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Honeywell & Airbus To Turn Algae Into Jet Fuel
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri May 16, 2008 11:36 AM
from the little-animalcules-powering-bug-jets dept.
from the little-animalcules-powering-bug-jets dept.
mystermarque alerts us to an announcement by Honeywell,
JetBlue Airways, International Aero Engines, and Airbus about a program to develop jet fuel from algae and other biomass. They hope to supply nearly 1/3 of the demand for jet fuel from these sources by 2030. A Wall Street Journal blog points out that even if this program's goals are met, we will be worse off by 2030 in terms of jet kerosene released into the atmosphere, assuming that the rapid growth in the aviation sector continues apace.
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A blogger says it's bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess we better do nothing then and abandon this project...
Abandon this project? (Score:5, Funny)
All hands: Abandon Planet! Abandon Planet!
Then we can nuke the site from orbit. It is the only way to make sure.
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Re:Abandon this project? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, 23% of the country could supply the energy needs of the entire nation.
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Re:Abandon this project? (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, they're easier to convert into jet fuel than algae. The devil has perfected that specific process already : I hear a steady supply of politicians (and lawyers obviously) is what keeps hell warm.
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Re:Abandon this project? (Score:5, Interesting)
See this link for more details on an algae farm [wired.com]
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There's approximately a zero percent chance... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A blogger says it's bad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Expensive fuel makes having retailers closer to home, fewer trucks eating fuel delivering product. Hmm...
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Re:A blogger says it's bad... (Score:5, Insightful)
IF you had to get all of your goods from local factories/farms, you'd pay much more for the goods themselves, and have a far smaller selection, driving the price up even more due to lack of competition.
The inability of local retailers to provide the same goods as the "megacorps" killed them.
to continue, local retailers means that you have to pay more for your goods which means that your standard of living will drop as the prices rise and you are not able to afford as much as you once did.
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So what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the Rapid Growth in the Aviation sector, precisely where is that growth? There are fewer flights today than there were 5 years ago.
And as older planes are replaced the newer ones are more efficient.
Re:So what? (Score:4, Interesting)
If anything, there are an order of magnitude *more* takeoffs and landings than 5 years ago thanks to the explosion in regional airline flights - the puddlejumpers that hold 50 passengers and fly from Detroit to St. Louis instead of NYC to LA.
This has actually contributed to delayed/canceled flights, which have also skyrocketed, but that's more an infrastructure and logistics problem.
Fewer people are flying on those planes, but this also lets the airline offer more flights, which passengers have requested again and again - more travel options.
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Re:So what? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Some assumption. (Score:5, Interesting)
You think so?
I suppose I don't know a lot about the topic, but domestic aviation's more important to the US than to just about anybody else, innit? And the US airlines are busy melting down.
The question was "aviation", and not "domestic aviation", but I think domestic flights are where most miles are racked up yearly.
Re:Some assumption. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Some assumption. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Some assumption. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone remember when all the US flights were grounded after the twin tower bombings? The US economy came to a complete halt.
This is also obviously global, not just US. China is the big grower in flight miles in the next 3
I've got a secret for them (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't anybody tell the hippies!
Look, if they're doing this to save money, then great, good for them. If they're doing it to help our economy by keeping everything in house (and not installing a pipeline of cash from here to Saudi Arabia) then awesome! But if they're doing this to somehow trick themselves into believing that they are "helping the cause" then they need to pull their head out of their ass.
We NEED hydrogen power. Not fuel cells, not batteries, combustion of hydrogen and oxygen into water. Electrolysis is not difficult.
Step 1: Build nuclear power plant
Step 2: Split salt water into hydrogen and oxygen
Step 3: Profit
Step 4: Goto 1
This crap that we're doing right now is hurting the problem. Driving a Prius isn't helping, buying a hybrid Chevy Suburban isn't helping. Elect officials that build mass transit systems. Our cities our built with the assumption that people can very cheaply get from one end of it to the other, but they can't anymore.
Priuses and other hybrids are not addressing the root of the problem, which is our assumption of cheap transportation. THAT is what we need to cure. The neo-hippies with their lattes and they horn rimmed glasses are not helping the cause, they're hurting it by buying into a false reality and encouraging others to do so.
Re:I've got a secret for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I've got a secret for them (Score:5, Funny)
Ducks?
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Re:I've got a secret for them (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I completely agree with you. At least when you pull the carbon from the air and put it back you are maintaining an equilibrium instead of bringing carbon stored in the ground an releasing it into the air.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
To repeat the strip-mining, unsustainable forestry attitudes of the 19th and 20th centuries would be foolish, damning and unconscionable.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Well these are pilot projects with a very specific function - clean up factory emissions. Other setups will have different net carbon emissions, of course.
Here's an interesting study. [unh.edu]
In that, they study open ponds full of salt water to get their numbers. The CO2 comes from the air directly, same way a field of grass works. Different project, different goals - different carbon footprint.
