Airbus A380 Completes Flight Powered By Cooking Oil (cnn.com) 242
The Airbus A380 has completed a trial flight powered on cooking oil. CNN reports: The test airplane completed a three-hour flight from Blagnac Airport in Toulouse -- Airbus' French headquarters -- on 25 March. It was powered by Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF -- predominantly made of used cooking oil and waste fats -- and operating on a single Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine. Airbus then followed up with a second A380 flight, using the same cooking oil fuel, on March 29, flying from Toulouse to Nice. The second flight was to monitor SAF use during take-off and landing.
The fuel used was supplied by TotalEnergies, a company based in France's Normandy region. It was made from Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA), which is free of both aromatics and sulfur. Airbus has been testing the use of SAF-powered flights for the last year, with an A350 being tested in March 2021, and an A319neo single-aisle aircraft flying on cooking oil in October. The company hopes to get its aircraft certified to fly on SAF by the end of the decade. Currently, Airbus aircraft can be powered by up to 50% SAF, blended with traditional kerosene. [...] Airbus plans to bring the world's first zero-emission aircraft to market by 2035.
The fuel used was supplied by TotalEnergies, a company based in France's Normandy region. It was made from Hydroprocessed Esters and Fatty Acids (HEFA), which is free of both aromatics and sulfur. Airbus has been testing the use of SAF-powered flights for the last year, with an A350 being tested in March 2021, and an A319neo single-aisle aircraft flying on cooking oil in October. The company hopes to get its aircraft certified to fly on SAF by the end of the decade. Currently, Airbus aircraft can be powered by up to 50% SAF, blended with traditional kerosene. [...] Airbus plans to bring the world's first zero-emission aircraft to market by 2035.
I'm Sally, Fry me! (Score:2)
That's all I've got on this one.
Unsustainable (Score:2)
This is PR bullshit, completely unscalable, and unsustainable.
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Yep it is greenwash.
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Its not even a good Greenwash.
We've been down this road before. When you turn food into fuel, you just trade out a carbon dioxide problem for a food security problem. And thats hardly a better situation.
Last time industry tried a mad rush on BIodiesel, it caused a corn shortage that had a serious impact on Mexico where corns a staple, and frankly threatened to do the same to the united states, who put corn syrup in frigging everything.
Truth is I dont think they are actualy attempting to do a greenwash. My s
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Its not even a good Greenwash.
We've been down this road before. When you turn food into fuel, you just trade out a carbon dioxide problem for a food security problem. And thats hardly a better situation.
Last time industry tried a mad rush on BIodiesel, it caused a corn shortage that had a serious impact on Mexico where corns a staple, and frankly threatened to do the same to the united states, who put corn syrup in frigging everything.
Truth is I dont think they are actualy attempting to do a greenwash. My suspicion is this is about European Carbon targets for aviation. Unlike the automobile industry , the aviation industry cant ignore it because American jets fly to europe.
Maybe its time the aviation industry got back into hardcore engineering again and figure out how to build a fully electric reliable Jumbo Jet. Considering a modern electric car engine can out torque the shit out of an equivelent gasoline engine, I have no doubt with a proper commitment to research they could make that shit viable for 747s.
Too bad they could only haul 4 passengers in a 747 sized plane. The rest of the payload weight capacity would be taken up by batteries.
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And if you had actually read the article, you would see this is _used_ cooking oil and _waste_ fat. That is not "food", that is "waste". Getting it refined to a state were it would be "food" again is not economically sound. So you make industrial products with it and an additional one being in the last stages of getting ready for market is aviation fuel. No "greenwashing" here.
True but... (Score:2)
While it's true that this is not as bad as food grown specifically for fuel (like corn-based methanol) it's still not scalable or carbon-free. In most places, used cooking fat is already recycled into biodiesel (or animal feed, or soap or other solvents). There just isn't enough french fry drippings in the world to supply even a single airline. Not to mention the fact that it still has carbon emissions. Whether the plants and animals you're burning were alive millions of years ago or yesterday, they sti
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Getting it refined to a state were it would be "food" again is not economically sound.
