Today, we’ve been reading an interesting article about biofuels and whether they’re really the environmental panacea airlines (and jetsetters) hope.
Biofuels for airlines? Don’t get too excited just yet. Everyone wants to believe aviation could one day be guilt-free, but it’s still a way off according to one man, says Wired. Jeff Gazzard of the Aviation Environment Federation, who’s written a report about cruising at altitude on biofuel, says for now, it’s still in the realm of dreams. Says Wired, he’s:
…underwhelmed by the high-profile alt-fuel tests we’ve seen to far. Like others, he dismisses as a publicity stunt Virgin’s much-ballyhooed test flight of a Boeing 747 that flew from London to Amsterdam with one of its four fuel tanks carrying a 20 percent mix of biofuel. The plane, which used a mixture of coconut and babassu oils, would have needed some 3 million coconuts had it made the flight entirely on biofuel, he says.
More worrying are the safety issues that come from pumping biofuels (or alternatives) through an infrastructure that was “designed for petroleum … unlike petroleum, untreated biofuels can freeze at low temperatures and damage seals in aircraft fuel systems.” The International Air Transport Association has argued that the second generation of biofuels almost identically replicate jet fuel and have eliminated many of the contamination issues previously associated with the replacement fuel.
Elsewhere in environmental news:
Can Nitrogen Be Used to Combat Climate Change? Findings from one of the National Science Foundation’s longest-running studies show that adding nitrogen to soil prompts northern hardwood forests to absorb more heat-trapping carbon dioxide. — Scientific American
Taxpayers still paying for Garnaut Report. Taxpayers have been forced to pay almost $65,000 to allow the Department of Climate Change to buy copies of the Garnaut report, which was completed withmore than $2.3 million of public money. — Christian Kerr, The Australian
Hobbits really did exist, says study. An analysis of an 18,000-year-old fossil, described as the remains of a diminutive humanlike creature, proves that genuine cave-dwelling “hobbits” once flourished in southeast Asia, according to a US anthropologist who conducted X-ray studies of a skull. — The Guardian
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A commentary on Wired’s article on Jet Biofuels can be found in Crikey blog Plane Talking at http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2009/01/09/how-well-rooted-are-jet-biofuels/
The role of innovative technology in curbing the release of fossil-based-carbon, whether through biofuels or the enhanced capture of solar or geothermal energy is obviously very important. So is informed debate.
Mixing transesterified vegetable oil into jet fuel is a pretty silly concept, but the IATI is entirely right — standard aviation fuel consists mostly of short-chain alkanes and Fischer-Tropf synthesized fuel has similar makeup; if anything the lighter fractions of F-T synthesis are purer and cleaner and safer for this purpose than distilled and filtered petroleum.
Synthetic oils have been proven as fuels for many decades. Currently they are mostly derived from fossil gas (in Malaysia) or fossil coal (in South Africa), but there are firms in Europe (http://www.choren.com/en) and America working on gasification and synthesis of plants that haven’t already been dead for millions of years. It isn’t cheap, but if oil prices remain over $US50/barrel (as eventually they must), economies of scale will make it cost-competitive with petroleum-derived kerosene as production ramps up.
There are two fundamental misunderstandings of “peak oil”. One is that it’s a geologically-determined thing; that there is some predestined limit on the total “economically recoverable” supply of petroleum. The other is that when the supply of oil is constrained, nothing will be available to take its place and we will stop using energy.
Both are false. King Hubbert’s analysis of oil (and coal) production peaks were of individual wells and the gross supply from individual countries in the presence of competition from larger resources elsewhere. US oil production peaked when he predicted it would, because cheaper imports were available from elsewhere.
The global production peaks of fossil oil, gas and coal cannot be determined by cheap imports. It will be determined by the same economics, but in competition with non-fossil energy supplies, becoming ever more fungible as technology is developed to convert energy from one form to another.
Good old firewood (or other biomass crops such as elephant grass) will compete with petroleum for jet fuel, and mains electricity will compete with it for driving cars. For the production of mains electricity, nuclear fission and the wind and the sun have all already begun to compete with coal.
So the peaks will occur, due to economic (not geological) causes, as the genuine alternatives get cheaper (and not before). As prices increase due to constrained supply (not due to index speculation on commodity futures by institutional investors as last year) they will cause some “demand destruction”.
As we saw last year, demand for petrol is nowhere near as price-inelastic as studies seemed to show in past decades. It will become more elastic, not less, as technology and public policy (ie. transport planning) catch up with the idea that fossil fuels are finite.