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Honeywell & Airbus To Turn Algae Into Jet Fuel
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.
It seems the interest for the companies involved is not reducing their carbon footprint, but reducing their fuel cost. If they can make their own biodiesel, they wont be buying as much oil @ $100+ per barrel. Its a nice point you make, but I think this really comes down to crude oil being, and continuing to be, crazy-expensive.
Power corrupts. Absolute power...is even more fun.
Private jet sales are going through the roof. CEOs and other VIPs have their own jets or will have them.
Getting frisked, waiting in lines, and getting piddly pretzels is for us members of the great unwashed.
This graph is a good one but only goes up to 2004. Going to the data source and creating your own table shows that you're correct (RPM=revenue passenger mile=one paying passenger flying one mile). However, the graph does look bumpy lately, and I'm not sure how valuable extrapolation really is here.
E pluribus unum
If you can't afford a private jet there's Day Jet and Net Jet. They're like buying a time share in a private jet. Either way, you don't deal with the crowds and hassles of commercial airports.
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
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Actually, density is more of a problem than you would think - most cargo aircraft bulk out before they reach their MTOW (Maximum Takeoff Weight), and the same for passenger aircraft (as baggage is relatively bulky but light compared to cargo).
Cargo is also much more lucrative than passengers (check out Singapore Airlines operating late night passenger flights routinely with a dozen or so passengers on - they make the money running cargo in the aircraft belly).
So you cannot simply add tanks to the cargo compartments as that is lost revenue. There is little place else you can add tankage to, especially when you take into account weight and balance issues (the aircraft has to be balanced within certain parameters before it can safely take off).
A lower weight fuel also presents other problems, as most modern passenger aircraft use trim tanks in the tail, where quantities of fuel are pumped to during flight in order to balance the aircraft during cruise. Lower the weight of fuel much and you lose that ability, which means costly amendments to aircraft.
Yes, I am closely linked to the aviation business...
I recently spent a day with someone at the supplier of 90+% of the world's hydrogen gas, and as you say, they produce it from methane. He pointed out that the amount of CO2 released while producing the hydrogen equivalent of a gallon of gasoline for automobile use is about twice the CO2 released from directly burning the gasoline. He said that the switch to an environmentally friendly production method would be monumental but likely to occur in the next few decades, but that the even bigger problem in his opinion was developing a distribution network for this hydrogen.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I remember reading recently that airlines have actually slowed their flights down. Slowing down apparently means being a few minutes later, but a noticeable savings in fuel (or so the article said)
Honeywell, JetBlue Airways, International Aero Engines, and Airbus. None of them is an oil company or in the energy business. The single most important problem (imho) with green fuel is that the right people are not working on it. It's a special, expensive, small-volume product; producers are startups or general chemical companies. They are not oil companies, which own the oil infrastructure and have expertise in energy and transport fuels, not speciality products.
When the renewable fuel is a speciality chemical, there's little or no focus on the actual scale-up. They may sell 0.01% of the market volume with a high price; this is just greenwashing, novelty, or "alternative energy" (I really hate that expression). As I understand, Honeywell is a speciality chemicals company. Such companies lack the expertise in oil refinery operations and energy infrastructure.
Commercial-scale fuel production will probably start with triterpene-producing algae, which have a high hydrocarbon yield. An oil refinery operation, hydrocracking, is used to convert triterpene into fuel. Expertise is also needed to process the massive volumes of organic waste; will they go to replace coal or to gasification and then Fischer-Tropsch diesel synthesis? All this should be done in an oil-company scale, not on the backyard scale or even on the plastics/specialities scale.