Ugghh. This is not exactly related, but you just reminded me of a story I saw about some street vendors in China saving money by doing exactly that.... with oil recovered from scum floating in the sewers. I mean, obviously you're talking about turning into food to standards that, for example, the FDA might approve and in the street vendor case it would just be "food". It still churns my stomach.
To get that a bit more on topic, I suppose scum from sewers and from sewerage treatment plants, etc. would be exac
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Nope, fuel is fuel, you burn it, CO2 comes out. Unless it's hydrogen which is too heavy to be economic for airplanes. The only good green air-fuels are ones made by taking CO2 from the air using renewable energy and making fuel with it, that way you're not adding to the problem.
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Perhaps you should read the summary ... at least.
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It's useful as a proof of concept.
Aviation fuel is held to a very high standard because the last thing you want is an engine acting funny because the fuel is contaminated or doesn't have the properties you expect. This demonstrates that biofuels can be made to the same standards as traditional aviation fuel and successfully used in commercial aircraft.
And that's important, because commercial aviation is one of the few sectors where there is no clear path for alternatives - batteries and hydrogen just aren't
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It's useful as a proof of concept.
Aviation fuel is held to a very high standard because the last thing you want is an engine acting funny because the fuel is contaminated or doesn't have the properties you expect. This demonstrates that biofuels can be made to the same standards as traditional aviation fuel and successfully used in commercial aircraft.
And that's important, because commercial aviation is one of the few sectors where there is no clear path for alternatives - batteries and hydrogen just aren't there and it's not clear they ever will be. For a carbon-neutral future we're going to need biofuel for aircraft.
=Smidge=
Hydrogen and batteries would be there, if we would finally bury that meme about the Hindenburg, and start building modern lighter-than-air craft.
It has long ago been proven that it was the highly-flammable "doping" on the fabric covering that ignited; the Hydrogen was actually not that big of a contributor to the fire.
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Hydrogen and batteries would be there, if we would finally bury that meme about the Hindenburg, and start building modern lighter-than-air craft.
Well, maybe. The big problem is that one of the main reasons to take planes is because they're fast. Consider this, the Hindenburg was about three times the speed of the Titanic. At the time of the Hindenburg, transatlantic passenger plane flights were not yet a thing and there were still few, if any passenger ships faster than the Titanic. So taking a dirigible across the Atlantic was, hands down, the fastest way for a typical passenger to make the trip. Regular passenger service by plane started only seve
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It's useful as a proof of concept.
Nope. The "poof of concept" was a while ago. This stuff is getting ready for regular production, these are final tests being run.
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This is PR bullshit, completely unscalable, and unsustainable.
Apparently, you underestimate the number of Freedom Fries that are consumed each year in the United States alone!
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You just need to save and donate your bacon grease
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Gimmick.
Nope. Some understanding of the subject matter required. No, airplanes do not run on Diesel.
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It's illegal because the government can't tax it if you take your used cooking oil and put it in your car. They can easily tax it when it's used as aviation fuel though, so there is no problem.
It might be possible to use it in vehicles eventually, when taxation moved from fuel to mileage or something because everyone has an EV.
A flying gimmick. (Score:3)
I wonder what the real cost of collecting and processing all this fat and cooking oil is, and if it couldn't have been used in a better way. It's just a flying gimmick now.
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If we need more oil we grow algae in raceway ponds using tech developed at Sandia NREL in the 1980s. After separating the lipids the remainder is valuable fertilizer, or it can be used as feedstock for the ABE process to produce Butanol, a clean-burning 1:1 replacement for gasoline. We really have the solutions right here on this planet already, and we could afford to implement them if we stopped subsidizing fossil fuels.
Re: A flying gimmick. (Score:2)
It wouldnâ(TM)t be carbon neutral if we brought it in from another planet.
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If discarded in nature, the oils (including cooking) will create, on running or standing water, a top layer that reduces oxygenation. This is bad for aquatic life, especially fish.