As for the pressed biomass left over, it makes fantastic fertilizer.
Really, the entire algae/biodiesel thing is
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A few major problems with your solution
1> Salt water is only mostly water. Where are you going to dump all the waste (something like 25Kg of salt per 1000 liters)
2> Hydrogen by itself is fairy hard to handle - it escapes most containers, and it makes metals brittle so pipelines (and engines - think about the pressures inside an engine cylinder and what happens when your engine block and cylinders become very britle)will have some severe problems.
3> although #2 touches
Re:I've got a secret for them (Score:5, Insightful)
You should know that the majority of organic material (like leaves or algae) and the carbon they contain does not get trapped away from the atmosphere. For the most part, dead organic material slowly decays releasing that carbon back into CO2.
Using algae as a source of fuel can decrease the amount of carbon we are pulling out of deep sequestered sources. It would decrease global CO2 concentration as the source of carbon is part of a closed loop. We'll be pulling carbon out of the air when we grow more algae.
On another note. Electrolysis is not easy. Right now, electrolysis terribly inefficient and needs platinum electrodes. There's a reason that hydrogen today is produced by cracking oil and not extracted from water.
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Re:I've got a secret for them (Score:4, Insightful)
Step 2: Split salt water into hydrogen and oxygen
Step 3: Profit
Step 4: Goto 1
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Re:I've got a secret for them (Score:5, Informative)
You should do some homework regarding using H for power. First, being the lightest element, it does not like to be constrained and so seeps easily out of containers which are not properly sealed or, and this is key, thick enough.
Yes, thick enough. Do a Google for how thick tanks have to be to contain hydrogen and you will see that you are adding substantial amounts of weight to any vehicle which uses hydrogen as a power source. Why thick? Because you need a lot of H to do the same amount of work that gas does and the only way to get a lot of H into any area is to compress it. To keep it under pressure you need a strong containment vessel (or wessel as Chekov would say).
Second, you can't just have Joe Six Pack walk up to an H filling station, pull out the hose and start pumping. To use the compressed H (see above) it has to be liquified which means extremely cold temperatures. Usually, tranferring H to containers involves an automated process, not some guy with a cigarette hanging out his mouth, a cell phone in one hand and the other hand holding the valve open.
In the end, using H as a power source, while a nice idea, is not feasible. You're missing at least one, if not more, steps in your example above. The liquification stage. That takes large amounts of energy to do so by using your example, you'd have to build the liquification plant next to the nuclear plant which is doing the electrolysis. That's what we need, a large source of explosive material next to a nuclear plant.
This is not to say that we shouldn't use H where it can be easily applied but as a source to fuel cars, buses, planes, etc, it's simply a pipe dream.
For your reading pleasure: eSkeptic [skeptic.com]
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, global warming exists but tying the Greenhouse effect in with global warming is presumptuous. But if you do buy into all that AND think that CO2 is a major contributor to the percentage of Greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere (hint: it's not) THEN you look at this algae thing
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Our cities our built with the assumption that people can very cheaply get from one end of it to the other, but they can't anymore.
You are correct, but do you consider why that's the case? Ever look at housing prices on a website like Zillow? Living near major centers of employment is extremely expensive. The only way people afford those homes is because they are rich, and/or gave up their vehicle. But what happens if they have to buy a lot of groceries or need to travel farther than their feet/public transportation will allow? Traditionally it's been cheaper to live far from work and own a car. High energy prices are not going
Hydrogen is a red herring (Score:3, Insightful)
Cars were better for the environment (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, its true, back in the day, the greedy corporation was in fact the steam train operators that ran the steam railroads. To some extent, people viewed the likes of GM as a form of liberation from a railroad monopoly, just as much as people cheered Microsoft when they supplanted IBM and cheer now tiny Linux service companies as they threaten to supplant Microsoft. Basically, what we are doing is evolution through corporate service. Once we've realized in our minds whatever good can be ascribed to a company, we get rid of it.
To get back to point, its all too easy to see that, as soon as GM and Ford salespeople walked into cities talking up the virtues of buses over trains, they weren't exactly walking into a hostile environment. A bunch of cities even helped things along by passing ordinances effectively banning steam engines and then later on, even regular trains, for various health and safety reasons. The car, of all things, were not just a symbol of freedom from the evil railroad corporation, not just a symbol of private ownership, but they were actually -better for the environment too-!
That just cracks me up. That and, the likes of Ivy League Univ of PA.
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Re:Cars were better for the environment (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it was a mix. You still needed to have steam trains to haul both freight and commuter traffic between city. Electric trains didn't have the power to make steep grades and so steamers would be still be used, for example, to K4s.
I had a bunch of pictures in a longer post explaining this in more detail, but slashdot's new stupid interface got the best of me and now its gone.
