Bioavgas two years away?

Business Green quotes an aircraft exec as saying that commercial jet biofuels should be available by 2011:

Dr Alan H Epstein, vice president technology and environment at Pratt & Witney, told Businessgreen.com that the company was confident that the industry's efforts to develop biofuels were on track to attain the official certification new fuels require to be used commercially during 2011.

"We want to certify a biofuel by 2011 and we have an agreement to share results with GE and Boeing," he said. "Between us we make 98 per cent of the engine market and we genuinely are working as a team on this to get the engines certified for using biofuel. We think that is a realistic timescale."

Of course, agreeing on a formulation says nothing about commercial scale production, price competitiveness (for a commodity fuel) or global distribution, each of which could take years to achieve.

Still, I will be the first to admit that perhaps I have been too skeptical of jet biofuels — as long as they’re made from jatropha or algae or some other scalable crop, rather than coconut oil as used in the earliest PR stunt.

Less carbon in the skies

Today there was an interesting op-ed in the WSJ on three approaches for lowering carbon emissions from commercial aviation, signed by the president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

Scott Carson started at the obvious takeoff point — better fuel efficiency:

There's plenty of incentive to develop more efficient airplanes. Historically, fuel has been the airlines' second-biggest operating expense next to labor. Last year, with oil reaching $140 a barrel, fuel costs even outstripped labor costs, rising to 40% of total airline operating expenses. So airlines have demanded increased efficiency from airplane and engine manufacturers. And manufacturers have responded big time. Over the past 50 years, the efficiency of commercial jets has risen an astounding 70%. This means that carbon emissions per mile flown have dropped 70% -- all without a regulatory requirement for greenhouse gas emissions.

That said, Boeing with GE (and others?) wants to encourage fuel efficiency standards for new airplanes — sort of like a CAFE in the skies.

Carson listed two other ideas for reducing carbon emissions. One is more efficient routing — a plan to shift from the 1950s-era traffic corridors to GPS-enabled point-to-point routing (NextGen). The idea of flying point to point is welcomed by all segments of the aviation industry, but the question is how to pay for the huge capital costs: private pilots welcome the idea of fuel/ticket taxes while airlines oppose it.

Surprisingly, Carson suggested that biofuels could also reduce carbon emissions:

Third, we have been testing various advanced, sustainable biofuels with the goal of finding renewable fuels for aviation that don't compete with food crops for land and water and that emit 50%-80% less carbon than petroleum. We have conducted test flights using mixtures of standard jet fuel and several different sustainable biofuels, among them fuels made from algae and camelina (a plant that produces seeds that aren't used for food).

However — as with other cleantech efforts — Carson requests government subsidies to get the new fuels off the ground.

One proposal is that government could provide loans to refiners to make biofuels competitive when the price of petroleum is low and get repaid when the price of petroleum is high. We hope government officials will seriously consider such ideas because biofuels, in our view, are the ultimate answer to aviation's carbon-emissions challenge.

Looking further out, ATAG (an industry trade association) has an interesting overview of near-term and long-term fuel alternatives that argues that hydrogen is the long-term solution.

As it turns out, this week I received (from a NASA historian) a copy of the NASA book Taming Liquid Hydrogen. The book is about how NASA’s Lewis Research Center and industry researchers learned in the 1950s and 1960s how to create safe and reliable hydrogen-fueled rockets, at a time when rival groups said it couldn’t be done.

Researchers at Lewis (now Glenn) co-authored a 2006 report evaluating all the aviation fuel alternatives. Ironically, they are more pessimistic about hydrogen as an aviation fuel:

Liquid hydrogen (LH2) not only presents very substantial airport infrastructure and airplane design issues, but because of the need for heavy fuel tanks, a short-range airplane would experience a 28 percent decrease in energy efficiency while on a 500-nautical-mile (nmi) mission. However, because airplanes need to carry much more fuel for a long range flight, and Liquid Hydrogen (LH2) fuel is quite lightweight the lighter takeoff weight of the airplane results in an energy efficiency loss of only 2 percent while on a 3,000-nm mission.

As they note, the key driver of hydrogen is that it’s not an energy source, but a way of converting ground-based electricity generation into a portable fuel. If there is (someday) enough electricity generating capacity that doesn’t produce carbon emissions — nuclear, hydro, solar, wind, tidal —then a use of hydrogen-based fuels is the one solution that would eliminate commercial aviation’s carbon footprint.

Latest aviation biofuel PR stunt

The search for renewable sources for aviation fuel continues. First it was coconut and babassu nut oil for a Virgin Atlantic 747, and this week it was jatropha oil on an Air New Zealand flight Tuesday.

