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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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DURBAN, South Africa—My share of the carbon dioxide my flight to Johannesburg emitted over 15 hours amounted to 1,391.3 kilograms, according to the helpful information provided by South African Airlines. Add a dollop of 53.8 kilograms of CO2 for the jet jaunt to Durban and you can see that the aviation industry—and the Durban climate talks—have an emissions problem.
In fact, flying now accounts for some 2 percent—and growing fast—of global greenhouse gas emissions, although the industry has pledged to stop that growth by 2020. According to the aviation industry, a full 80 percent of the roughly 650 million metric tons of CO2 annually emitted by aircraft are from those flying more than 1,500 kilometers (like my trip from New York City to Durban) for which there is no alternative mode of practical transport. And, given the energy density of kerosene, there really is no alternative to liquid fuel either—with the exception of lightweight solar-powered drones, electric planes cannot get off the ground. As for hydrogen, it is hard to carry enough of it and still have space for passengers, too.
That's why the U.S. military, a slew of airline companies, Boeing and others have invested heavily in jet fuel made from plants—the oils provided by weedy camelina or hardy jatropha shrubs or even algae. The fuels have successfully passed all trials—even delivering more thrust per gallon—and have now entered regular commercial use in the U.S. and Europe, promising to cut CO2 emissions by 80 percent, albeit at a premium price. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is giving out $7.7 million in contracts to such jet biofuel–makers.
"Everybody wants a solution to oil," says Jigar Shah, CEO of the Carbon War Room, an organization founded by Virgin Airlines founder Sir Richard Branson and others to combat climate change. "Aviation is where it's going to come first."
Unfortunately, there's a problem. As much as ethanol from corn turns out to be a bad biofuel idea, the climate-friendly value of these bio-jet fuels depends largely on how they are produced. A fuel made from palm oil turns out to be worse for greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere than jet fuel refined from petroleum because it involves clearing rainforest or peatland. To help solve this problem, the Carbon War Room has launched RenewableJetFuels.org, which ranks all biofuel companies on sustainability, among other criteria.
"We need to ensure that these fuels are made in a way that doesn't put pressure on ecosystems that are already stressed," says Suzanne Hunt, who is leading the Carbon War Room's aviation effort. "They must not put pressure on food security and we must make sure the greenhouse gas reductions are real and verified."
Per the Carbon War Room's main criteria of scalability (Can it be made in bulk?); sustainability (Can it be made with minimal environmental damage?); and economic viability (Can it be made at a profit?), the top five producers include: Lanzatech, SG Biofuels, AltAir, Solazyme and Sapphire—all of which have already provided biofuels to fly jets.
All of these fuels cost more than petroleum-based jet fuel. "For airlines, a third or more of the operating costs are fuel," Hunt notes, arguing that locking in bio–jet fuel at a consistent price will help airlines hedge that cost. "The E.U. including aviation under the cap [of its emissions trading program] is a major incentive."
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18 Comments
Add CommentTalk of costs, but no mention of actual figures. How much does biofuel cost compared to traditional fuel? This article is fact light.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article did not cover the most promising method of biofuel production: generating both methane and fuel oil from sewage. An incomplete survey of the topic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have seen another article that says LanzaTec has a process to convert the waste gases from steel production into aviation fuel (http://www.marklynas.org/2011/11/virgin-atlantic-and-sustainable-aviation/).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnswer is variable, hence the difficulty in including it. But safe to say it costs at least three times as much and in some contracts 100 times as much as conventional jet. Some of that is premium pricing and some of that is fundamental. Of course, it's early days so prices are for test batches and will not hold if such fuels scale up.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@dbiello
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCompare 3 - 100x cost with article info that fuel cost is about a third of airline operating expences, and you see that this is a way to stop flights. Completely. Back to train travel from Washington to California!
More sensible would be for airlines to buy up and close farms, since farming globally produces much more CO2 than aviation.
The "wave " is coming .I believe we will see it this decade.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'No alternative'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, there is. Less travel. Air travel is rarely a necessity. Then again, that would be too much reality for the global warming cultists burning fuel to get to Durban.