Anyway, the picture I'm trying to paint is this. Commuters circa the 1920s would probably take some sort of a electric train, be it subway or trolly to a central station. There, they would transfer to a steamer for travel between those cities that did not have electrified routes. So, to get somewhere, you would have walk a bit, take one form of transit, then get off, wait on a platform, then get another, and then from there go to another city, and repeat the same process. You had a big mix of ugly electric wires or dangerous third rails everywhere, and choking smoke from steam engines to do it. What's even worse is that, in that whole system, pressure from cars and worn infrastructure abused by the nationalizations of two wars basically meant that railroad service was pretty unreliable. Imagine how pissed you would be, for example, if your commuter train was late and you missed your intracity train.
So, when the car came out, its advantages were obvious to anyone who travelled. You only had to get into and exit your vehicle once. You stayed warm and dry the whole trip. You didn't have to walk to and from any stations and the only cost you needed to have to make a trip was gasoline (which was dirt cheap). By the time you get to the 1950s, Eisenhower was launching the interstates, New Jersey and other states were building their turnpikes, and everyone who had any brain was buying a car.
The great irony is that, as much as we say the coal fired locomotive was evil and polluting, to this day, a steam engine pulling 100 passengers built even with 1920s designs would emit about the same CO2 as not much more than 4 or 5 modern cars. A K4s (the most common steam passenger engine on the PRR circa the golden era) only had about a two thousand horespower, if that, and even today a modern locomotive diesel is about 4000 hp. Trains a pretty good deal, environmentally.
If we had a "clean coal" steamer service, we'd be way ahead of the curve...
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Re:Cars were better for the environment (Score:4, Interesting)
A hydrogen-powered locomotive would have a number of advantages over hydrogen-powered cars: it's pulling tens of thousands of tons already and won't mind the weight of thick-wall stainless steel tubing that doesn't leak or embrittle badly, and one big fuel depot can handle the cryogenic storage requirements, with a small number of people who have had training in doing cryo fuel transfers, rather than having to build thousands of hydrogen storage tanks at gas stations and make something that's sufficiently idiot-proof that the morons who think it's a good idea to drive down the highway while talking on the phone and trimming their nose hairs don't explode themselves.
(that isn't the longest sentence I've ever written, but it's probably the longest I've written on slashdot...)
BTW, I'm not saying that a hydrogen economy is a good idea. I am saying that if we were to try it, locomotives would be a better beneficiary than automobiles.
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Re:I've got a secret for them (Score:5, Insightful)
American's don't 'love' their cars. The zoning, design and construction of their homes and cities make them reliant on cars.
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Soylent Green? (Score:5, Funny)
It works best with a Charlton Heston voice.
Other alternative propulsion methods... (Score:4, Funny)
Will air travel return to its 1950s elite status? (Score:4, Interesting)
I also wonder if we'll see a renaissance in train travel in the US as air travel gets more expensive.
Slower planes (Score:4, Informative)
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A WSJ blog... (Score:3, Insightful)
If 30% of the demand is met from biomass, that's *still* 30% less kerosene used and released into the atmosphere. What an idiot.
Rapid growth in the aviation sector? (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone must not be reading the news much lately. [google.com]
Seems like every time you turn on the news you can't help but see some airline going broke.
Personally I don't mind much. I'm hoping we see a resurgence of train travel. Easier, cheaper, and somehow a more romantic way to travel.
Take an airplane when you're in a hurry. Take a train when you want to have a nice easy experience traveling. Looking out the windows at the cows, sleeping with the click-clack of the rails passing under your car - that kind of a thing. I know that's not the current situation today but I'd like the future to look like that.
I'd happily tack on an extra day or two to my vacation if it meant I could enjoy dinner in a nice dining car. And not get frisked and scanned and have my orange juice confiscated by airport security when I go to board.
Re:Rapid growth in the aviation sector? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I don't know where you're getting your numbers. Perhaps for short distances and certain areas (ie, up and down the Eastern Seaboard), but for cross country travel, trains aren't price competitive at all. I travel to Seattle once or twice a year from Boston, and I can still get ~$300 round trip tickets. I also get there in a few hours. I've priced out train travel, and it comes out to almost $600, and 6 solid days of travel time for the round trip. Even more if I want a guaranteed electrical socket so I can plug anything in and do work/other stuff during the 3 day journey each way (you've got to buy a room for the long distance trains, the special seats with plugs only seem to be on the trains that run along the Eastern Seaboard, that's something like $300 per CONNECTION).
Now, I don't imagine that the cost of air travel is going to stay that low, so in the near future train travel may very well become the only reasonable option left to me, but even with the nightmare that is air travel today, it's still a better option than the train.
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Journalists and Bloggers Template! (Score:4, Funny)
Simply use the template below to create incisive, award winning posts.
---
Despite advances in _______________, by the year ______________, experts believe that we will still be worse of in terms of ________________, requiring drastic measures to reduce ______________.
It doesn't matter what you put in, it's all true!
You know even if it won't (Score:3, Insightful)
Simple solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Grey Goo? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but can they use grey goo?