So, while there is cost in collecting and processing the used oil, there is also a huge cost in _not_ collecting it.
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This is bad for aquatic life, especially fish.
It's also bad for mosquito larvae, which have to come to the surface to breath, but can't breathe through the layer of oil. That's a bit of a mixed blessing/curse because mosquitoes are really annoying and can spread disease, but they're also a food source for various forms of aquatic life.
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I wonder what the real cost of collecting and processing all this fat and cooking oil is, and if it couldn't have been used in a better way. It's just a flying gimmick now.
As opposed to the cost of producing jet fuel which falls from the sky, right?
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McFuel? ;-)
I'm not clear on the relative carbon merits of SAF versus dinosaur oil, but re-using something has to be better than finding and refining more of it just to throw it away (or burn it) later. Whatever carbon we release making SAF can presumably be mitigated and/or handled, whereas we can't do that if we just dig up more and more oil.
What I would like to see is that for every flight you take, the percentage of SAF in the fuel for that aircraft is published by the airline. That way, I, as a consumer
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A lot of that is being done already in the restaurant industry, and has been for decades.
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I wonder what the real cost of collecting and processing all this fat and cooking oil is
Less than the cost of dumping it down the drain. In Europe we've been collecting cooking oil for decades. Some countries have dedicated pickups for it. Some countries allow you to put it out with the trash in a separate container. Where I live now I need to drop it off to a collection depot around the corner.
The cost is zero since it's incorporated with existing waste management.
The cost of reprocessing is also close to zero for refineries with existing hydroprocessing units, you just need the ability to ad
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This is actually more than just that. Before covid brought a lot of air travel down, the bottleneck in oil distillation was kerosene.
Specifically, when you distill oil, you get specific fractions in specific amounts you can't meaningfully adjust. Kerosene is going to be a bit over 4% of the total output. That means that even if other products are in oversupply, we have to refine enough oil to generate enough kerosene to meet demand. Surplus in other areas ranging from gasolene to bitumen has to be dumped on
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Yeah, I guess you have never hard of cracking then. The oil that comes out the ground has way to high a percentage of heavy oils and needs processing to produce products in the useful quantities. There are a range of different cracking processes which produce different amounts of different fuels.
So for example in Europe we do more hydrocracking because it produces more diesel where in north America they do more fluid catalytic cracking because it produces more petroleum spirit.
For almost the entire history
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Like I said, you can't MEANINGFULLY adjust the numbers for kerosene. You can some percentage points in one direction or another. This is why this is done to increase large fractions, like diesel or gasoline.
Problem is, that's not very useful for kerosene, because it's only ~4%. It's not efficient. That's why it's the primary limiting factor.
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This is actually more than just that. Before covid brought a lot of air travel down, the bottleneck in oil distillation was kerosene.
Specifically, when you distill oil, you get specific fractions in specific amounts you can't meaningfully adjust. Kerosene is going to be a bit over 4% of the total output. That means that even if other products are in oversupply, we have to refine enough oil to generate enough kerosene to meet demand. Surplus in other areas ranging from gasolene to bitumen has to be dumped on the cheap if there's not enough demand. It's why gasoline is used in car engines. It was a really shitty product that had very poor specs for most industrial uses, so there was a massive oversupply of it in the age of early automotive industry. So it became the cheap fuel to put into small specialized ICEs that power personal vehicles and that stuck.
So if we can just reduce the amount of kerosene needed, the bottleneck in the distillation of oil will go elsewhere and we'll need less oil in total. A small impact in the ~4% output can have outsized effect on the remaining ~96%.
So, convert the fuel injectors in the jet engines to use gasoline. Another benefit would be better fuel mileage, since BTU/kg of gasoline far outstrips kerosene.
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That would be the single dumbest thing to do. Gasoline is extremely poorly suited for jet aircraft, and jet aircraft have extremely tight tolerances for fuel. Even minor deviations cause severe problems.
