Just intuitively I doubt there's nearly enough coconut oil produced to replace any meaningful amount of jet fuel. I scanned the article and didn't see this addressed, but may have missed it.
Various other bio-fuel and synthesized replacements for petroleum-based jet fuel have been tried and are in development. The aviation industry is very slow to approve and adopt changes.
The point isn't to make cheap jet fuel. The point is that your "coconut tailings" pile is a big liability. The environmentalists could start screeching any day without warning. You might be able to sell it as loam or fertilizer or whatever. But then they'll screech that you need to buy somme compliance solution. Just shipping the damn thing off to the next guy who'll squeeze some jet fuel out of it. And then the rest of the tailings become his problem. Maybe he's in a better jurisdiction. Maybe it's more inert at that point. In any case it's a liability off your books. The jet fuel just needs to be cheap enough to make this whole process cheaper than whatever way you were dealing with it before.
Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.
Is Jet Fuel really the best use of coconut oil? I'd imagine it's far better as a lubricant or ingredient in things more directly adjacent to human rather than mechanical use.
I think with waste products there is more of a last-mile (first-mile?) collection issue. Regardless we're definitely seeing some processed bio-oil waste coming in to the diesel lab for analysis in the recent year or two.
Looks to me like someone who is prospering based on coconut plantations would be the beneficiary from tapping a new market from a jet fuel process, and it probably could be made into a cleaner fuel than the waste-based bio-fuel.
All subsidies are wealth transfers. That's the whole point- to incentivize something that wouldn't otherwise happen at a scale the government deems to be of benefit or necessary.
Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification.
The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on.
I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive.
The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.
A lot of food cost is due to food waste and convenience (refrigerated shipping, out of season crops, etc). There's already a lot food waste due to logistics and consumer preference.
Are the people against bioengineered produce also be against us working towards super efficient coconuts or some other plant we designed to fill the same role?
Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?
It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.
The economic landscape of farming is very bimodal. “Most farmers” (by headcount) are subsistence farmers who live in impoverished countries and don’t produce very much food because they are feeding themselves and their immediate community.
The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.
What do you mean by farmers? Of the rich farmers, yes, most do have a second job, but the farming does pay most of their income. It's not just a hobby. The second job is something that they can do in between the farm work. The other thing about farming is it's very much investment heavy. And so for a young farmer just getting started out, you're going to be working at farming and all of your income is going right back to paying things off. And so you're going to need a second job to put the food on the table for a few years. After 10 years, because of inflation, you would hope that your income has gone up while the payment you're making on existing land is kept the same, and so you don't have some left over, and so you can start only being a farmer. After, say, 30 years, most of your land is now paid off, and now you can take all that money that was going into paying off millions of farmlands, and you're making enough income that you could pay off of millions of dollars a loan, and you have no loans, and you are very well off. Of course after 30 years you're also getting close to retirement age and you're probably thinking well I'm gonna sell that farm off and now you have a lot of money that you can put into regular retirement acounts and enjoy a really nice retirement. But that means you're not a farmer and so the farmers themselves really have to live like the poor but they're on track to be very wealthy.
> it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact.
In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel.
But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel.
I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet. Not just for the carbon impact, but also for the diversity of our species and cultures.
Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?
Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.
> Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane
Who are you to dictate where Chinese and Indians can and cannot visit or enjoy delicious watermelons?
China and India are the biggest domestic aircraft markets in the world. The manufacturers literally cannot keep up with the demand.
I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses, it would take a year to respond to them all.
Air travel is not going anywhere and we are not setting society back 100 years on account of dubious climate histrionics.
Want to save the environment?
Ditch smartphones and all their useless apps (and resource-sucking infra) we could all live without tomorrow.
Turns out we were as effective in moving goods and services and leisure travel in 2008 as we are today.
Well they're more convenient by virtue of being faster. The well off will inevitably pay for convenience if allowed.
> If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.
The only thing California stands as an example of in that regard is political dysfunction. A hypothetical benevolent dictator could have built out high speed rail there on time and on budget.
