This isn't proper SAF, it's basically C8/10 biodiesel. No aromatics which is one of the perennial problems with SAF, due not just to volumetric energy density but nitrile seals not swelling enough. Integral wing tank seals usually expect aromatic exposure also. This is why some of the catalytic routes/CHJ are of greater interest, cycloparaffins/napthenes recover some of this vs a more biodiesel-ish blend, but even 50% cycloparaffin doesn't fully recover swell. These are solvable backwards compatibility issues but not in the short or medium term.<p>More egregiously FAME is a polar solvent that eats your elastomers, even some fluoroelastomers. It will also attack your polysulfide tank sealant. The remark that it's "technically feasible" to decrease oxygen through hydrogenation is not at all sufficient. Now you're into requiring catalyst beds and a hydrogen plant which makes this much less appealing. Plus ester instability when you sink heat into fuel. Plus freeze point. This is literally a tracked contaminant banned above mg/kg levels that doesn't even have very good properties otherwise they want to run as a major constituent of fuels.
Do coconuts grow particularly efficiently?<p>Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.
> a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities<p>My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.<p>Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s more of a massive subsidy to enormous agribusiness operations. But yeah I’m sure some of the pork makes its way to some normal farmers too.
Don't most farmers own their own farms? (or work on a corporate monstrosity farm).<p>How common is farm landlords?
Depends on the area, but the vast majority are owner operated.<p>The question begs some other questions though.<p>One is more about what fraction of the economic production of the farm industry is owner operated; There is a long tail of now-tiny farms that are not economical to actually sow and harvest, which nobody could actually earn a living from. If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?<p>Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.<p>The vertically related industries have also seen a lot of consolidation. There are ~four seed companies, only a few pesticide companies, two main tractor companies, only a few slaughterhouse companies, etc. There are long-term contractual arrangements with some of these entities. Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly they may as well be a sharecropper really counted as a farm?
My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive.<p>International markets and all that...
NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.
Likely, and then... after Mexican farms went out of business, they added biofuels, the price spiked, and Mexico had no domestic corn people could buy.<p>It's sort of what they want for Canada. They keep trying to attack our protected agricultural sectors, and no sane country doesn't protect their food supply. Amusingly, they want 10% of our dairy market (as a start), and they already have a few percent.<p>Yet we're 1/10th the size of them. So they make a massive fuss, over 5 additional percent of our market or so, which for their market size is 0.5% of its overall size. The US economy won't even notice, but the Canadian market will 10x as much. It's just petty.
Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options. People constantly repeat this, but it's flat out wrong.<p>The best way to apologize for people who, is to say that they don't have enough time to cook between all the jobs they have.
> cheaper than heather options<p>Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern.<p>Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc.<p>Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.
I bought over a pound of steak the other day for $5. (Yes, it was on sale. But it is frequently on sale.) Along with a potato for 50 cents, that's cheaper than a bag of Doritos.<p>Oh, and I bought a banana for $.22.<p>Cooking a steak takes about 10 minutes.<p>Microwaving a TV dinner ($7.50) takes more time.
This canard again [0]? You're comparing one piece of beef with a massive bag of Doritos. The banana's irrelevant, but last time you compared it to an enormous block of chocolate [1].<p>From experience a microwave meal should take about 3 minutes to cook so I don't know how you're taking more than 10 minutes unless, like your food item comparisons, you're cooking enough of them to feed an entire town.<p>0: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312807">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312807</a><p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314864">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314864</a>
Microwaving takes less attention and less skill, though. And less cleanup. And you don’t need to own a pan. And you don’t need to own spices (steak is a bad example ofc). And you don’t need to think about the side dishes. And you don’t need to agree on what’s for dinner. And I think it’s worth repeating, you don’t need any skill and can’t really screw it up. And you don’t need to worry about it going bad because you were too lazy to cook it. Etc.<p>Processed food may not be cheaper, but the flavor:effort ratio is waaaaaay higher.
Wait til you find out what's in a $5 steak!<p>Our cheapest grass-fed tenderloin is $10 for a half pound cut. One. In a poor northern state.<p>We had that cow two years and didn't supplement grain. Cheap as you can grow them.<p>With a $5 steak, it might as well be corn chips.
