Fat Replaces Oil In F-16s 206
It looks like the military has finally figured out a way to combine Americans' love of french fries with their love of blowing stuff up. The Air Force says all of its 40-plus aircraft models will be able to burn biofuels by 2013, three years ahead of schedule. From the article: "The Army wants 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025. The Navy and Marines aim to shift half their energy use from oil, gas and coal by 2020. 'Reliance on fossil fuels is simply too much of a vulnerability for a military organization to have,' U.S. Navy Secretary Raymond Mabus said in an interview. 'We’ve been certifying aircraft on biofuels. We’re doing solar and wind, geothermal, hydrothermal, wave, things like that on our bases.'”
Re:Can't be ignored any longer (Score:2, Interesting)
The war in the Pacific was started over oil, and turned on fuel supply.
In the end, Japan was using biofuels made from the roots of pine trees, which they had a lot of because the trees had been felled to be burned themselves.
It took 100,000 pine tree stumps to make one tank of gas for a Japanese fighter jet.
Biofuels are an overrated source of energy.
Once the oil begins to run out, heavier-than-air airraft are going to become scarce.
WW2 RAF? (Score:2, Interesting)
Their planes ran on butanol 75 years ago, a byproduct of ABE production that yielded acetone for cordite manufacture. It was the worlds second largest biotech industry to ethanol for almost a century, but no one seems to notice how it's gone away. I don't want to blame the petrochemical craze started in the 1960s for deliberately outshining renewable and sustainable alternative fuel sources, but a ton of greased and greedy sons of bitches making decisions with their wallets later and I'd be remiss not to mention it.