First Flight of Jet Powered By Algae-Fuel 255
s31523 writes "Today a US airline carrier conducted a 90 minute test flight with one of its engines powered by a 50/50 blend of biofuel and normal aircraft fuel. This was the first flight by a US carrier after other airlines have reported trying similar flights. In February 2008, a Virgin 747 flew from London to Amsterdam partly using a fuel derived from a blend of Brazilian babassu nuts and coconuts. At the end of December, one engine of an Air New Zealand 747 was powered by a 50/50 blend of jatropha plant oil and standard A1 jet fuel."
Great, but ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flight Tests (Score:5, Insightful)
You can bet that the tests were performed for hundreds of hours in controlled environements, you don't just put a couple hundred million dollar airplane into the air and hope that everything works out ok. Of course, there are a ton of variables still to be tested with real world flights: lower air pressure, oxygen density, and temerature for a start.
The thing people don't realize is that modern jet engines can burn practically anything, gas turbines are remarkably flexible. The real questions are how the new fuel affects range and maintanence issues, if the algea fuel gums up the fuel pumps after a half dozen flights, it's not going to see a whole lot of use until all the issues are resolved.
Re:We've been over this before (Score:5, Insightful)
If I recall correctly, moving liquids in a pipe does not cost much energy. In theory, there should be no reason why you can't produce somewhere dirt cheap, and then transport it over with pipelines. Alternatively, we can use electric trains to transport the stuff, and then generate the electricity with nuclear power.
Gross is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Eew. Algae. What's next, a flight powered by athlete's foot?
You don't EAT the damn stuff dude, you burn it! Who the hell CARES what it's made of? Sure seems like a lot less trouble and easier on the earth than digging deep into the earth and dredging up old dead dinosaurs to burn.
I'm also hoping it shuts up the idiots who jump up and down yelling "but how will we feed the children?!?!" whenever someone advocates biofuels. BIO in biofuels does NOT equal FOOD. If I recall, algal blooms are in OVERabundance due to human activity (our detergents ending up in water and supplying phosphates to grow the stuff in excess--tainting our water and killing fish, etc). Seems like an elegant solution to me.
Athletes foot wouldn't be next, but I can thing of another abundant biofuel source that we have a hard time eliminating and that nobody would eat: fecal waste. Everything from poultry litter and cow manure to even human sewerage. How is THAT for gross?
Also, with biofuels, the PROCESSED end product is chemically similar or even identical to conventional hydrocarbon fuels. If you run straight corn oil in your car of COURSE it'll smell like the fryer at the local burger joint, but you don't run straight algae in a jet engine!
Incidentally, have you ever smelled NORMAL jet fuel, or better yet, the EXHAUST from an engine running on it? Jets typically run on a naptha/kerosene blend, which besides being a carcinogen will give you a real bad headache afer a few minutes (unless you're into doing things like snorting tremclad or shoving jiffy markers up your nose or other "fun with fumes" I guess). The exhaust smells similarly unpleasant--almost, but not quite as nice, as deeply inhaling the cloud of black sooty smoke that comes out of the tailpipe of an old diesel truck with fouled injectors.
SO, I'm guessing that it'll perhaps make the airports smell BETTER if algae-derived biofuels become more commonplace. It's also much better than using exotic and/or edible sources, such as coconuts.
Re:Additionality... or just a renewable resource? (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as the CO2 is coming from a truly "renewable" source (meaning that CO2 went into it during it's production) and it's production doesn't involve improperly disposing of some toxic chemical (the EPA does a relatively fair job of this,) how much more environmentally friendly can you ever expect capitalists to get?
We could argue all day about how a car trip through the countryside hurt the feelings of a pair of owls and now they aren't talking to each other and their population is in decline and all of a sudden we realize that NOTHING we do is truly sustainable because we are going to have an impact wherever we go no matter what... and then you just have to ask yourself "is the cost of what I'm doing worth it" and that's a question only YOU can answer. If you don't think so, then there are remote islands where you can farm beets and live in a mud hut for the rest of your life, and I won't think any worse of you for it.
Re:We've been over this before (Score:3, Insightful)
JUST FEED the traffic from EWR/JFK you would need to convert most of northern NJ into one giant goo pile
So...no changes would be necessary, then?
Re:We've been over this before (Score:3, Insightful)
According to the washington post [washingtonpost.com] it would take only 15,000 square miles to replace all the oil used in the United States which includes the oil costs to move oil around.
Which sound huge right? Luckly this country is pretty damn big, with lots of pretty useless areas....
