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."
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It will be interesting to see how this plays ou (Score:5, Interesting)
The kinks in harvesting algae will be worked out with development. Give the industry time.
And of course it will take large quantities to produce large volumes of fuel, the up side is that algae is easy to grow anywhere and grows fast.
Solix (http://www.solixbiofuels.com/):
On a side note and off topic, what imbecile modded you down to -1? Your post is informative and includes a great link to the technology and should be modded up. I amazes me just how many morons are out there with mod points. Mr Malda, would you fix this please. Someone needs a time out.
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Nobody ever bothers meta-moderating.
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I used to meta-moderate almost every time I saw the link for it.
I tried once after we switched to slashdot v2.0 and could not figure it out, so I haven't moderated since.
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Because most of the time when there is a post the moderator doesn't like or agree with. He will moderate it Overrated.
Overrated is not effected by Meta Moderation unless they make it so
Rated Overrated Score when rated was x currently is y.
Overrated should be used when a post score is about a 5. Right on the top of the page but really doesn't belong there.
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Post correction, should have been:
"It amazes me just how many morons are out there with mod points."
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So there are no morons who modded me down, only a
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The real test will be whether the total energy efficiency exceeds that of creating hydrogen fuel via electrolysis as the MIT team that's been all over the news for the last year says they can now do cheaply and efficiently. Biofuel is of course just a form of solar power. The conversion efficiency is not likely to be more than about 14% based on how photosynthesis works, if I recall my numbers correctly. PV cells already do much better than that, so the real value is of course in the storage. If MIT's e
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.
Great, but ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Still good to know that this is renewable and useable though. Cars can go electric just fine. Airplanes capable of carrying any useful load (ie, people) have a much harder time. Weight is at a premium in an airplane and batteries are quite heavy compared to the energy they have stored.
If/when we run out of oil I have confidence that electric cars will be pretty well developed and ready. For flight though, I think some form of combustion will still be needed.
So production up to a practical level might not be as much of a problem if it means only supplying aviation fuel while everything else runs on electric. At would at a minimum keep small airplanes available for hobby use (where fuel burn is not really that bad - 4 to 10 gallons per hour is pretty common in smaller planes).
Re:Great, but ... (Score:4, Funny)
I, for one, am dismayed that they were so quick to shoot down my idea of commercial aircraft being launched to their destinations with enormous slingshots. It requires no fuel, and would look wicked cool. Where's my grant, huh? Why do these jokers who want to fly planes using used grease from a McDonald's fryer get all the money, and I don't get squat?
All I need is a big tree and a really big elastic band at every airport, and I could solve this problem tomorrow!
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Agreed that your idea would look "wicked cool", however I see a couple of problems. In order to keep the acceleration low enough to avoid destroying the plane and killing the passengers during take-off, the band will have to be fairly soft and very long. Although if we can stretch it constantly over the entire length of a sharply inclined runway, that may be enough.
The second problem, however, is that the major technical hurdle will not be the launch. In order to stop the aircraft, you'll need a very lar
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the major technical hurdle will not be the launch.
The cruising altitude of a commercial jet is somewhere around 10km. Gravitational potential energy is given by mgh. Kinetic energy is given by 1/2mv^2. In order to get to this altitude, the elastic band needs to provide enough kinetic energy for the wings to turn it into gravitational potential energy. Let's pretend, for now, that this conversion is 100% efficient. Therefore:
mgh = 1/2mv^2
We can immediately cancel the m from both sides, giving:
gh = 1/2v^2
Rearrange, and we get:
sqrt(2gh) = v
Plug in
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Hell why bother with the aircraft at that point? I'm envisioning 'individual' transport. We could ship things that are light enough as well like crystal ware and ship in bottles. It could also win us the space race (assuming the two trees are on opposite ends of a gorge). And it could also be easily retrofitted for wartime. It is one simple thing that solves a variety of todays difficulties!
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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: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:Great, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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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
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Weight is at a premium in an airplane and batteries are quite heavy compared to the energy they have stored.
