First Flight of Jet Powered By Algae-Fuel

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."

Comments

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

[Jonah Bomber]

Bio-fuel from algae is going to be an interesting field. It's easy to grow, difficult to harvest, and takes a lot of it to make into fuel. But it doesn't take up valuable cropland like corn does and really can be grown anywhere you're willing to build tanks. Solix (http://www.solixbiofuels.com/) is one such company working on the issue who see the potential of building tanks by power plants and then using the CO2 emissions to feed the algae.

We've been over this before

[Ralph Spoilsport]

And I posted to it then. It must have been a few years back. I did a calculation on how much energy one gets out of algae per acre, and to JUST FEED the traffic from EWR/JFK you would need to convert most of northern NJ into one giant goo pile. Not that Northern NJ isn't already one giant goo pile, but right now it's a giant goo pile full of houses and people and malls and highways and Dunkin Donut shops, all of it located on some of the nations most expensive real estate.

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

[MozeeToby]

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.

Re:We've been over this before

[colin_young]

To quote from Ask The Pilot:

"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?

Re:We've been over this before

[init100]

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

[WebCowboy]

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.

Not that exciting?

[henrygb]

It is well known that biofuels can (at a cost) be refined to meet most specifications. Providing there is some mineral fuel in the blend to prevent microbial contamination and growth, using this should cause no problems apart from cost. But since jet kerosene is generally untaxed, it is harder to subsidise biofuel replacements than it is for road fuels.

Re:Great, but ...

[sbeckstead]

They grow it in huge tanks that take up very little space compared to the mass they produce. It's actually one of the most viable sources of biomass that they have come up with yet, and the waste after extracting the oils can be used as fertilizer. So Algae is a win win bio fuel.

Re:Additionality... or just a renewable resource?

[MadCow42]

>> 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 you compare that to farmland, it's not the same effect. You start with bare land, grow crops, then burn the results - 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).

I agree that more advanced crops that are easier to convert to fuel are the answer, especially if we're not displacing existing carbon sinks to grow these. The fact that most ethanol comes from low-yield sources like corn today, competing with food crops, is worrying.

MC

Re:Great, but ...

[JustinOpinion]

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) than the takeoff weight. This is why planes making emergency landings sometimes need to dump fuel.

Re:Gross is good

[Deadstick]

even human sewerage

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 -- your grandfather's coal oil.

rj

Re:Great, but ...

[NeutronCowboy]

Look up Solix for a company that is investigating this. Algae are really the only long-term viable source of bio-diesel.

Re:It will be interesting to see how this plays ou

[Jonah Bomber]

Actually, I started out at -1. My karma was Terrible. This is apparently what happens if you have a couple of +5 Funny comments. Now, thanks to this Informative post, my karma went up to Bad.

So there are no morons who modded me down, only a /. karma system that has yet to make sense to me. I just have those moderators who actually read -1 comments to thank.

Re:Gross is good

[rgviza]

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

Re:It will be interesting to see how this plays ou

[Whorhay]

What you say isn't entirely true from what I have read.

The Algae is usually seperated from the water through filtration or skimming of some sort and then pressed to extract the oil. The waste product can then be dried out and broken up to be used as food stuff for the algae that you still have growing. So while the algae isn't generating as much waste as the other options it's not 100% production either.

The big difficulties I seem to remember were in getting useful amounts of oil out of the strains of algae they could easily grow. While there are millions of different strains of algae there are only maybe a couple hundred that can produce enough oil to be worthwhile. They need to find a hardy strain of algae that won't easily be displaced by an invading strain that doesn't produce enough fuel. And at the same time that won't wipe out all other algae strains in the area.

Re:Gross is good

[c6gunner]

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.