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Yes, that outsized effect on the remaining ~96% would be to drive up the prices as there would be less of it. What a fantastic idea.
it is a fantastic idea if your goal is to disincentive the use. Your goals and their goals may not be the same...
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>> That's someone else's problem
Common theme with climate problems: make something unsustainable, and push it to other people.
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I was on a flight where they had MOS Burger (Japanese chain) for lunch. It wasn't bad actually, much better than the usual food.
I guess the issue is that they can only microwave stuff in-flight, so most McDonalds stuff is probably not suitable.
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The low humidity and low pressure on planes reduces the sense of smell/taste. Even if they made the burgers fresh on the plane, they would still taste bland compared to an identical burger served on the ground. That's why airplane food is usually specially made to be eaten in the air.
Airline food (Score:2)
When that plane crashes (Score:2)
it can serve fish & chips.
Chemtrails (Score:2)
Now they've become real. ;-)
Inaccurate summary (Score:2)
An A380 cannot sustain flight with a single engine. The actual test took place with 3 engines burning Jet-A1 fuel, and 1 engine burning the cooking oil-based fuel.
Source (fr) [midilibre.fr]
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An A380 cannot sustain flight with a single engine.
Can't it? The only sources I can find indicate it can't maintain full cruising speed at high altitude on one engine (not really a surprise). Certainly an A380 couldn't fly properly on one engine, certainly not take off or reach a reasonable altitude. Could fly as in could it hobble along at a low speed in the ground effect without touching down on one engine? Probably especially with a fuel dump.
But this 3 engines normal, one test is how it's commonly done
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Over *shakes hand*
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Having only 1 engine running will help slowing the descent rate (it's better than gliding with 0 engine) but it won't provide enough thrust to stay level or increase altitude, at least on this plane model.
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They also seem to have missed out just how green this fuel is. A quick bit of research shows some claims for up to 80% less "emissions", by which I presume they mean greenhouse gasses.
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What they actually mean is net CO2. This fuel is apparently ~20% Jet-A mixed into green diesel. https://totalenergies.com/medi... [totalenergies.com]
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There's a really really simple reason why they're running the test with only 1 engine running experimentally.
The thing can stay in the air with 2 engines, barely. So if you lose 1 engine under normal operations, it's not a problem. So if the french fry engine blows up, it can still get to safety. If it loses another engine for whatever reason, it can still make a controlled emergency landing.
If you put your experimental fuel in all 4 engines, you're going to have a really really big problem if it turns out
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it wasn't my point, but thanks for the details! The summary implies the plane was flying on a single engine, which makes no sense for a 4-engine aircraft.
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Fair! I tend to generally just skip over the summary and read the actual article, since the summaries here are.. Well. Garbage.
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Yes, so? It is about reliability and thrust generated. So you run one engine on it in a real test and if it fails you still have 3 left that work under regular conditions. Airplane engineers are _careful_. Well, if they do not work at Boeing, that is.
Single engine? (Score:2)
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Regular fuel. The standard for testing these things is to run one of the engines off the novel thing and the rest in normal mode. That way if you have failures, you don't have problems flying or landing the aircraft.
There are usually some additional fail safes added in the test engine, fuel system and fuel tank as well.
Greenwash (Score:2)
The problem is not the fuel per se , its what is emitted when the fuel burns. Cooking oil is no different to #FossilFuel based oils in this regard.
Up to 500 empty flights per day are flown in the UK so airlines can keep their slots at airports.
End practices like these.
First take the low hanging fruit instead of wasting time with Greenwash and unscalable climate band-aids.
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The idea is that cooking oil comes from plants we grow. Carbon in plants we grow comes from the atmosphere. So this is carbon neutral in that the plants pull carbon out, and this engine releases the carbon back.
The problem is that all the stages of processing aren't free. It's the same problem as with solar in low solar intensity regions like much of Central and entirety of Northern Europe. You'll never even break even on carbon spent building the photovoltaic panels if they're using in such low solar inten
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The idea is that cooking oil comes from plants we grow.
