Jet stream in green: a Centennial Air Force vet is betting aviation fuels made from nonpolluting renewable sources will take flight. Front Range firms are among those developing them.

• Author: Best, Allen

Talk about your audacity of hope. George Bye has nothing just yet to offer as a business. He has no goods, no services, not even a technology of his own. He does have a company name, Bye Energy, and a handful of company officers.

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What he has is an idea of the future. Transportation must change, he believes, with improved energy efficiency and a much greater role for fuels made from renewable, non-carbon feedstock. The niche he is aiming for is in general aviation, specifically that small but influential market of business travelers: companies with their own jets.

With that market in mind, he chose Denver's south metro area for his startup company. He's based in Englewood, along Interstate 25 and near Centennial Airport, which is perpetually among the top 10 airports in the nation for business travel. If there is a market for clean, renewable fuels, it's business aviation, he says.

"We're making preparations," he says while munching on French toast at a cafe near the airport. "We're laying the groundwork for employing the next-generation technology."

Bye, 51, is a civil engineer by training who flew 20 years for the U.S. Air Force. He was in Desert Storm, the 1991 war against Iraq, and has 4,000 flying hours to his credit. As well, he has a patent for a light twin-engine jet called the Javelin. It is described by one posting at f-16.net as a "cross between an F-16 fighter plane and a corporate Lear jet" that can shoot to 49,000 feet in under four minutes. It's a business jet, the website added, that is "not for the faint of heart."

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Neither are startup enterprises. As everywhere, money is becoming more difficult to find, says Tom Konrad, an investment analyst at AltEnergyStocks.com. Colorado-based, he specializes in publicly traded clean-energy technology and has made a couple of small investments in local startups.

"This is one place where venture capital is still flowing, but it is flowing a lot more cautiously than it was a year ago," Konrad says. "They are looking for much better valuations and much better formed business models."

Konrad sees this emerging energy frontier as an exciting but difficult place. Profitability is still distant, which works against undercapitalized startup companies. "Only the companies with deep pockets can wait that long. Startups can't wait," he said.

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But there are fortunes to be made as worldwide transportation is reinvented. Driving this quest are grave doubts whether supplies of fossil fuels can keep up with rising demand. Within the United States there are concerns about reliance upon foreign sources. And not least, both the automotive and aviation sectors have gained a tarnished image because of the environmental impacts of burning fossil fuels. One...