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> Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options.<p>I have bad news for you about flour
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They already grow, they are already harvested, and this process uses discarded parts of the harvest. It is putting in use what we already had but had no use for.<p>Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: <a href="https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Biofuel-Infographic-1200x675.png" rel="nofollow">https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi...</a><p>Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.
Are there really discarded parts? Usually when people talk about discarded parts, what they really mean is those not used in the first process. The article says "parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste", but just a quick glance seems to show that there are other products that uses those parts of the crop, like biodegradable packaging and animal feed.<p>Turning it into fuel and burning it would compete with the other uses for those 30%.
That infographic says it uses 16-20% more fuel per unit of thrust. That's a significant amount more weight for an aircraft to carry, but because carrying extra fuel also burns fuel, extra fuel use would compound exponentially. This would probably mean significantly more than 20% extra fuel would be required for long-haul flights.
Ouch.<p>There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1]
But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense.<p>This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though.<p>Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle.<p>Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-coconut-tree-oil-copra-biodiesel" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance</a>
^^^ this<p>I cringe thinking about more biofuel ideas getting forced through. Sure, let’s all spend a ton of petroleum energy on fertilizing, farm equipment, and processing, and raise food prices by using all the land for producing ethanol-corn, and jet fuel coconuts, just to get a slightly worse petroleum replacement fuel.
I presume that the market for coconut oil is far smaller than for jet fuel, so this solution can't scale without wreaking havoc on the environment. These sort of clever uses for exisiting byproducts only work when the market for the main product is much bigger than for the byproduct (e.g. down is a byproduct of duck/goose meat, leather is a byproduct of beef).
The existing solution is actively wreaking havoc on the environment. I don't know the specifics of this crop but generally agricultural products absorb a substantial amount of carbon when growing, so releasing some of that carbon by later burning has the potential to be close to carbon-neutral. Whilst petroleum fuels are 100% carbon negative.
Aviation is a relatively small amount of global carbon dioxide emissions (2.5% or so). However, there is some evidence that their emissions are much worse than they seem on paper due to NOx and water vapour emissions high in the troposphere. Even if coconut oil was a remotely viable alternative it would do nothing to address these other issues.
There's more to the environment than the greenhouse effect. Coconut plantations would compete with rainforest in much the same way palm oil ones do, since they have more or less identical growing climates.<p>If you want to use biofuels, use a plant that grows in low-value areas like open fields. Something like corn or sugarcane.
Apparently (I’m relying on facts from Claude here), aviation uses about 100 billion gallons of oil a year and coconuts yield about 250 gal/acre, so assuming you can approximately replace them 1:1, you would need to plant about 400 million acres under coconut plantation, an area the size of Mexico.<p>Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).
To what scale though? Doubtful it's going to be enough for a replacement. Just as GP stated, the corn grown for ethanol is nothing more than an additive and it is quite easy to find fuel without it. It's a boondoggle and not any where close to being a fossil fuel replacement
> it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact.<p>In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel.<p>But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel. [0]<p>Coconuts could be a breakthrough!<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel</a>
Just use any carbon monoxide source (e.g., pyrolysis of pretty much anything that'd release carbon dioxide when burned works, followed by some cleaning to get rid of some problematic catalyst poisons (notably sulfur compounds)), add hydrogen, and do Fischer-Tropsch.
You get your high quality diesel fuel, often higher quality than what you can easily get from crude oil, btw.<p>If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.<p>You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.<p>Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.<p>Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...
I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet. Not just for the carbon impact, but also for the diversity of our species and cultures.<p>Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?<p>Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.
> I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet.<p>Me neither, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating possible breakthroughs in decarbonisation.
Why not stop other Europeans from going as well?
They live closer by? So less miles travelled, and in many cases travelled by train? Depending on how you generate electricity that works out quite differently.<p>Went to Venice by night train 15 years ago, would definitely recommend.<p>Conversely, however, perhaps we should question Europeans massively going to Phuket.
> Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane<p>Who are you to dictate where Chinese and Indians can and cannot visit or enjoy delicious watermelons?<p>If someone wants to eat a watermelon like a dirty slave that is their business and you are not going to deny them that right. This is pure insanity.<p>China and India are the biggest domestic aircraft markets in the world. The manufacturers literally cannot keep up with the demand. If trains were more effective they would have built them already. If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.<p>I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses, it would take a year to respond to them all.<p>Air travel is not going anywhere and we are not setting society back 100 years on account of dubious climate histrionics.<p>Want to save the environment?<p>Ditch smartphones (future e-waste) and all their useless apps (and resource-sucking infra) we could all live without tomorrow.<p>Turns out we were as effective in moving goods and services and leisure travel in 2008 as we are today.<p>We just couldn't post to social media about how uncomfortable the airplane seat was and how the onboard Wi-Fi sucked.
How many coconuts are on one tree and how many tons of coconuts would be needed to replace kerosene globally?<p>I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible.<p>BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well.<p>Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less.<p>I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation.<p>Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…
The best solution to flying and long distance travel is to reduce it as much as possible. This means no more travelling for hedonistic (touristic) purposes.<p>I.e. measures like massive taxation (also for private jets of course).
Degrowth, and “everyone should just do without X” is such an easy solution. Too bad for you we don’t live in a political system where you guys can pass such unpopular policy and force the majority (who wants <i>improving</i> living standards) to just ‘own nothing and be happy,’ trading all the things they like for promises that the climate will be fixed.<p>And other countries will also choose to keep their privileges and climate change will not be reduced anyway.
I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement.<p>As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
Oh we can and should absolutely do both. Travel and tourism has other downsides which make it worth reducing it, like the fast spread of diseases for example.
The difference between removing plastic straws and reducing air travel is that reducing air travel would have an impact.
Sure, but as I said in my second example, forcing oil and natural gas companies to prevent methane leaks would have much more of an impact than reducing air travel, and requires no sacrifice for the average person. When considering which policies to advance, we should look at both the potential impact AND the democratic support for it.<p>Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.
If people like Steve are advocating for such insanely unpopular policies as ending all travel (or is it just that you need to prove to the government that you have a valid reason for a travel permit?) I don’t think they’re concerned with the ideas’ democratic prospects at all.<p>Seems like he’s looking forward to a dictatorship that will just tell us all what we’re allowed to do, without the burdensome need for our dumb pleb voices to be heard. Maybe they could call the folks who enforce the policy the “Klimate Governing Board.”
So no tourist travel for the poor or middle class, just the elite rich? And no tourist income for the poor and middle class? This is a policy only the top .1% will enjoy.
Exactly. The travel permits will still be easy to get for the elites and their friends. In fact I bet even the climate change academics, and their friends and anyone they went to school with, will be able to get their travel permits just fine. You and me though? F your family, you’ll never see them again. The climate simply can’t spare it.<p>These people are so out of touch it’s bananas.
But the purpose of money is exactly to be a currency to be spent on choices. And, I must unfortunately repeat myself with regards to what I wrote nearby, externalities can be charged as a cost - and it is probably the way to handle it. "You pollute, you pay" - then, you acquire money to invest it, especially in activities with downsides.
I don't support the idea as described, but playing devil's advocate presumably it would shift demand towards train and boat travel. That would push tourism closer to home and largely eliminate visiting other continents for those who couldn't either afford the air travel tax or to take several months off of work if going by boat. But it wouldn't eliminate tourism by any means. Even the poor could still easily travel the better part of a given continent.
I didn't say tax everyone the same amount. Make it hurt. Tax the elite a million per flight.<p>And yes, no tourist income. It's dirty money.
Electrified high speed rail solves this, with flying reserved for transoceanic needs. Private jets should not exist outside of scientific, medical, or other non luxury/personal use cases. Travel and tourism will always be with us, and should be imho. Carbon taxes, laws, whatever is needed to accomplish it.
Saw a recent post about an electric plane - was pretty sweet let me dig it up. $5 worth of fuel!<p>> <a href="https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-completes-first-flight-of-world-s-largest-electric-aircraft" rel="nofollow">https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...</a>
Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?<p>It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.
"It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population)."<p>Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.<p>Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.
That is both true and not quite true at the same time. The notion of the Yeoman farm family supporting itself off its land is mostly a myth.<p>Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.
> Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?<p>Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?<p>Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.
All subsidies are wealth transfers. That's the whole point- to incentivize something that wouldn't otherwise happen at a scale the government deems to be of benefit or necessary.<p>Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification.<p>The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on.<p>I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive.<p>The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.
Middle of the road, comparable to Sunflower oil. But they want to utilize waste products and a low energy conversion process.
They literally grow on trees
Same rural communities raise pitchforks upon mention of any other demographic receiving wealth transfers.
"It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities"<p>I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.
Are the people against bioengineered produce also be against us working towards super efficient coconuts or some other plant we designed to fill the same role?
Just through this out again, biofuels are dumb. Per acre a solar farm produces 30 times the energy per year as corn without most of the environmental concerns that growing corn has.<p>You don't have pesticide or fertilizer runoff from solar farms. You don't plow the soil resulting in soil loss.<p>Biofuels, dumb.
50 MTons of coconut oil are produced per year (approximately). Is this a significant amount, compared to oil derived from crude (where gas currently comes from).
How many coconuts do we need to support current aviation needs? I’m guessing it’s not likely this will work economically?
You want a fuel that's chemically identical to current jet fuel, not one burdened with extra oxygen. Yes, this would require more energy, but it would be used more effectively in jets.<p>A drop-in compatible jet fuel can be made by hydrodeoxygenation of biomass, using Virent's process. The waste cellulose in current US waste streams would be more than enough to displace all current US jet fuel consumption. An extra source of hydrogen would be needed to do this, but hydrogen can be made renewably (and, indeed, that's a good way to provide dispatchable demand to help deal with renewable intermittency, and will have to be done anyway to displace the use of natural gas to make hydrogen.)
I agree, I wish more work was being done on building a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen can be generated sustainably, is a great way to store excess energy from renewable sources, can be transported, and as a bonus can be mixed with hydrocarbon fuels to be used directly as a heating source.<p>As an example, a house in NH can generate a lot of excess solar power in the summer months when it uses hardly any electricity. If all that energy could be stored as hydrogen, in the winter (when solar power is less due to the far northern latitude and snow covering the panels) it could draw down on the hydrogen to generate electricity and also use it for a backup heat fuel.
I'm in Northern Europe and am in that situation. I have an electric heat pump, so would need around 3 MWh over the winter period. Apparently that would need a tank around 4m3 at 700 bar (typical pressure of hydrogen vehicle tanks). Plus the fuel cell actually generate heat, so that could be used for heating too. Doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.
I'm skeptical of any application for hydrogen where electricity could be used directly. In your case, I think hydrogen would better be used in a more centralized power plant as a backup for renewable sources (perhaps with the waste heat then used for district heating), and the power used to drive your heat pump.
If it burns more fuel, how is it "about as efficient"? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.<p>> New research found that aviation biofuel made from coconut oil can power a small jet engine about as efficiently as traditional jet fuel, with lower unburned hydrocarbon emissions, though the blends burn more fuel and emit slightly more carbon monoxide.
I think this is awesome. Anything we can do to get away from burning fossil fuel is a win in my book. I don’t know about this particular effort, but it seems to me that aviation could really need some big wins in this direction. Last I looked we still run smaller planes on leaded fuel. Crazy.
This isn’t awesome, it doesn’t work at scale and it only lets idiots ignore what should be done: leave fossil fuels in the ground, and only then do what we can with the energy that’s still available. Aviation is mostly incompatible with a sane global environmental policy.
Leaded is slowly going away, but regulation means these changes take many, many years and dollars to implement and test.<p>It will be similar (worse?) implementing a new type of fuel for commercial jets, especially when it comes to wide adoption across a majority of countries around the world. Basically you need something which is as least as reliable, clean (I.e., won’t clog/solidify), non corrosive, etc. and remain that way after being mixed with standard jet fuel.<p>I too want to see alternatives but expect to see more failures than success at this stage.
Replacing fossil fuel with biofuel only works if we starve half the planet and use their food for fuel.
So we can't have the dark chocolate Bounty bar anymore but we can use coconuts to fuel planes?<p>This isn't the future I want.
