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Fat Replaces Oil In F-16s
It looks like the military has finally figured out a way to combine Americans' love of french fries with their love of blowing stuff up. The Air Force says all of its 40-plus aircraft models will be able to burn biofuels by 2013, three years ahead of schedule. From the article: "The Army wants 25 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2025. The Navy and Marines aim to shift half their energy use from oil, gas and coal by 2020. 'Reliance on fossil fuels is simply too much of a vulnerability for a military organization to have,' U.S. Navy Secretary Raymond Mabus said in an interview. 'We’ve been certifying aircraft on biofuels. We’re doing solar and wind, geothermal, hydrothermal, wave, things like that on our bases.'”
Everyone should've switched to NTFS by now...
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
I don't think the 386 based autopilot can run a os that can uses NTFS
> The Navy and Marines aim to shift half their energy use from oil, gas and coal by 2020.
Didn't release you could run a F-16 on coal
If military vehicles remain dependent on the same traditional fuel, it will ultimately be the collapse of the US.
I'd never really thought of this, but it makes good sense both militarily and environmentally. Economically, well, it's clear the economic sustainability of the military has never really been important.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
All F-16's use F-100 (or F-110) engines, and without exception they all run on JP-8 fuel. Whatever the Air Force did, you can bet that they didn't change much. The concept that these engines are somehow eco-friendly is absurd, no matter what contributed the hydrocarbons that they are burning. At full afterburner, these engines can burn more than 20,000 pounds of fuel per minute .
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
You don't want to be the guy in the back shoveling the coal while the plane does a barrel roll.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
From TFA:
The U.S. Air Force is set to certify all of its 40-plus aircraft models to burn fuels derived from waste oils and plants by 2013
The armed forces say they’ve been successful testing fuels produced from sources as diverse as animal fat, frying oils and camelina, an oil-bearing plant that’s relatively drought- and freeze-resistant.
“We can use an almost unlimited number of feedstocks to produce these fuels,” said Braun. “From a performance stand- point you can’t tell the difference whether you’re burning a camelina blend, a tallow blend, or another fuel that’s made up of a bunch of waste greases -- fry grease or seasoning grease.”
And from TFW
Fats may be either solid or liquid at room temperature, depending on their structure and composition. Although the words "oils", "fats", and "lipids" are all used to refer to fats, "oils" is usually used to refer to fats that are liquids at normal room temperature, while "fats" is usually used to refer to fats that are solids at normal room temperature. "Lipids" is used to refer to both liquid and solid fats, along with other related substances, usually in a medical or biochemical context. The word "oil" is also used for any substance that does not mix with water and has a greasy feel, such as petroleum (or crude oil), heating oil, and essential oils, regardless of its chemical structure.
The confusing point is that "oil" is a very generic term. They're switching from using fuel derived from petroleum (which is an "oil" but definitely not fat) to fuel derived from various renewable sources (many of which are oils and most of which are fats).
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
I wish they had told me about this!
They could have switched all the planes to natural gas!
I have a great chili recipe to donate to the cause of America's defense.
Because, I sir, am a Patriot!
Biodiesel is an ester. Ethanol is an alcohol. Neither of them are oil. And they clearly mean "petroleum oil" when they say "oil."
I love the GE coal ad from a few years back with the attractive models mining coal, and the song "16 tons", which is all about how exploitive and evil coal-mining companies are, playing in the background. here it is on YouTube. Who exactly they're targeting with that commercial, or what they were thinking, I have no idea.
Biofuels will supplement, but never replace oil for the military. Frankly, I doubt there's enough of it to be significant. Maybe if the military used ALL the biofuel produced in the continental USA, it could continue to operate... in the continental USA.
That all being said, I don't have any figures on how much fuel the USA's military uses per day. The entire USA uses about 7 to 8 million barrels of oil a day, depending on what sort of day we're having. Anyone know how much of that is the military's share?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
DoD embarked on a major program about ten years ago to get all DoD equipment running on one fuel: JP-8 with a corrosion inhibitor. This will work in jet engines, diesels, and heaters. DoD has been using some biodiesel, and it has to meet the specs for JP-8. That's what this is about.
DoD has been almost all diesel for years. Gasoline tankers have no place on today's battlefields, where there's no secure rear area.
There were theories that oil was made via abiogenic processes but it fell out of favor by the scientific community.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Their planes ran on butanol 75 years ago, a byproduct of ABE production that yielded acetone for cordite manufacture. It was the worlds second largest biotech industry to ethanol for almost a century, but no one seems to notice how it's gone away. I don't want to blame the petrochemical craze started in the 1960s for deliberately outshining renewable and sustainable alternative fuel sources, but a ton of greased and greedy sons of bitches making decisions with their wallets later and I'd be remiss not to mention it.
The headline should have been "biofuels replace petroleum..."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
That _was_ one of the issues that Nazi Germany's economy/industry eventually couldn't deal with.
This was an also an issue in the Pacific - Japan doesn't have a native supply of petroleum either. For instance, a mid-1941 US embargo was a key event in the pre-Pearl Harbor timeline.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.