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The Development of Ecologically Sound Jet Fuel
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at Princeton University are currently working on two projects to reduce jet travel's role in global warming. The first one, a major project funded by the U.S. Air Force with $7.5 million, is focused on developing computational models that accurately simulate the burning of jet fuel, a complex process not well understood today. The second one, funded by NetJets, a company providing business jets, will help to develop new jet fuels with near-zero net greenhouse gas emissions."
Unless this fuel meets the exact spec of existing jet fuel.
Each aircraft type will have to be tested and certificated for use with this fuel.
This is very, very costly and time consuming.
But of course: it's salami.
Or in the words of Mythbuster's Jamie: "This may look like a salami, it may smell like a salami, it may even taste like a salami, but it's rocket fuel."
But haven't I read a number of stories just this week that Ocean Shipping and Cement Production are bigger CO2 emitters than airlines?
It's so obvious, I don't know why they haven't done this earlier. They just need to make a HYBRID plane model! Just load it up with 5000 lbs of batteries. Silly scientists...
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How is better public transportation going to decrease the carbon emissions when I fly from Atlanta to London in a month? The article is about improving the efficiency of Jet transportation, not cars. Those emissions effect the atmosphere much differently because they're injected at a much higher atmosphere.
-Bucky
Near-zero net emissions. The fuel itself releases CO2 when burned, while the plants from which the fuel is derived pull it right back out of the air for the next batch of fuel.
An "especially attractive feature" of processing coal and biomass together to make synfuels is that it requires only half the amount of biomaterial as pure biofuel production, while still making fuels with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions, Williams said.
If they're using 50% coal and 50% biomass won't the result will still be a hydrocarbon? In which case their actual CO2 emissions will be pretty much as normal, with around 50% of those emissions theoretically offset in the process of growing the biomass in the first place.
It's certainly not going to be anywhere near zero emissions unless they're proposing some way to filter the CO2 out of the jet exhaust.
Even a 50% reduction in net warming using this method seems unfeasible, because emitting greenhouse gases up in the stratosphere causes more net warming than emitting them on the ground, i forget the exact factor, I thinks it's estimated to be around 50% more. And that's still ignoring the fact that putting human beings and industry into competition for limited arable land resources is a horrible idea in the first place.
Maybe this is serious research and I'm just missing some important point, but it sounds horribly like airline industry FUD to me...
You're wrong. According to wikipedia contrails have a positive effect. Anyways, I'm not saying that the carbon emissions are good so that is irrelevant. If all they do is switch fuels, but the engines operate under the same principles as they do now, then I imagine contrails will continue to exist as engines will continue to put out water vapor.
I don't think anybody has nearly as clear a picture of how our planet's weather as we would like. It sure would be nice. I could plan my days at the beach better and we could quit guessing about what is best for the environment and maybe get a little more consensus and action, though I doubt too much more. So are contrails in and of themselves good or bad? I don't think anyone can say.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Actually, the difference between low temperatures and high temperatures increased by two degrees. Whether the net result would be warming or cooling, we don't know for sure, because as you say it's too small a sample size.
You should read about global dimming.
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For flights that don't cross the oceans it seems to me that Maglev trains is the way to go. They can actually reach higher speeds than a commercial airliner, and if you want to be really sci-fi you could operate them inside an evacuated tube, effectively eliminating air-resistance, and thus allowing velocities far above the speed of sound. Power would of course come from nuclear reactors, because as we all know, nuclear reactors cure cancer... ( no, really ).
Seems likely to me this suffers from several serious problems:
(1) I can't easily believe it's more efficient. Granted, you use a fair amount of energy raising a jetliner to 40,000 feet, but it can't be that much, compared to what you need to use to keep it levitated and push air out of the way at 600 knots for hours and hours -- and a maglev train needs to do that, too. Indeed, air resistance is surely much higher on the maglev train, which has to operate near sea level instead of at the significantly lower air pressures in the stratosphere.
(2) You've got an incredible infrastructure problem. Essentially, you've got to build the entire Interstate highway system over again -- only this time it can't be just smooth concrete, it's got to be ultrasmooth, ultrastraight rails kept in alignment to the nearest micrometer along thousands of miles, in rain or shine, snow or mud or hurricane or flood, and with marvelous superconducting magnet windings all along them that have to be kept in absolutely perfect working order all the time, because you can't afford one small booboo in your levitation when you're flying along near the speed of sound 1.5 inches off the ground. I can't even imagine how you're going to switch maglev trains from one track to another while they're blistering along at 600 MPH. Those are going to be some very, very expensive switches.