> I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses
Has it not occurred to you that maybe that's a red flag that perhaps your own views or emotional state are a bit off?
> on account of dubious climate histrionics.
An empty dismissal of a vague and poorly defined (on your part) concept. How about engaging with a real position instead of name calling a straw man?
> Ditch smartphones (future e-waste)
And what do you suppose the combined total environmental impact is for those globally compared to other categories?
You’ve got the answer with CAHSR. The only form of government that can build high-speed rail well is one like the CPC: a dictatorship which doesn’t need the consent of the governed. If we put them in charge of CAHSR they would have the job done in a couple years, but we would have to allow them to nationalize every single property in their way, by force if necessary, and cities, towns, unions, etc. would have no right to negotiate with them on any matter. All the problems they’ve had IRL are a result of them not being able to do whatever they want.
Honestly I respect China a lot and it’s hard not to respect them when it comes to getting infra projects done, be it roads, trains, or whatever. But it’s not a system that has any overlap with the rights in our Constitution. Even Europeans expect more rights from their governments.
The US rarely builds new highways anymore though. They expand existing ones a lot, but it is rarely a new build. Where they are built, it's on the edge of town where the entire farm was sold to a developer who specifically reserves some of it because the developers are well aware that people will not buy it in their new subdivision unless there's good roads to get into it.
France has an extensive medium and high-speed rail network and is not an authoritarian state. This is purely an administrative issue. Why do HN believe that there are only two alternatives : the US and China?
France's HSR network extenda into both Germany, and into Britans rail network. California just does not really care about HSR, and I live here. I have been a fan of BART since the day it opened and will be a fan until the day it closes which will be sooner than I think. Bus systems suck too.
Have you considered that the goal in life is not necessarily for societies to maximize dollars in the bank account? Or that pushing the strategy to its limits may be short sighted, and come with massive long term costs and externalies?
In the case of Venice, and other places in Europe, the influx of tourists is just too much and displaced local populations, and erodes the infrastructure. And for what? To rush through cities in a week end and take photos on instagram that have millions of duplicates?
Alternatively, have you considered improving your city to make it a place worthy of a visit?
They live closer by? So less miles travelled, and in many cases travelled by train? Depending on how you generate electricity that works out quite differently.
Went to Venice by night train 15 years ago, would definitely recommend.
Conversely, however, perhaps we should question Europeans massively going to Phuket.
I'm not against restricting internal tourism as well, at least the most destructive forms, such as cruises for instance.
It's not just a question of CO2 pollution, but of human ecology as well: cities like Venice, Lisbon and Barcelona are being eaten out by tourism. What made them interesting is disappearing due to the local economy being highly disrupted by the massive inflows of tourists around the world.
No, we will not get to a post oil society by self flagellating like Europe, but by making sustainable options so cheap and plentiful that they displace unsustainable options. (Of course there’s some market intervention and government investment necessary to get there)
One of these days, electricity will be so cheap that we can carbon capture our way back to 0C net warming and fuel flights for every Indian and Chinese with fuel made from CO2. The developing world will accept nothing less than the abundance route to decarbonization.
I don't understand, you want to create a copy of Venice?
The issue is not just the pollution from air travel, but also the types of consumption and ways of life that it enables. Besides ressources are not unlimited so even if you have fee energy, you still need to extract aluminium etc from the ground, and pour concrete on land to build airports and oversized infrastructure.
Just use any carbon monoxide source (e.g., pyrolysis of pretty much anything that'd release carbon dioxide when burned works, followed by some cleaning to get rid of some problematic catalyst poisons (notably sulfur compounds)), add hydrogen, and do Fischer-Tropsch.
You get your high quality diesel fuel, often higher quality than what you can easily get from crude oil, btw.
If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.
Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.
Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...
> a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities
My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.
Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
Depends on the area, but the vast majority are owner operated.
The question begs some other questions though.
One is more about what fraction of the economic production of the farm industry is owner operated; There is a long tail of now-tiny farms that are not economical to actually sow and harvest, which nobody could actually earn a living from. If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?
Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.
The vertically related industries have also seen a lot of consolidation. There are ~four seed companies, only a few pesticide companies, two main tractor companies, only a few slaughterhouse companies, etc. There are long-term contractual arrangements with some of these entities. Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly they may as well be a sharecropper really counted as a farm?
> Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together ...
I can't speak to US farm practices but note that 5,000 acres is 2,023 hectares and a bit less than half the average size of farms in our local farming cooperative (CBH, Western Australia). today they are still mostly extended family farms formed from buying up and joining together many smaller post war farms.
> that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.
The "mean farm" of 4,500 Hectares (11,000 acres) here is typically managed by three full time workers and machinery, along with a network of mechanics, seed suppliers, pooled harvest hands etc.
> Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly
Again, I have no comment wrt US practices - here owner operators formed their own cooperatives to build out and co-own their rail, port, silo, seed storage, agronomy, facilities and via bulk production of > 20 million tonnes of grain per annum have leverage to make demands of equipment manufacturers.
> If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?
I know people that own 10 to 15 acres, live in very old farmhouses that have been fully overhauled to current standards and lease their cropable land out to form large thousand acre paddocks which receive back enough money to cover rates and improvements.
They own the land, they often tun AirBnB as a side earner, the land is farmed at a profit.
The largest private single owner of farmland in the US is Bill Gates. [1] He owns < 1% of all land, but it's still a telling fact. In total, owners own more than 70% of farms, but only about 35% of farmland. The remaining 65% of farmland is either partial ownership (~55%), or tenant farmers (~10%). [2]
I don't (or didn't) know the answer to those questions.
Regarding corporate farms, they may actually be some of the most productive farms, and give people actual opportunities to find good jobs in farming (that donmt require that they inherit a farm from mum and dad).
If you manage to tolerate the interviewer, I think the person being interviewed here was very interesting, and made me think about corporate farming in a different way:
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s more of a massive subsidy to enormous agribusiness operations. But yeah I’m sure some of the pork makes its way to some normal farmers too.
Yeah, it's not like the few remaining small, family-owned Indiana farms (which are either very specialized away from corn or basically lifestyle businesses at this point) are benefitting from this in a meaningful way.
Just through this out again, biofuels are dumb. Per acre a solar farm produces 30 times the energy per year as corn without most of the environmental concerns that growing corn has.
You don't have pesticide or fertilizer runoff from solar farms. You don't plow the soil resulting in soil loss.
> The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago
A few years ago? Corn ethanol subsidies have been a thing for my entire life.
It's a net-negative fuel. Costs more fuel to produce than it provides. It's literally just a way to waste water, farmland, huge quantities of diesel (burned by engines exempt from any sort of emissions), labor, etc.
What changed is that ethanol has been forced by regulations into more and more use over time. That has driven up demand for corn, and one of the worse side effects is that a major food staple for Mexico has gone up dramatically in price.
> effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities,
If you think that's bad, stop and think for a moment about what purpose the US military serves for rural America, both directly through personnel but also indirectly through all the incredibly wasteful equipment, service, and supply contracts.
The US military's primary reason for existence is force projection, but its secondary is keeping rural American's uneployment from skyrocketing.
Aviation uses around a million metric tons of jet fuel per day.
If you thought habitat destruction from palm oil was bad, that would be nothing compared to coconut oil making up any significant fraction of jet fuel.
The question is which habitat destruction is worse? That which is already happening at scale for oil, versus what would happen if we lean into this in any meaningful way.
I don't think the answer is obvious. And I think many of us are blind or numb to environmental harms of oil outside of carbon exhaust and the occasional spill, simply because we've accepted it as status quo.
An oil well is quite small Area wise compared to the amount of acreage you would need for a coconut plantations to replace the same amount of energy output.
The issue with oil is CO2 and other green house gases and then the occasional oil spill or leak. Land area wise they don’t take up much space
I think this is awesome. Anything we can do to get away from burning fossil fuel is a win in my book. I don’t know about this particular effort, but it seems to me that aviation could really need some big wins in this direction. Last I looked we still run smaller planes on leaded fuel. Crazy.