It's even worse than that. Even if a battery had the same energy density (by weight) as fuel, it would still be worse because the batteries do not get lighter over the course of the flight, so the aircraft must constantly expend energy to carry that mass. By burning fuel you lighten your load over the course of the flight which makes flying progressively cheaper.
Also, many aircraft can't (safely) land with a full tank of fuel. They are designed such that the landing weight will be lower (due to burning fuel
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And you'd still have lots of greenhouse gases, too.
Re:Great, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
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Look up Solix for a company that is investigating this. Algae are really the only long-term viable source of bio-diesel.
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I don't know how they are creating this algae, but I think we'd run into a similar problem as ethanol, where you'd need to devote so much land to growing that actually using the algae as a replacement for petroleum isn't feasible
Not sure about your other questions but it doesn't take up much space
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algae_fuel [wikipedia.org]
Algae fuel, also called algal fuel, oilgae, algaeoleum or third-generation biofuel, is a biofuel from algae.
The record oil price increases since 2003, competing demands between foods and other biofuel sources and the world food crisis have ignited interest in algaculture (farming algae) for making vegetable oil, biodiesel, bioethanol, biogasoline, biomethanol, biobutanol and other biofuels. Among alga
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I wonder what the temperature requirements are? We have tons of basically useless land out in really inclimate places, like deserts in the Southwest and practically glacial areas in the Northern U.S. Crops can't grow there and algae tanks wouldn't need to be "rotated" like crops, so we could make use of this space. It would probably equal cheap land for the companies as well.
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I wonder if... (Score:5, Funny)
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We've been over this before (Score:4, Informative)
Due to the low Energy Return on Energy Invested inherent to biofuels, you can't really make the stuff too far from its point of use, as the transport of the material would exceed its energy value. Jet aircraft are insanely inefficient and guzzle fuel at prodigious rates, and require fuel that has a high energy density. As a consequence I do not see biofuel for jets as anything but a stop gap measure.
I suggest you move to where you like to live, so you can plan out your future, because in a few short decades, you're not going anywhere cheaply or quickly.
RS
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.
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Indeed, I hear that the south west has LARGE tracts of land (those larger than NJ) that would much more ideal. Warm, Sunny, etc.
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I would think evaporation would be a large consideration, no? If you go to a historically dry place and make large (shallow?) pools of water it may get quite expensive to keep filling them up.
I would think a sunny, humid, place with cheap undeveloped treeless land would be ideal. A swamp somewhere?
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Toss a lid on it. Nothing will evaporate, it works well for ICE coolant systems. Toss a bubbler at the bottom to bubble air through the system so the algae can get air. You solve 2 problems, first is the evaporation. Second is that in a big swimming pool the only algae in contact with air is the stuff on the surface. If you bubble it through you can get air to a much larger percentage of the algae.
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but you have to understand, the energy ratio on biofuels is *tiny* compared to petroleum. For corn based alcohol, it's a negative/break even value (per Pimental). For sugar based alcohol, it's about 2.5:1. Right now, oil is 25:1 and in the 1920s, when much of our urban infrastructure was planned and built it was 100:1. Moving liquids in a pipe reduces its energy return, and with algae goo, it's already low.
In theory, there should
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But 2.5 to 1 ratio is not fundamentally a problem; as long as transporting it is cheaper then 50% of the energy produced, you come out ahead. In any case, if the process can be sufficiently automated, you can repeat it as many times as you want in a loop and get any ratio you want. (use the output as input, over and over again)
Re:We've been over this before (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We've been over this before (Score:5, Informative)
I assume you're basing those calculations on a couple inches of algea covering a huge area. Algea farming for biofuels doesn't work that way. You put the algea in large tubes (10 ft tall, 2 ft around) and continuously churn the water until the density of algea reaches your target harvest point. Then drain the water and process the agea.
As for biofuels for jets being a stop gap measure, how do you expect to power jets 50 years from now if (when?) oil begins to run out. I don't see charging up some Li-Ion batteries to fly several hundred people from New York to London.