Really, the idea is that the cooking oil comes from something that would be thrown away as it is filtered, used cooking oil. A question is how much effort goes into collecting, filtering, etc., and the CO2 and other outputs associated with that compared to its value as a fuel. It's possible it's a net benefit compared to pouring it down the drain or might be a net cost in CO2 terms. You can do other things with used oil, though, which might be better. A complexity of, as an example, using it to enrich anima
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Depending on the processing, though, the most environmentally friendly thing to do might well be throw it away.
Throw it away? Environmentally friendly? Not very likely.
The process of converting vegetable oil or animal fat to a bio-fuel is a straightforward chemical process where you can recycle almost everything put into the process. It requires low amounts of energy (mostly for removing water-content from oils before processing).
In terms of aviation as a whole, I doubt there's an option for powering the whole industry via fresh cooking oil that is environmentally friendly, even compared to fossil fuel.
There's environment friendly and there's environment friendly. Burning bio-fuels is vastly more environment friendly than fossil fuels, the problem is having a large source of vegetable oil
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The process of converting vegetable oil or animal fat to a bio-fuel is a straightforward chemical process where you can recycle almost everything put into the process. It requires low amounts of energy (mostly for removing water-content from oils before processing).
The issue may not be so much the processing, but the collection. Unless there is some low energy way to collect sufficient oil to process, then it may not be CO2 neutral, or at least a CO2 way (e.g., collecting it via electric vehicles powered by wind or solar).
Burning bio-fuels is vastly more environment friendly than fossil fuels
If it takes more energy to collect and process then unless that energy is being sourced from low carbon means then it might not be. If it is being sourced directly from crops then the inputs to those (e.g., fertilisers) and their impacts need to be a
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Yes, the "payback" time is great, because you enjoy:
1. Subsidies in China.
2. Subsidies in EU.
3. Domestic subsidies.
When it comes to actual decarbonisation, subsidies are actually counter-productive, because they enable long production chains and extreme overproduction in China. Which is why PV prices got so low recently. The actual manufacturing methods + hauling them around the globe incur so much carbon debt however, that it's not feasible to recover it in low solar intensity regions.
It's worth rememberin
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You'll never even break even on carbon spent building the photovoltaic panels if they're using in such low solar intensity areas.
If solar panels are deployed in low solar intensity areas then their lifespan is correspondingly longer.
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That's not even remotely how photovoltaics work.
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> The problem is not the fuel per se , its what is emitted when the fuel burns. Cooking oil is no different to #FossilFuel based oils in this regard.
There seems to be some misconception here, I blame the click-bait title.
They aren't running the engine on cooking-oil, the oil is processed into a bio fuel. Compared to ordinary jet fuel or diesel it burns incredibly clean.
On the other hand, producing vast amounts of these types of bio-fuels tend to affect food production though since we don't have enough la
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The problem is not the fuel per se , its what is emitted when the fuel burns. Cooking oil is no different to #FossilFuel based oils in this regard.
Actually, it is, and for two reasons. One, processing energy aside, it's carbon neutral. The carbon in those fats came from plants or animals. Two, bio-based diesels actually do burn cleaner. They even have slightly more energy per gallon, although the difference is something like 2-5% so it's quite small, but that does turn into a direct reduction in emissions.
First take the low hanging fruit instead of wasting time with Greenwash and unscalable climate band-aids.
Even if we stopped those empty flights, it would be a temporary improvement, because those empty flights represent flights that would have been fill
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No it's not greenwashing. It's about exploring future potential avenues. The issue at hand is CO2, not the other byproducts of combustion. Carbon-neutral fuel burning would be a net benefit. That's the whole point of the exercise. While NOx and particulates are human health concerns, they are possible to deal with--modern jet engines are way cleaner in this regard. The big big issue facing airlines absolutely is carbon emissions. Full stop. So while the rest of what you said is true about flying empty,
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You're right. Complete greenwashing. We should just pour cooking oil down the drains like God intended! /s
Isn't this just another incarnation of Diesel? (Score:2)
And what are the exhaust fumes like compared to traditional jet fuel? My understanding is that jet fuel burns way cleaner because it's made for purpose, whereas spent cooking oil is already a waste product, and its composition may actually produce more harmful substances when burnt.