Very few people are willing to accept a, "sane global environmental policy" if it means changing their lifestyle. Thus, anything that allows people to keep (or better yet, improve) their current lifestyle while making the environment sane, that is the one we need to be searching for.
Leaded is slowly going away, but regulation means these changes take many, many years and dollars to implement and test.
It will be similar (worse?) implementing a new type of fuel for commercial jets, especially when it comes to wide adoption across a majority of countries around the world. Basically you need something which is as least as reliable, clean (I.e., won’t clog/solidify), non corrosive, etc. and remain that way after being mixed with standard jet fuel.
I too want to see alternatives but expect to see more failures than success at this stage.
You want a fuel that's chemically identical to current jet fuel, not one burdened with extra oxygen. Yes, this would require more energy, but it would be used more effectively in jets.
A drop-in compatible jet fuel can be made by hydrodeoxygenation of biomass, using Virent's process. The waste cellulose in current US waste streams would be more than enough to displace all current US jet fuel consumption.
I agree, I wish more work was being done on building a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen can be generated sustainably, is a great way to store excess energy from renewable sources, can be transported, and as a bonus can be mixed with hydrocarbon fuels to be used directly as a heating source.
As an example, a house in NH can generate a lot of excess solar power in the summer months when it uses hardly any electricity. If all that energy could be stored as hydrogen, in the winter (when solar power is less due to the far northern latitude and snow covering the panels) it could draw down on the hydrogen to generate electricity and also use it for a backup heat fuel.
I'm in Northern Europe and am in that situation. I have an electric heat pump, so would need around 3 MWh over the winter period. Apparently that would need a tank around 4m3 at 700 bar (typical pressure of hydrogen vehicle tanks). Plus the fuel cell actually generate heat, so that could be used for heating too. Doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.
I'm skeptical of any application for hydrogen where electricity could be used directly. In your case, I think hydrogen would better be used in a more centralized power plant as a backup for renewable sources (perhaps with the waste heat then used for district heating), and the power used to drive your heat pump.
The issue is long term, high capacity storage. To store enough energy to last an entire winter using batteries just isn’t practical today. I think you’d need around 100 power walls at today’s capacity to make a house completely off grid, meaning you store excess solar from the summer and draw it down in the winter. With hydrogen stored in pressurized tanks, a 20 m3 tank could be enough to last the whole winter, which seems much more practical than 100 powerwalls.
I think this could be a solution if you wanted a fully off grid, solar powered house, or perhaps if we collectively decide to generate more electricity at home and not rely so much on the grid.
Oh sure, batteries are completely inappropriate for seasonal storage. But for a home I think a synthetic liquid fuel would be better than hydrogen. Seasonal storage at grid scale is rather different; there I suspect thermal storage will win, if it is brutally cost optimized (so-called sand batteries don't qualify; their capex is too high.) Unfortunately thermal seasonal storage for an individual home isn't very practical; it could be for a village.
Storing hydrogen in big underground salt caverns at reasonable pressures and converting it back into electricity in a big power plant is probably more efficient and safer than storing it in millions of tanks in cellars at 700 bar and using small fuel cells to turn it back into electricity.
This isn't proper SAF, it's basically C8/10 biodiesel. No aromatics which is one of the perennial problems with SAF, due not just to volumetric energy density but nitrile seals not swelling enough. Integral wing tank seals usually expect aromatic exposure also. This is why some of the catalytic routes/CHJ are of greater interest, cycloparaffins/napthenes recover some of this vs a more biodiesel-ish blend, but even 50% cycloparaffin doesn't fully recover swell. These are solvable backwards compatibility issues but not in the short or medium term.
More egregiously FAME is a polar solvent that eats your elastomers, even some fluoroelastomers. It will also attack your polysulfide tank sealant. The remark that it's "technically feasible" to decrease oxygen through hydrogenation is not at all sufficient. Now you're into requiring catalyst beds and a hydrogen plant which makes this much less appealing. This is literally a tracked contaminant banned above mg/kg levels they want to run as a major constituent of fuels.