Call me a techno-optimist, but I have faith we can solve these kinds of problems with research and engineering. We've done it before and we'll do it again.
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As for biofuels for jets being a stop gap measure, how do you expect to power jets 50 years from now if (when?) oil begins to run out. I don't see charging up some Li-Ion batteries to fly several hundred people from New York to London.
We replace the turbine section with a big spiral spring, and put a sticker on the instrument panel that says, "Rewind Engines Every Three Miles."
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"I don't see charging up some Li-Ion batteries to fly several hundred people from New York to London."
You're close ... we need .... Dilithium Crystals!
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Oh don't remind me of project pluto. Most terrifying but most badass weapon ever devised. Cruise missile/bomber that operates for months at a time. It kills anything it approaches by giving them radiation sickness or killing them with shockwave alone. And carried multiple nukes. The idea was to send it off to bomb a bunch of russian cities with nukes. Then fly back and forth in russia killing anything that was left alive.
Re:We've been over this before (Score:5, Informative)
To quote from Ask The Pilot [salon.com]:
"As for fuel consumption, let's look first at a short trip, from New York to Boston and back again. This flight is slightly under an hour in each direction. A typical aircraft on such a route, an Airbus A320, will consume somewhere around 10,000 pounds or 1,500 gallons of jet fuel over the course of the round trip. Assuming 140 passengers, that's 71 pounds of fuel, or just over 10 gallons per person. A lone occupant making the same trip by car would consume twice those amounts."
I'm assuming that Mr. Smith as a professional airline pilot has got his numbers right. So where's your backup for your "insanely inefficient" claim?
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Greyhound may use a lot less gas than a driving yourself and/or the airplane.
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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.
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One could also assume that Mr. Smith as a professional airline pilot has a vested interest in making his job look good. I'm sure that the numbers check out, but the GP also said that jet aircraft "require fuel that has a high energy density." Assuming that the fact is accurate, to find out if jet aircraft are "insanely inefficient" we must also look at the relative energy densities of jet fuel and good old gasoline, and figure out how much of a difference in production resources/costs it makes. This is l
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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:4, Informative)
Jet aircraft are insanely inefficient and guzzle fuel at prodigious rates
Actually not. If we e.g. take a common Boeing 737-400, with a fuel capacity of 23170 liters, a maximum range (fully loaded) of 4005 km and a seating capacity of 159 seats, it yields a fuel consumption of 0.036 liters of fuel per km per passenger, which translates to 65 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.
That's not so bad, is it? Sure, it assumes that the aircraft uses its maximum range (take-off comprises a significant share of the total fuel consumption, so a short flight is much more wasteful than a long flight) and contain a full load of passengers, but still, it's a pretty good number.
Re:We've been over this before (Score:5, Informative)
and to JUST FEED the traffic from EWR/JFK you would need to convert most of northern NJ into one giant goo pile.
Not really a PILE--probably a nice thick coat of algae, but not a PILE. Besides, why would you bother covering New Jersey in it when you could grow it in the ocean or in lakes? Comparatively speaking the area of NJ is microscopic when you consider how much surface of the earth is covered in water. Not only that, you can grow it in "3D", so you can grow thousands of percent more Algae per acre of SURFACE than you could, say, CORN--that "darling" of the biofuel industry.
Due to the low Energy Return on Energy Invested inherent to biofuels, you can't really make the stuff too far from its point of use, as the transport of the material would exceed its energy value.
I've heard, in fact, that Algae biofuel is MORE THAN 3000 PERCENT MORE ENERGY DENSE THAN CORN ETHANOL. Even myths about corn ethanol taking more energy to produce than it provides has been dispelled (though corn ethanol IS only a fraction as efficient as petroleum fuel and thus not a good alternative). As a matter of fact, if you set aside an area of ocean near the shore about the size of NJ, not only would it produce enough jet fuel to feed EWR/JFK traffic--it would be enough to fuel ALL FLIGHTS AND AUTOMOTIVE TRAFFIC IN THE UNITED STATES.