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Isn't this just another incarnation of Diesel?
Yes, it's already been well proven (here's a Mythbusters clip [youtube.com] showing an example) that you can pour filtered cooking oil straight into your Diesel automobile tank and drive it down the highway. Since A1 Jetfuel and Diesel are close cousins [generalaviationnews.com], it doesn't surprise me in the least that a "Bio-A1" is also feasible.
My understanding is that jet fuel burns way cleaner because it's made for purpose.
I expect that they're not pouring the oil straight-up into the engine, bu
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They're presumably just cracking it, it's green diesel as opposed to biodiesel. The exact details differ but it goes into a fractional distillation column, just the same way you would process petroleum. This takes more energy than making biodiesel but it produces a far superior product that can be used without modification in existing diesel engines. The big challenge has been figuring out what additives to use to prevent it from gelling at low temperatures, because several companies have successfully been
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You don't really need to crack it, there are low energy transesterification processes (FAME) that works just fine that are very easy to scale.
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Transesterification produces a fuel with a higher gel point than distillation. So while it's conceivable that you're correct, there are good reasons to suspect otherwise.
I went hunting on their site and so far haven't found the answer, but I did find an interesting tidbit in a press release on this subject [totalenergies.com] from March 3:
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Transesterification produces a fuel with a higher gel point than distillation.
There's additives for that, just like you have additives for diesel/jet-fuel to lower the gel point:
Source: https://www.etipbioenergy.eu/i... [etipbioenergy.eu]
This in itself doesn't answer the question, but it does show that they aren't making 100% biofuel. What percentage blend? Don't know that either. But they're claiming an 80% reduction in net CO2, so presumably it's 20% or less.
Well, that's the rub isn't it. From what I understand, the practicality
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Transesterification produces a fuel with a higher gel point than distillation.
There's additives for that, just like you have additives for diesel/jet-fuel to lower the gel point:
Yes, there are additives. But you have to use more of them for transesterified biodiesel than for green diesel. Is that sustainable? I don't know. I haven't even looked up what those additives are. Suppose I could look up some MSDSes.
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I'm sure mod points await for anyone who can find any further details on how the veg oil gets processed into Bio-A1.
Doubtful...
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but rather it goes through a "trade secret" refining process first.
Probably a "fancy name" refining process. A long time ago I supported a refinery which mixed a significant percentage of their hydrocracker feed with bio-something (it varied from tallow to palm oil to reclaimed cooking oil, etc) what came out of the kero side draw went straight to the merox and then in to the A1 tank. It effectively was no different from jet fuel (and certified as such without issue). But this was a refinery initiative, not an airline initiative so the goal was to make a fuel indistinguish
Key words (Score:2)
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And what are the exhaust fumes like compared to traditional jet fuel? My understanding is that jet fuel burns way cleaner
LOL. I'm glad the industry has given you that impression. In reality jet fuel is a great place to put waste products used from cleaning up other fuels. The key requirement is purely to reduce the smell of it. A typical refinery will use an amine unit to strip sulfur out of diesel to meet the very strict sulfur requirements in most countries, and then dump a large part of that sulfur into the jet fuel which allows a sulfur content 3-4 orders of magnitude worse (still measured in percent rather than ppm for o
That's not sustainable ... (Score:2)
... no matter that the name has "sustainable" in it. I see no effing way that this makes sense ecologically. Maybe in rare fringe-cases where flying is a specialty, but certainly not in todays situation that still has a carbon subsidy rather than a much needed carbon tax.
This is nothing other than Type A aviation industry greenwashing b*llsh*t.
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And if you had actually read or understood the article, you would have seen that this fuel is made from _waste_. It is not about replacing all jet-fuel with it, it is about getting rid of the mountain of used cooking oil and waste fats that otherwise would have to go into waste incineration or the like where they provide very little value.