Thing is, with airplanes you only need to build airports, and that's really only just laying down a big long strip of concrete and installing radar. You don't need to build much stuff between destination cities. You also don't need to lay down power along the entire route of every route they fly, because the motor goes along with the carriage.
(3) You've got an amazing safety issue. In the stratosphere there's not much you can run into at jet speeds, fortunately. But on the ground? Say a 50 pound rock falls off a rock face and dings the marvelous superconducting track, so that when the maglev train comes along 20 minutes later it hits a "dry spot" and the carriage dips down 3 inches and hits the ground at 600 knots. BOOM. You'd have to identify the passengers by DNA analysis of tiny bone fragments.
(4) Noise? I live next to a major rail line, and those things are noisy enough at 60-80 MPH. If they came by at 600, it wouldn't be possible to live within half a mile of the track. How does that square with the fact that most of the travel would be to and through major urban areas? Thing about airplanes is, except for within a few miles of the airport, you can't hear them because they fly two miles or more above us.
Jet turbine power plants have have 2 SIGNIFICANT advantages:
(1)They can operate with just about any type of chemically and thermally stable combustible fluid with a sufficient energy density having consistent and reliable combustion properties.
and
(2) They are not hampered by the well-known significant inefficiencies introduced by exhaust emissions systems such as mufflers, catalytic converters, EGR systems, etc..
NOTE: Modern Jet fuels are hydrocarbon BLENDS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
These blends are created as cheaply as possible to meet specific fuel properties and standards, including their energy content, and intended use: http://www.csgnetwork.com/jetfuel.html
There have been many well-intentioned pushes for "replacement" Jet fuels, including a "safer" version which was intended to reduce fire balls when Jets crashed, but it was a flop as it introduced safety concerns as the 'safety' additive increased the possibility of a flame-out (it basically made the flash point of the fuel higher and reduced the flammability of jet fuel mist) and it cost way too much for little if any margin of safety it would have introduced. (Most people in jet crashes do not die from a fireball of jet fuel, but from actually hitting the mountain, crashing into the ground/ocean, or basically some form of 'Aortic Dissection' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aortic_dissection )
I say that this is really a SPIN and a PR campaign.
Everyone looks good waving the environmental flag, but when compared to boats, trains, and trucking, jets are NEVER environmentally friendly. (Jets have to fight gravity continuously when moving goods and people = INEFFICIENT)
TFA ( http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S18/96/92S56/index.xml ) is a Press Release about research into processing "Biomass" into Jet fuel And, oh ya BYW, COAL!! THAT'S RIGHT, COAL!
We are talking about fuel from "other than" OIL Sources = SYNTHETIC FUEL (AKA SynFuel), specifically SYNTHETIC "JET" FUEL. http://www.syntroleum.com/pr_individualpressrelease.aspx?NewsID=907157
This really has EVERYTHING to do with the price of oil being SKY HIGH (pun intended): http://www.peak-oil-news.info/new-synthetic-jet-fuel/
Everyone knows that Aviation drinks fuel of any kind faster than other transportation types (when you realize the efficiency ratio of Distance traveled with quantity of cargo compared to actual fuel used per unit cargo (person, metric ton, etc..) for that given distance)
We are talking about stirring up money to get more research into the conversion of Coal into Synthetic Jet fuel (and other fuels) and we'll get to work with biomass too.
Oil is so expensive these days it is becoming just as cheap to chemically engineer/create (from scratch!) synthetic Jet Fuels from Coal. (which the US still has hundreds of years worth)
Why expensively pump it out of the deep ocean, or the middle east, and then transport around the planet (BYW, they use ships for this because of their efficiency, not jet aircraft) when you can just dig up some local Coal or Bitumen Tar Sand deposit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_sands and make your own synthetic fuel.
(Now observe the pollutants released and the energy required during the "upgrading" of Coal/Bitumen into the new Synthetic Jet Fuel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upgrader )
FYI: The Germans made Synthetic Jet Fuel during WWII because they had Coal but not so much oil...
The other point is that airplane travel is usually selected for huge travel distances, of the sort that you would avoid using your car. Quoting passenger miles per gallon or whatever (A380 is about 2.9 litres/100 passenger kilometres) and making comparisons to automobile fuel consumption (10-20 litres/100 kilometres) is a nonsense - you don't jump in your car and fly to the other side of the world quite like you do in a plane. It is quite possible to exceed your annual auto mileage with one international plane trip.