The problem with algae fuel isn't growing the stuff (supply far exceed demand--it is often the byproduct of water pollution), or how much energy it provides (quite a lot in fact). The problem is that until now almost nothing has been invested in refining the stuff--virtually all the fuel refineries in the world are designed to refine "dead dinosaur residue". he refining infrastructure investment requirement to process that much algae is MASSIVE, which is the single biggest reason we don't all run our cars on algae today.
I suggest you move to where you like to live, so you can plan out your future, because in a few short decades, you're not going anywhere cheaply or quickly.
Thanks for the advice, Chicken Little, I'll take it under advisement.
Of course, our society is extremely wasteful and energy inefficient right now when compared to potential, so ignoring efforts in reducing energy use overall perhaps the sky will indeed fall. However, nothing of the sort will happen as we learn to do everything more efficiently.
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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
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Your point being? (i.e., and the downside would be?)
Not that exciting? (Score:5, Informative)
Additionality... or just a renewable resource? (Score:2, Interesting)
Is this really an Environmentally-friendly change, or just ensuring that it's a fuel that can be supplied long-term (not limited like fossil fuels)?
Consider these points before agreeing that it truly benefits the environment:
- what energy and chemicals goes into the growing, harvesting, and processing of the plants to make it into fuel? What CO2/pollution does that create?
- the land used to grow the crops... are we displacing food crops? Would that land otherwise have sequest
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Considering the insane amount of fuel that goes into a single flight (i think a single transcontinental flight takes more fuel than a car during the lifetime of its owner), this can't be good. As you said, we are displacing food crops, which is part of the reason behind raising food costs. Making humans starve can't be a very good change. Thats how wars start.
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i think a single transcontinental flight takes more fuel than a car during the lifetime of its owner
That may be true, but using cars to transport the same amount of people the same distance would use more fuel at least if you count on only the driver (and no passengers) in each car. And with US-style cars, you could probably add two passengers in each car, and still have the 747 come out as the more efficient alternative.
A typical Boeing 747-400ER configuration has a maximum fuel capacity of 241140 liters of fuel, a maximum range (fully loaded) of 14205 km and a seating capacity of 416 passengers. This am
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Yes, you're right. I was more thinking in absolute than relative though (basically I was trying to show how much fuel was in a plane, wasn't talking about efficiency, hehe..though keep in mind its not uncommon for a plane to be mostly empty, not just cars). Regardless of how efficient it is, its a LOT of fuels. Just the little bit of bio fuel that is used in consumer grade gazoline right now had a visible impact on food prices, for example. Imagine if you start loading planes with that stuff, ESPECIALLY if
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Aircraft are still more efficient per passenger-mile than other popular means of transportation. A loaded 747 gets roughly 100 passenger-miles per gallon. Most American cars, even when loaded with passengers and luggage, can't manage that. Ships are even worse; cruise ships are lucky to get 10 passenger-miles per gallon.
So until electric cars or high-speed rail services take off, don't complain about aircraft.
Also, biofuel sources like jatropha and algae don't displace food crops, unless you define anyth
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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
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- what energy and chemicals goes into the growing, harvesting, and processing of the plants to make it into fuel? What CO2/pollution does that create?
That's why biofuel is good. It's basically co2 neutral since any co2 release when burning it the same amount you removed from the atmosphere when you were growing it. Once up and running the factory would have 0 impact on the environment other than simply the land it takes up.
the land used to grow the crops... are we displacing food crops? Would that land otherwise have sequestered CO2 long term (benefitting us), whereas now we're taking that carbon and putting it back into the atmosphere
That's a big selling points of algae. You can build the factory anywhere there is sun light, deserts for example. And if you want to sequester the co2 just run your bio fuel factory and just pump the oil it makes back underground.
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Algae are the most promising because you can grow them on refuse and sun-light. The energy captured is sun-light - think of it as biological solar panels. The processing of algae is not where it needs to be right now, but they're the best long-term bet.
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>> Land (and forest) do not sequester carbon to any significant extent - the decomposition process of dead plant matter releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.
