And there's the nub of aviation's problem.
In oil markets, the invasion of the bio requirement has already displaced some of the regular demand for mineral diesel and gasoline, and few portions of the barrel look to be spared from this undercutting of oil demand.
As a gasoline blend component, biofuels have the potential to supplant some of the need for naphtha too, while the recycling of plastics and a faddish move back towards cardboard and recyclable packaging is making modest inroads into petrochemical demand.
Although a number of major carriers have dabbled with biofuels, the oil industry's response has been cool. There remain serious questions over the role that bio alternatives in aviation can credibly take.
"It isn't even on the radar," one London-based jet trader said of biofuels, with this unlikely to change even over the course of the next decade.
During that time, analysts are expecting jet fuel demand to recover, with WoodMackenzie anticipating the deficit between demand and supply stretching further to leave Europe nearly 25 million tons short annually by 2025.
There's the question of which biofuel to use. First generation fuels have already stirred controversy and raised more questions than solutions.
Second and third generation fuels are under development, but they range from algae to synthetic paraffinic kerosene, in essence a hydrogenated vegetable oil produced by a refinery. But no single solution stands out, and, with all the paraphernalia of pipelines and tanks, that's critical.
Cost effectiveness is another question mark: whether they can be produced in sufficient quantities to guarantee a price that will be competitive with mineral costs, even in an environment where oil prices are broadly expected to continue rising.
There's the reliability of biofuels too, their resilience and performance when operating in the harsh environment of high altitude, and their ability to deliver the sort of power required to shrug off the shackles of gravity.
And then there's the capacity to produce biofuels. 1,268 flights leave London Heathrow every day according to the airport's operator, BAA. Conservatively the airport consumes in the region of 15,000 mt, or nearly 5 million gallons, of fuel every day.
By far the biggest hurdle remains one of approval, however. With so much at stake, rigorous testing of any new fuel is required and that means prolonged use in a variety of engines across a variety of conditions.
"There is no biofuel for jet fuel," a source at the UK's
Defence Fuel Group, the agency charged with procuring 174
million gallons of aviation fuel annually for the country's
armed forces, said.
"Aviation will be flying on something a lot like kerosene for a
long, long time to come," the spokesman continued.
Which makes aviation the last bastion of unadulterated oil demand.
On December 17, 1903, on a cloudy, windy morning strewn with rain, at Kitty Hawk in the US state of North Carolina, two men created a defining moment in the history of humanity. Using a spindly machine, applying basic principles of physics to raw oil-fueled horsepower, they proved the surly bonds of earth could be slipped.
Barely six decades separate that moment from the first commercial flights of both the Boeing 747 and Concorde. But while the Wright brothers proved the concepts, it was the advent of the jet engine, the pressurized cabin and radar that took aircraft out of the realm of the amateur, or the rich enthusiast, and placed it firmly into the mainstream.
In so doing, the bond with oil was indelibly forged.
Almost 106 years later, in Switzerland on December 4, 2009, Bertrand Piccard's Solar Impulse hopped 350 meters, just over 1,000 feet, using nothing but the power of the sun and the application of basic principles of physics.
From that first small step, it remains to be seen whether the industry, or the world leaders flying into Copenhagen, can afford to wait another six decades before finally shrugging off those fossil fuel bonds.
