https://techxplore.com/news/2024-05-transatlantic-sustainable-aviation-fuel-flight.html
That is impressive. It will be interesting to see how much fuel renewable waste oils can actually provide. I mean one jet can suck up a lot of fuel made from a lot of fish and chips shops and McDonald's.
A friend thought he was going to save the planet by doing conversions to biodiesel from waste cooking oil, but when he started getting down into the nitty gritty of how that scales, it doesn't.
But note that the article says "like waste cooking oil." It doesn't actually say anything about the source of fuel for this test. It could be algal sources or who knows what.
It could be human poo (was that posted here?). And if human poo can make jet fuel, so could cow and pig poo. There's a lot more poo than there is waste cooking oil.
I suspect like most climate solutions, it's less about finding the One New Thing and more about finding lots of 5% solutions
HA! EG beat me by a nano-second.
>suck up
> fish and chips shops and McDonald
About 15 years ago, there was a fad of converting vehicles to burn vegetable oil. If you blend it with store-bought fuel, diesels were pretty easy. But my good friend, King-Of-The-Land-Rovers, wanted to run 100% fast-food fryer oil in his 'commuter' LR 109. (Who the hell commutes in a Land Rover 109??!!) Everything was fine in hot weather --and smelled of french fries. But in cold weather, the veggie oil would congeal in the fuel lines.
Eventually, enough people collected from the fast food joints that the supply got scarce. Managers started charging for the oil and that killed the fad.
I was thinking about the above supply issues when reading the article. They're going to need to extract oils from sewage or some other mega-source. ...Or cover the Midwest in rapeseed.
>It could be human poo (was that posted here?
Yes, of course.
>cow and pig poo
We'd be doing the planet a big favor if we could pump all those huge ponds of pig poo dry on big corporate swine farms and put it to use.
>human poo
No shortage there. Most people are full of s##t. :)
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA781250925&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=01908286&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E7d0bda84&aty=open-web-entry
Fat, sugar, trash: All the weird things that may fuel planes by 2050.