Actually, they do - however to a finite capacity. It's true that as plants die, the carbon goes back into the environment, but new plants grow to replace them. Once you deforest an area, or cut it down to grow crops, you've permanently released that carbon to the atmosphere - You're taking an existing carbon sink and destroying it.
If yo
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Once you deforest an area, or cut it down to grow crops, you've permanently released that carbon to the atmosphere - You're taking an existing carbon sink and destroying it.
This is actually in most cases quite false. Old growth forests are generally "carbon neutral" and commonly can even be net carbon PRODUCERS. This is because there is a very large volume of biomass in these forests that is decomposing or otherwise not involved in photosynthesis, relative to new growth that acts as a carbon sink.
Though clearing an old rain forest is a bad idea, doing so would NOT "destroy a carbon sink".
net neutral except for the energy put into growing the crops (unless you chopped down a forest to create the farm land in the first place).
Depending on what is done with the biomass removed with the deforestation, and on the na
Sounds like a PR-coup, really. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm all for biofuels and algae is certainly promising, but AFAIK, it's nowhere near industrial production yet. (cellulosic ethanol is getting there though)
Note that it says:
They don't say how much algae-derived biofuel was in that mix. I'm guessing this is rather a way for the company involved to get attention and hence, more funding. I suppose the ends justify the means, though. It take
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Algae is COMING on line NOW. Cellulosic ethanol will most likely fail before Algae owns the AE market. The reason is that Algae can be grown 3d, whereas Cellulose comes from a 2D. How different is it? Solix has already achieved production of 1,500 gallons an acre per year at a test plot in Fort Collins, and the company is expecting yields of 2,500 to 3,000 gallons an acre per year, said Mr. Henston. [nytimes.com]
In contrast, so
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Of course that is hurting not just our AE efforts, but also Iran and Venezuela. I am not sure that the Saud's care one way or another about these 2 countries.
I don't know about Venezuela, but I'm pretty sure the Saud's would be quite happy to see the Iranian government (which as you say, really needs oil prices > $80/barrel) weakened or worse...
Which airline? (Score:5, Interesting)
A US airline carrier
Is rather vague. Would it kill the editors to read the first line of the article itself to see
The 90-minute flight by a Continental Boeing 737-800 went better than expected, a spokesperson said.
Considering how poorly many of the carriers are doing in terms of finances and customer satisfaction (not to mention customer service) it could be useful to know which one is trying the biofuel, even if it was a short test.
Hydrogen (Score:2, Informative)
In many ways liquid hydrogen would be an ideal aviation fuel. It is clean, has a high energy/weight ratio, it has already been demonstrated ( The Russians developed a Hydrogen passenger Jet during the first Oil crisis ), it scales and because airlines have much more predictable traffic patterns than does your home car, you don't need to store it for days or weeks, meaning the cooling and insulation systems can be much simpler.
The catch is the cost of producing hydrogen in an environmentally friendly manner.
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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.
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There's two ways that are practical for aviation. One is using pressure, with the problems you mentioned. The other is to cool it to cryogenic temperatures, meaning you will need insulation. Fortunately insulation can be made comparatively light, the problem is that cooling the hydrogen to cryogenic temperatures requires a lot of energy, adding to the already expensive production of it.
Basically there's no technical obstacles to using hydrogen. Heck it's low weight makes it the fuel of choice for many space
Coconuts? (Score:2)
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.
Yeah but were those African or European coconuts?
The airlines wont tell you... (Score:2)
The airlines will never admit to doing this once it has been many years that way they can keep bitching about the gas prices, and overcharge you until the day comes they will let it be known they have been flying for some time now. I doubt very much the price of tickets will go down just because they save money doing this.
Carriers dont fly (Score:2)
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It can only be an improvement. I'd prefer "malfunctioning waste treatment plant" over "jet exhaust".
I'm hoping it smells like "fish tank".
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If they were smart, they'd make it smell like coconut suntan lotion.
Mmmmm...
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.