Maybe it's time to stop burning food as fuel. What are the jets going to do anyway, bomb Iranian children?
Remember when George W Bush signed into law the corn ethanol bill. Corn tripled in price within 8 years. Fuel didn't get cheaper. In fact it cost more to produce the ethanol.
Not just corn. Farmers would grow more corn in place of other plants reducing the supply, and shorter supply generally means higher prices, This is happening in India right now.
If it burns more fuel, how is it "about as efficient"? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
> New research found that aviation biofuel made from coconut oil can power a small jet engine about as efficiently as traditional jet fuel, with lower unburned hydrocarbon emissions, though the blends burn more fuel and emit slightly more carbon monoxide.
But why? I don't know of a case where biofuels aren't a disaster against the stated environmental purpose. Bailouts for farmers? Sure. A good way to generate green energy? I think engineered algae comes kind of close to making sense as an oil source, but as a fuel would still seem silly to me. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> This study used oil from material the researchers describe as discarded and non-edible, including the large seeds and leftover flesh, so the fuel draws on parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste.
This statement seems disingenuous. Surely they did not invent a novel way to extract coconut oil as part of this study and not choose to publish it. Surely this is just existing byproduct that already has plenty of commercial use.
If you look at how many coconut plantations you would need to make even a measurable dent in jet fuel demand, this would be an unmitigated environmental disaster.
I want to solve climate change as much as the next guy, but chopping down all our tropical rainforests to make it happen sacrifices exactly what we're trying to save.
The issue with bio fuel is the following: Due to climate change the overall area for food production in the world is shrinking. Bio fuel is directly competing with food.
The solution: Ditch carbon based fuels as much as possible and replace it with electric transport.
I know that it's currently unviable to use electric aircraft in almost all use cases except short range drones. But then the solution to that problem is to rely less on air travel and transport and use land based alternatives.
This is about vectors and incentives. Investing in bio fuels to get a 100% replacement for fossil fuels is not going to work and it only stalls what actually needs to happen which is a radical transport system change.
They've already got coconut content down to 20% but I'm sure the food scientists are working on the next iteration; A new low calorie environmentally friendly 'fun size', '3-for-1' bounty containing bleached cellulose flakes, synthetic coconut flavor and hydrogenated seed oil.
I will not be trying that though. Dark chocolate or bust.
In the post-apocalyptic future I will be the guy roaming the wastelands, armed to the teeth, seeking out rumoured stashes of Jamesons Raspberry Ruffles and those Roobar things.
50 MTons of coconut oil are produced per year (approximately). Is this a significant amount, compared to oil derived from crude (where gas currently comes from).
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 14.7 ms ] threadVarious other bio-fuel and synthesized replacements for petroleum-based jet fuel have been tried and are in development. The aviation industry is very slow to approve and adopt changes.
Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.
Looks to me like someone who is prospering based on coconut plantations would be the beneficiary from tapping a new market from a jet fuel process, and it probably could be made into a cleaner fuel than the waste-based bio-fuel.
Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification.
The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on.
I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive.
The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.
It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.
Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.
Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.
The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.
Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?
Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.
In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel.
But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel.
Coconuts could be a breakthrough!
Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?
Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.
Me neither, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating possible breakthroughs in decarbonisation.
Who are you to dictate where Chinese and Indians can and cannot visit or enjoy delicious watermelons?
China and India are the biggest domestic aircraft markets in the world. The manufacturers literally cannot keep up with the demand.
I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses, it would take a year to respond to them all.
Air travel is not going anywhere and we are not setting society back 100 years on account of dubious climate histrionics.
Want to save the environment?
Ditch smartphones and all their useless apps (and resource-sucking infra) we could all live without tomorrow.
Turns out we were as effective in moving goods and services and leisure travel in 2008 as we are today.
Well they're more convenient by virtue of being faster. The well off will inevitably pay for convenience if allowed.
> If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.