Ah, you almost made sense until you injected your political grudge into the discussion. Darn...so close!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisREALLY??? Do you eat?? If you plan to stop all farming, I hope you learn to live on grass. I hate to break this to you, but food does not come from stores, it comes from FARMS!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"....even delivering more thrust per gallon".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore thrust per gallon than what?
Do bio-fuels generate less greenhouse-effect gases, or are cheaper to produce, or have advantages in terms of energy density, fuel economy or lifespan in the engines that run on them ?.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese would be the right reasons to produce and use biofuels, if it's just to give a "green" image of corporations running with biofuels, or keeping people calmed, it use can be considered a too costly luxury good, such as jewelry. In the things that do have an strong influence in the economy, economy and health reasons must prevail. You can't be all day, all night, launching fireworks.
Please ping me if you want an accurate picture of the aviation fuel space. We just finished a week at ASTM for all fuels. There are significant misconceptions of the space, and referenced in this article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'd love to see a full accounting of ALL of the energy inputs into bio-fuels, to see if any actually produce more energy than they consume. Small or negative real energy production can be tolerated, to some degree, if the resulting fuel is more useful than what fuelled the process but it doesn't make a lot of sense for anything other than purposeful trips and certainly wouldn't support an air travel/freight industry as we know it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd sustainability is not just about pollution, it also involves other impacts on the environment like water use, biodiversity loss, topsoil depletion, and so on.
It took the earth millions of years to produced the stored solar energy we found in oil; to imagine that we can reproduce that kind of fuel from an annual solar budget, is akin to believing in fairies. Air travel was an interesting but quite short phase in the human project on this planet.
Scientific progress is being held back by two serious myths.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne is the anthropgenic global warming myth. This is costing us billions of dollars and many lost years in bioproducts development progress that will continue be held up until we consign this old myth to the dustbin of history.
In fact were world CO2 levels twice or three times todays levels, this world would be a much more lush, prolific and productive place to live. We would truely be living in an age of milk and honey.
Another myth is the old canard that we are using food production land to grow fuel.
Please understand that I speak only for American farmers here.
In fact we use corn to make food, feed, pharmaceuticals, vitamins, nutriceuticals, home chemicals, industrial chemicals, plastics, ethanol, biodiesel, biobutanol and biojet fuel.
Corn is a multi use commodity, and we are processing it for best uses.
In fact we produce enough corn each year in America to fill every world market we have, including all of the above. If we lose any one of those markets, we will have to reduce American corn production to avoid over supply and crashing world grain markets.
We still have 30 million acres of American crop land under federal subsidy to not grow farm crops on; as we can not sell any more farm crops than we now produce until we develop more markets.
As we develop more world corn markets we will grow more corn to fill those markets.
The costs of the various biofuels are moving targets, as we are just starting up the Moores Curve of product development.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe can expect several industry shakouts of companies betting on wrong technologies or having second class management.
Solyndra is a solar example of a bad management shakeout.
In time the big oil companies; BP, Cosmos of Japan, India Oil, who are betting billions on biofuels right now, will dominate the world bio fuels market. It is anyones guess which feedsources and technologies will win the bio fuel race, tho I favor green algae and gasification. It is the nature of biotechnologies that multiple products are desirable and relatively easily produced.
Poet Ethanol out of Kansas will be a large scale bio fuels player, until one of the big oil companies buy them out.
The Dow Chemicals and EI DuPonts wil dominate the home, industrial chemicals markets and bioplastics. Cargill, Louis Dreyfus and ADM wil dominate biofoods and animal feeds.
The biopharmaceuticals and biovitamins industries will have their champions.
There will however, be many bio products produced across industry lines, out of expediency.
The movement of the future for bio technology is to make many salable finished products from your feedstocks.
The worlds militaries, ocean shipping companies and the worlds airlines already have their purchse orders and checkbooks out.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe other users of bio fuels will have to get in line.
All numbers in bio technology are changing frequently, as thousands of researchers around the world improve the technologies daily.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn fact we are just now starting up the Moores Curve of bio technology. Expect millions of innovations and improvments to come in the next 20 years.
Costs will come way down, as this new industry gears up.
It would take hundreds of thousands of words to cover the present knowledge of the Age of BioTechnology.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo magazine article can begin to be complete.