Coming Soon: Natural Gas-Fueled Airplanes

Scott Detrow

Recent Stories

Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

October 25, 2012 | 3:02 PM

Getty Images

We’ve talked about natural gas-fueled cars, trucks and buses The New York Times’ Green Blog takes a look at the next frontier of natural gas as a fuel source: airplanes.

At the end of next year, Qatar Airways is scheduled to open a new airport that will include a 25-meter swimming pool and squash courts, among other amenities. But it will also be extraordinary from an energy standpoint because it will pump airline fuel made from natural gas.
Qatar has relatively little oil and vast supplies of natural gas. Oil goes on tankers to distant destinations, but moving natural gas is much harder for the Persian Gulf emirate. So Royal Dutch/Shell built a gas-to-liquids plant called Pearl that makes a variety of liquid fuels.
Qatar is not quite the first out of the box with this approach. That would be South Africa, which was driven to make liquids from coal in the days when its apartheid regime faced trade sanctions and the country could not import oil.Now the country makes diesel and jet fuel from coal because it makes economic sense.