The only thing California stands as an example of in that regard is political dysfunction. A hypothetical benevolent dictator could have built out high speed rail there on time and on budget.
> I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses
Has it not occurred to you that maybe that's a red flag that perhaps your own views or emotional state are a bit off?
> on account of dubious climate histrionics.
An empty dismissal of a vague and poorly defined (on your part) concept. How about engaging with a real position instead of name calling a straw man?
> Ditch smartphones (future e-waste)
And what do you suppose the combined total environmental impact is for those globally compared to other categories?
Honestly I respect China a lot and it’s hard not to respect them when it comes to getting infra projects done, be it roads, trains, or whatever. But it’s not a system that has any overlap with the rights in our Constitution. Even Europeans expect more rights from their governments.
In the case of Venice, and other places in Europe, the influx of tourists is just too much and displaced local populations, and erodes the infrastructure. And for what? To rush through cities in a week end and take photos on instagram that have millions of duplicates?
Alternatively, have you considered improving your city to make it a place worthy of a visit?
Went to Venice by night train 15 years ago, would definitely recommend.
Conversely, however, perhaps we should question Europeans massively going to Phuket.
It's not just a question of CO2 pollution, but of human ecology as well: cities like Venice, Lisbon and Barcelona are being eaten out by tourism. What made them interesting is disappearing due to the local economy being highly disrupted by the massive inflows of tourists around the world.
One of these days, electricity will be so cheap that we can carbon capture our way back to 0C net warming and fuel flights for every Indian and Chinese with fuel made from CO2. The developing world will accept nothing less than the abundance route to decarbonization.
The issue is not just the pollution from air travel, but also the types of consumption and ways of life that it enables. Besides ressources are not unlimited so even if you have fee energy, you still need to extract aluminium etc from the ground, and pour concrete on land to build airports and oversized infrastructure.
Ecology is not just a CO2 optimization game.
If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.
Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.
Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...
I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.
My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.
Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
How common is farm landlords?
The question begs some other questions though.
One is more about what fraction of the economic production of the farm industry is owner operated; There is a long tail of now-tiny farms that are not economical to actually sow and harvest, which nobody could actually earn a living from. If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?
Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.
The vertically related industries have also seen a lot of consolidation. There are ~four seed companies, only a few pesticide companies, two main tractor companies, only a few slaughterhouse companies, etc. There are long-term contractual arrangements with some of these entities. Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly they may as well be a sharecropper really counted as a farm?
I can't speak to US farm practices but note that 5,000 acres is 2,023 hectares and a bit less than half the average size of farms in our local farming cooperative (CBH, Western Australia). today they are still mostly extended family farms formed from buying up and joining together many smaller post war farms.
> that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.
The "mean farm" of 4,500 Hectares (11,000 acres) here is typically managed by three full time workers and machinery, along with a network of mechanics, seed suppliers, pooled harvest hands etc.
> Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly
Again, I have no comment wrt US practices - here owner operators formed their own cooperatives to build out and co-own their rail, port, silo, seed storage, agronomy, facilities and via bulk production of > 20 million tonnes of grain per annum have leverage to make demands of equipment manufacturers.
> If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?
I know people that own 10 to 15 acres, live in very old farmhouses that have been fully overhauled to current standards and lease their cropable land out to form large thousand acre paddocks which receive back enough money to cover rates and improvements.
They own the land, they often tun AirBnB as a side earner, the land is farmed at a profit.
Why not both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
[1] - https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/business/how-bill-gates-quietl...
[2] - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Re...
Regarding corporate farms, they may actually be some of the most productive farms, and give people actual opportunities to find good jobs in farming (that donmt require that they inherit a farm from mum and dad).
If you manage to tolerate the interviewer, I think the person being interviewed here was very interesting, and made me think about corporate farming in a different way:
https://youtu.be/pgdLYugmkX8
You don't have pesticide or fertilizer runoff from solar farms. You don't plow the soil resulting in soil loss.
Biofuels, dumb.
A few years ago? Corn ethanol subsidies have been a thing for my entire life.