The Mojave Desert for instance is over 22,000 square miles.
While you obvious can't covert the whole thing and dump it all in one place you can probably still find lots of place to stick huge tanks of this stuff, and the tech is only going to get better.
But you are correct in that this wont solve the problem it's still very promising.
Re:Gross (Score:5, Insightful)
If you can smell something outside the outside the cabin of a pressurized airplane, you have bigger problems than being offended by the smell.
Re:Great, but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is why we need to start building light and fast rail NOW. Link all the cities above X million people, a hub in cities with more than X0 million people. Rail doesn't need to carry ANY energy. (Overhead power lines), rail can do regenerative braking and dump all that power back into the grid, power generation can be centralized and cleaned (rather than a million little diesel engines running around).
Re:Hydrogen (Score:3, Insightful)
So how do you store it while in the aircraft? AFAIK, hydrogen needs to be compressed to a very high pressure, which requires heavy steel gas flasks for storage, not fuel tanks made of thin aluminium sheets as those used on aircraft today.
Re:Gross is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, they tend to avoid blending it with naphtha these days - it's a bit dangerous. The fuel itself doesn't smell particularly bad, although the exhaust usually does. That's primarily because aircraft fuel - contrary to popular belief - is much "dirtier" than the fuel you'd put in your car. Jet-turbine engines can burn just about anything, so they can tolerate a much higher level of impurity than your typical piston engine.
Re:Great, but ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Rail sucks for numerous reasons. Fast rail competitive with airlines really, really sucks; rail that can safely carry people at 500mph would be insanely, absurdly expensive, because you can't afford a single failure if you're going to kill hundreds of people in a derailment. Worse than that, rail is much harder to protect against even low-grade attackers because it only takes one whacko deliberately damaging the rails in the middle of nowhere to cause such a disaster.
Finding an alternate affordable fuel source for airliners is going to be much easier than making fast trains that are competitive with airliners. Trains are an attempt to use a 19th century solution for 21st century problems.
Re:It will be interesting to see how this plays ou (Score:5, Insightful)
Algae is the only really viable bio-diesel source. The closest thing to it is switchgrass, but even that can't be fully turned into bio-diesel. The only - and significant - issue with algae-derived bio-diesel is that it's difficult to efficiently turn algae into diesel.
What astounds me though is the number of times people try to turn slow-growing foodstuff into fuel. Coconut oil? I'm sure the same genius came up with the idea to use corn for ethanol fuel. Here's why those are dead ends:
- they require a lot of surface, water and nutrients.
- only a small fraction of the entire plant gets used.
- impacts food prices.
Compare that with algae, which:
- can grow in vats of arbitrary size.
- can be grown in sewage treatment plants.
- main growth restriction is light.
- the entire organism is used in the production of the fuel.
Every time I hear someone advocate fuel from coconuts or corn, I'm wondering how much he's getting paid by corn and coconut growers.
Re:We've been over this before (Score:4, Insightful)
You are comparing a form of mass transit to a single occupant car. Nobody would claim that a single occupant car was fuel efficient. Replace your single occupant car with two to four people, and the fuel usage drops to equal or half as much as an airplane. Put the people in a plane on an appropriately sized bus, and the fuel per person would drop even more. Use a train which has a dedicated path and moves at a constant speed (again, appropriately sized), and fuel usage would drop further.
In today's transportation, energy efficiency is basically a non-issue. People value convenience and speed far, far more than energy usage. When energy costs rise as oil depletion nears, this will change. More money will be pumped into creating new energy sources and people will travel both less and more efficiently. Most office workers don't REALLY need to travel as often as they do. Most drivers don't REALLY need a large heavy vehicle for most of their transportation. Even public transportation in the US is vastly energy inefficient due to low usage patterns. The only crisis will come if oil prices impair the ability to produce and distribute food before alternatives are found. Everything else will scale back if and when it becomes necessary.
Re:Gross (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great, but ... (Score:3, Insightful)
everyone wants a train stop, which means by the time a high speed train gets up to speed it has to decelerate for the next stop.
Take a local train to a hub, then get on the high speed non-stop train to your destination.
The problem with infrastructure is that we don't have slave labor to put it in place. It costs millions of dollars per mile to build a highway, and (if I remember correctly) tens of millions (to 100+M) per mile for high speed rail.
Too bad we don't have millions of people out of work right now. And too bad we don't have an incoming administration looking to stimulate the economy by pumping billions of dollars into infrastructure...