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another abundant biofuel source that we have a hard time eliminating and that nobody would eat: fecal waste.
That way we can say "that airline sure has its $#!^ together!"
(Although with this bio-fuels stuff, I can't seem to get that coconut song out of my head now...)
digging deep into the earth and dredging up old dead dinosaurs to burn.
Argh. No, oil from the ground is not from dead dinosaurs.
It's from the plants that lived during the time of the dinos.
Re:Gross is good (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Actually, most oil comes from dead algae [wikipedia.org], not dead dinosaurs. Check the section entitled 'Formation' in the aforementioned Wiki link. So in this regard, we're just changing the current status of the input material.
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I can thin[k] 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?
I can see the Ryanair implementation now. Laxatives in the FREE WATER!!! and no seats, only 200 toilets with seat-belts. Turbulence is going to be messy.
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:Gross is good (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I know, I work on them for a living :) I wouldn't exactly call them "simpler", though. The basic concept is simple enough, but large jet-turbine engines are anything but simple.
And yes, the fuel is considerably cheaper. There's no point spending extra money in processing the fuel when your engines can handle a high level of impurity. Basic economics.
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Sewage. Sewerage is what sewage flows through.
Jets typically run on a naptha/kerosene blend
Only in very cold climates where the naptha keeps it from getting gooey. That stuff, called Jet-B, is widely banned elsewhere because it will ignite too easily in a crash landing. The rest of the civil aviation world uses Jet-A (in the USA) and Jet-A1 (elsewhere). Apart from having the solid crap filtered out of it, and some microorganism and corrosion inhibitors added, it's plain old kerosene
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The substantive impact on food supplies from biofuels comes from food production resources (most obviously land) switching to fuel production. This is irrespective of whether foodstuffs are what is being converted.
It's unlikely the problematic existing algae blooms will be used for fuel. More algae will be created for this use - it will be farmed. The objective is to produce biofuel cheaply, tax-free and without being imported... er, I mean in a way that minimises impact to food production, i.e. intensively
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The most productive source of bio oil is hemp, which has many non THC strains, but is illegal anyway.
Too bad the US gov is morons... Of course flying a hemp powered plane might not inspire confidence.
-Viz
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Sadly the supposed "efficiency" of hemp oil as a magical bio-fuel is a constant myth propogated by the pro-MJ crowd.
Those damn Michael Jackson fans and the crazy propaganda they spew!
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.
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If you can smell something outside the outside the cabin of a pressurized airplane, you have bigger problems than being offended by the smell.
Super smell?
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When it's on the ground though, the air coming through the vents often smells like some type of exhaust, I had always guessed it was from the plane engines.
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.
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[Sigh]... He and the Skipper DID fix the hole in the boat, and sealed it with tree sap. Gilligan then decided to coat the entire Minnow with the same tree sap. Unfortunately, after a period of time, the sap gave way, and the entire boat fell to pieces.
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Obviously you have a problem reading, we are talking about algae and jatropha(toxic) oil here neither of which you really want to eat.
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Yes, but the biofuels are carbon-neutral, as producing them removes an equal amount of carbon from the biosphere. It's a closed loop.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, extract carbon that has been sequestered for many thousands or millions of years and releases it into the biosphere. It's an open loop, at least in human timescales.
Re:Algae For Fuel Is Not Cool. (Score:5, Funny)
Putting those millions, nay, billions of LIVING organisms in such terrible working conditions is a crime against algaenity.
Fixed that for you.
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Care to place a wager on that, Nostradamus?
Air travel back in the 70's was quite a bit more expensive (as a percentage of average income) than it is today. There didn't seem to be a dearth in air travel back then. So maybe the price rises a bit in the future due to increasing fuel costs - so what? Maybe your all-inclusive week long vacation to Cuba will cost $1,200
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"So does this mean we will have planes with bigger paunches to carry fat Americans?"
With in-flight liposuction we could literally tap them for fuel.
Heat the lipo-slop with bleed air, run it through a centrifugal separator to get the crumbs out, then send the result to the engines.