It's a net-negative fuel. Costs more fuel to produce than it provides. It's literally just a way to waste water, farmland, huge quantities of diesel (burned by engines exempt from any sort of emissions), labor, etc.
What changed is that ethanol has been forced by regulations into more and more use over time. That has driven up demand for corn, and one of the worse side effects is that a major food staple for Mexico has gone up dramatically in price.
> effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities,
If you think that's bad, stop and think for a moment about what purpose the US military serves for rural America, both directly through personnel but also indirectly through all the incredibly wasteful equipment, service, and supply contracts.
The US military's primary reason for existence is force projection, but its secondary is keeping rural American's uneployment from skyrocketing.
If you thought habitat destruction from palm oil was bad, that would be nothing compared to coconut oil making up any significant fraction of jet fuel.
I don't think the answer is obvious. And I think many of us are blind or numb to environmental harms of oil outside of carbon exhaust and the occasional spill, simply because we've accepted it as status quo.
The issue with oil is CO2 and other green house gases and then the occasional oil spill or leak. Land area wise they don’t take up much space
It will be similar (worse?) implementing a new type of fuel for commercial jets, especially when it comes to wide adoption across a majority of countries around the world. Basically you need something which is as least as reliable, clean (I.e., won’t clog/solidify), non corrosive, etc. and remain that way after being mixed with standard jet fuel.
I too want to see alternatives but expect to see more failures than success at this stage.
https://youtu.be/Zvhd3tt7fx4
A drop-in compatible jet fuel can be made by hydrodeoxygenation of biomass, using Virent's process. The waste cellulose in current US waste streams would be more than enough to displace all current US jet fuel consumption.
As an example, a house in NH can generate a lot of excess solar power in the summer months when it uses hardly any electricity. If all that energy could be stored as hydrogen, in the winter (when solar power is less due to the far northern latitude and snow covering the panels) it could draw down on the hydrogen to generate electricity and also use it for a backup heat fuel.
I think this could be a solution if you wanted a fully off grid, solar powered house, or perhaps if we collectively decide to generate more electricity at home and not rely so much on the grid.
More egregiously FAME is a polar solvent that eats your elastomers, even some fluoroelastomers. It will also attack your polysulfide tank sealant. The remark that it's "technically feasible" to decrease oxygen through hydrogenation is not at all sufficient. Now you're into requiring catalyst beds and a hydrogen plant which makes this much less appealing. This is literally a tracked contaminant banned above mg/kg levels they want to run as a major constituent of fuels.
Remember when George W Bush signed into law the corn ethanol bill. Corn tripled in price within 8 years. Fuel didn't get cheaper. In fact it cost more to produce the ethanol.
There's simply no economic feasibility to replace every seal on every aircraft.
> New research found that aviation biofuel made from coconut oil can power a small jet engine about as efficiently as traditional jet fuel, with lower unburned hydrocarbon emissions, though the blends burn more fuel and emit slightly more carbon monoxide.
This statement seems disingenuous. Surely they did not invent a novel way to extract coconut oil as part of this study and not choose to publish it. Surely this is just existing byproduct that already has plenty of commercial use.
If you look at how many coconut plantations you would need to make even a measurable dent in jet fuel demand, this would be an unmitigated environmental disaster.
I want to solve climate change as much as the next guy, but chopping down all our tropical rainforests to make it happen sacrifices exactly what we're trying to save.
biofuels won't work. they take too much land and are inefficient in terms of producing.
The solution: Ditch carbon based fuels as much as possible and replace it with electric transport.
I know that it's currently unviable to use electric aircraft in almost all use cases except short range drones. But then the solution to that problem is to rely less on air travel and transport and use land based alternatives.
This is about vectors and incentives. Investing in bio fuels to get a 100% replacement for fossil fuels is not going to work and it only stalls what actually needs to happen which is a radical transport system change.
This isn't the future I want.
In the post-apocalyptic future I will be the guy roaming the wastelands, armed to the teeth, seeking out rumoured stashes of Jamesons Raspberry Ruffles and those Roobar things.