Gas-to-liquid fuels have been under development by Shell and ExxonMobil in Qatar for a number of years. The high expense, however, has made it a difficult sell for the car and truck industry.

This week, Qatar Airways flew an Airbus 340-800 jet from London to Doha flying a 50-50 blend of kerosene and GTL from Royal Dutch Shell, according to Reuters. The fuel mix cuts down particulate and sulfur dioxide. Airbus has said that 30 percent of jet fuel may have to come from clean alternatives by 2030. And planes will inevitably continue to run on liquid fuel – the nuclear plane and the battery-powered plane aren't likely alternatives.

You can drink GTL too. I kid you not.

If development continues, it could be a good news story all around. GTL is not liquefied natural gas, the stuff carried in tanker ships. In those ships, natural gas gets turned into a liquid through low temperatures and then turned back into a gas when it hits home port. GTL involves cracking methane and converting it into a liquid fuel that stays a liquid at ambient temperatures. The process is similar to the coal-to-liquid process devised by Fischer and Tropsch in the 1920s.

The coal-to-liquid process releases a number of greenhouse gases and is expensive. That's why it has only been popular with countries like Apartheid-era South Africa and Third Reich Germany facing trade restrictions. GTL is far cleaner, but it is still expensive. The gas for GTL generally comes from stranded natural gas deposits that are stranded, i.e., not on pipelines that would make extraction easy.

Earlier, Continental flew a plane partly on algae oil, but the algae constituted a very small percentage – like close to 1 percent – of the fuel consumed.

So with GTL you get a solution to the jet emissions issue and perhaps an economically viable option for GTL. We shall see.