Not greenwashing, however much you apparently desire to jump to conclusions.
Eat fries ... (Score:2)
Are there better uses for waste hydrocarbons? (Score:2)
I have always had trouble with just burning oil, when it is a fantastic chemical raw material. One example of a good use of waste oil is to use to it make biodegradable plastics, pharmaceuticals, and so on. The raw material is presumably of known chemical composition, compared to whatever gunk you pump out of the ground. Though I am not a professional chemist, I imagine it helps a lot if you know what your raw materials are made of.
I have also heard of ways of recycling waste cooking oil, to remove the burn
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I have also heard of ways of recycling waste cooking oil, to remove the burnt bits and degraded oil, and get back usable cooking oil. In recycling terms, this is very likely the most energy efficient use of waste oil.
Sure, you just pick it up out of the gutter and strain it through a coffee filter like they do in China.
Seriously though, oils go off, you just can't feasibly do this given the time products spend in transit, on shelves, etc.
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If you filter out the organic bits and water out of it, the oil will stay generally ok for a very long time. This can be as simple as a filter and heating the oil to at least 220F to drive off the water.
Source: decades of experience in a chemical process that relied upon a high-surface-tension oil/water interface to maintain sphericity.
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OK for what? Your chemical process? OK. Eating? Nope.
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There are some industrial uses, but AFAIK, there is a ton more produced than used. So this stuff usually just is burned along with trash, which is about the worst thing to do as it provides very little value. Basically you get some heating out of it and that is it.
Don't be so quick to poo-poo it (Score:2)
This specific article might be just a fluff piece, but don't be so fast to dismiss it. I was part of the catalyst manufacturing scale-up for a process that makes this "green jet fuel" almost 15 years ago, and from what I understand new units are still being licensed and built. The technology is actually fairly mature and the market for SAF is growing. If both the financial and carbon economics work out, then any use of vegetable oil to replace petroleum derived fuels is great.
One of the challenges presented
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Turbines run on just about anything that burns. You can even run them on coal dust - try that with a Diesel engine.
Re: Smells like french Fries (Score:2)
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Rudolf Diesel's second prototype ran on coal dust. With the right injection system, diesel engines too can run on most powdered, liquid and gaseous fuels.
There's been research into that for a while. One challenge is keeping the dust out of the oil; but experimental diesels have run on coal dust in the 80's.
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Except the nuclear reactor has never been used to power an aircraft. Even your own link says as such.
Maybe you can get away with it with an unmanned drone if you don't much care about irradiating the runway and anything on board?
=Smidge=
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Except the nuclear reactor has never been used to power an aircraft. Even your own link says as such.
Maybe you can get away with it with an unmanned drone if you don't much care about irradiating the runway and anything on board? =Smidge=
Yea, they decided it used to many sources and killed the a/c part of the program. Had it continued e might have gotten a "In flight on nuclear power" message. The engine development continued and tested on the ground. [af.mil]. That era saw a lot of ideas for nuclear power, including small portable ones for powering remote bases, such as the infamous SL-1. [wikipedia.org].
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https://www.lowtechmagazine.co... [lowtechmagazine.com]
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I ran my 1983 240D on that stuff for years. Diesels love that cooking oil.
Bring back flying boats powered by the Napier Nomad?
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Here where I live, doing this conversion was popular for some time and fast food joints loved giving the used oil away, because it solved the problem of paying someone to take it away.
Naturally, politicians outlawed this practice, so the cooking oil conversion cars died off. Typical politicians. And we're not even a state that produces oil...
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Here where I live, doing this conversion was popular for some time and fast food joints loved giving the used oil away, because it solved the problem of paying someone to take it away.
Naturally, politicians outlawed this practice, so the cooking oil conversion cars died off. Typical politicians. And we're not even a state that produces oil...
Just like wood gas. Even though there are vanishingly-few Wood Gas-powered vehicles in actual service in the U.S., Those vehicles are nonetheless illegal in some states, based on a ridiculous argument that they use the roads without subsidizing them with gasoline tax revenues.