This time, the biofuel was 50% of the mix (with jet fuel), unlike the 20% in the Virgin stunt. The jatropha crop is also promising because it can be grown places that other crops cannot, particularly sunny arid areas like the African continent, with 5 million hectares predicted to be planted by 2010, and acrages growing by 1-2 million hectares every year. As such, it seems more scalable than the earlier test.

However, the US alone uses about 20 billion gallons of jet fuel a year (nearly 60 million gallons a day). It may be that only algae-based biofuels will scale up well enough to have a meaningful impact on US consumption of jet fuel.

Electric airplanes--no joke

On this blog, I was earlier making fun of the idea of biofuel, hybrid or electric airplanes.

However, at the Dec. 8 meeting of the MIT Club of Northern California, that’s exactly the topic:

Did you know that Electric Flight it has an amazingly long, technologically fascinating, and successful history?

Learn more from Dr. Mort Grosser, keynote speaker at EAA AirVenture 2008, where 540,000 people and 10,000 airplanes convened in Oshkosh.

Electric flight has become a hot topic because of the widespread Green Initiative and ongoing revolution in the electric power industry, from generation to end user. A piloted electric airplane flew at Oshkosh 2008, and rapid battery development presages a practical general aviation airplane within three to five years

So apparently it‘s no joke. I’m not sure if I can make it, but perhaps others will

Electrifying general aviation

Our local CNN Radio affiliate carried a story about a new “green” technology: an electric airplane known as the ElectraFlyer. I couldn’t find the CNN footage, but there is 60 second ad on YouTube.

Obviously a few Lithium-Ion batteries used to power an ultralight aren’t going to get a 747 across the Pacific. There are also a few regulatory hurdles to be cleared, but it’s a start.

I’ve got a lovely ton of coconuts

In February, Richard Branson and Virgin Atlantic flew a 747 from London to Amsterdam using (some) biofuel. The effort was also publicized by partners Imperium Renewables (the fuel supplier) Boeing, while GE Aviation did not. One of the four plane engines was running a blend of 20% biofuel and 80% jet fuel. The renewable fuel came from coconut and babassu oil.

This is an obvious PR effort for airlines and aircraft makers to keep air travel relevant and politically favored. (Virgin Atlantic has a whole website section on sustainability). Planes will be burning hydrocarbons and spewing CO2 for decades to come, so the aircraft sector needs to come up with a way to help its image even if there’s not a lot they can do about the substance.

At the time, Wired was appropriately skeptical about the effort, with a balance of praise and criticism of Sir Richard’s stunt.

This morning, the NY Daily News reported some tidbits about the flight from an apperance by Sir Richard in NYC:

Branson, on hand at JFK yesterday [told] us that "the best way to reduce your carbon footprint is not to fly at all. But that's not realistic. You can't walk to England."

So what's the next best thing? "Fly Virgin," Branson laughed. "One hundred percent of all profits from all our airlines are reinvested into finding a cleaner fuel solution. We had an experimental 747 that ran on coconut oil ... but it took 150,000 coconuts for one flight. So now we're looking at developing fuel from algae. If you fly Virgin, you'll support this cause."

This suggested a simple back of the envelope calculation. Crude Google search suggested that the average weight of a coconut is 300-500g. So 150,000 coconuts is 45-75 metric tonnes, or about 100-165,000 pounds worth.

Let’s assume best case — 300g coconuts, negligible babbassu oil. Biofuel was only 5% (20% x 25%) of the fuel used on the flight, so pure biofuel would require 2 million pounds of coconuts for this flight.

The flight was 231 miles (or 370 km), while the average fight distance is probably closer to 1000 miles. Since fuel consumption is more proportionate to hours rather than miles, I’m guessing the flight was about half as long as normal, but a 747-400 holds more than twice as many passengers (416) as an average plane.

In 2007, there were 29 million flight departures last year. So if we assumed the world’s airlines together need 10 million times as much fuel as the Virgin flight used, that’s 2 trillion pounds (1 billon tons) of coconuts a year.

How big is that? To quote from an Indian website:

The world production of coconut currently is around 55 million tons, Indonesia having the highest production figures accounting up to around 30% in world figures. The nut is cultivated on around 26 million acres of land throughout the world in more than 90 countries of the world. The production of coconuts has increased significantly during the last decade with the increase in the world demand. The world consumption figure in context of coconut oil is around 3.8 million tons.

World trade in coconut complex is limited as most of the produce is consumed at the place of its production. The countries that have demand supply mismatch usually indulge in the trade of the fruit. The exports of coconuts fluctuates depending upon these factors and hovers around 1800000 tons per year.

So converting the global supply of coconut would supply only 5% of the world’s jet fuel needs, leaving nothing for Mounds bars and coconut milk.

Of course there is a broader question as to the economics (let alone energy budget) of the crops-to-fuel biofuel effort. But it’s a shame that people are not doing the simple math to see how little an impact some of these initiatives would actually have on global energy consumption.