But why? I don't know of a case where biofuels aren't a disaster against the stated environmental purpose. Bailouts for farmers? Sure. A good way to generate green energy? I think engineered algae comes kind of close to making sense as an oil source, but as a fuel would still seem silly to me. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
blended with standard jet fuel, in a small-scale micro jet engine
How is the viscosity at -60?
> This study used oil from material the researchers describe as discarded and non-edible, including the large seeds and leftover flesh, so the fuel draws on parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste.<p>This statement seems disingenuous. Surely they did not invent a novel way to extract coconut oil as part of this study and not choose to publish it. Surely this is just existing byproduct that already has plenty of commercial use.<p>If you look at how many coconut plantations you would need to make even a measurable dent in jet fuel demand, this would be an unmitigated environmental disaster.<p>I want to solve climate change as much as the next guy, but chopping down all our tropical rainforests to make it happen sacrifices exactly what we're trying to save.
Yep, we've seen this sobering reality ignored in previously-hyped "biofuel" aviation stories.<p>Not to mention another glaring omission here:
"By adding acetone to a mixture of alcohol and coconut oil"<p>How much energy is needed to produce those two ingredients, and the things THEY are made from?<p>If I were a junior-high teacher, I'd probably give this paper a C.
either wait for bigger batteries, hydrogen or some super efficient material to create the fuselage.<p>biofuels won't work. they take too much land and are inefficient in terms of producing.
Cue defense industrial base funded influencer campaign to promote the "dangers" of medium chain triglycerides.
Long life to coconut revolution, in Bougainville island!
Will this produce better smells?
Aviation uses around a million metric tons of jet fuel per day.<p>If you thought habitat destruction from palm oil was bad, that would be nothing compared to coconut oil making up any significant fraction of jet fuel.
The question is which habitat destruction is worse? That which is already happening at scale for oil, versus what would happen if we lean into this in any meaningful way.<p>I don't think the answer is obvious. And I think many of us are blind or numb to environmental harms of oil outside of carbon exhaust and the occasional spill, simply because we've accepted it as status quo.
An oil well is quite small Area wise compared to the amount of acreage you would need for a coconut plantations to replace the same amount of energy output.<p>The issue with oil is CO2 and other green house gases and then the occasional oil spill or leak. Land area wise they don’t take up much space
Ah, the modern debacle, shall we choose this kind of shit or that?
The issue with bio fuel is the following: Due to climate change the overall area for food production in the world is shrinking. Bio fuel is directly competing with food.<p>The solution: Ditch carbon based fuels as much as possible and replace it with electric transport.<p>I know that it's currently unviable to use electric aircraft in almost all use cases except short range drones. But then the solution to that problem is to rely less on air travel and transport and use land based alternatives.<p>This is about vectors and incentives. Investing in bio fuels to get a 100% replacement for fossil fuels is not going to work and it only stalls what actually needs to happen which is a radical transport system change.
we've been working on biofuel to replace fossils forever, hopefully it leads to something if not jet fuel specifically.
Yeah, but until it matches kerosene in price and availability (how many coconuts per aeronautical mile?) it won't actually be an alternative
Just intuitively I doubt there's nearly enough coconut oil produced to replace any meaningful amount of jet fuel. I scanned the article and didn't see this addressed, but may have missed it.<p>Various other bio-fuel and synthesized replacements for petroleum-based jet fuel have been tried and are in development. The aviation industry is very slow to approve and adopt changes.
The point isn't to make cheap jet fuel. The point is that to the coconut processor (someone who makes food or whatever) your "coconut tailings" pile is a big liability. The environmentalists could start screeching any day without warning, that's a big risk to your business. Waste that costs you nothing could cost a lot. You might be able to sell it as loam or fertilizer or whatever. But then they'll screech that you need to buy somme compliance solution. Just shipping the damn thing off to the next guy who'll squeeze some jet fuel out of it is real attractive because then the rest of the tailings become his problem. Maybe he's in a better jurisdiction. Maybe it's more inert at that point. In any case it's a liability off your books. The jet fuel just needs to be cheap enough to make this whole process cheaper than whatever way you were dealing with it before. It's like this the world over. Whether you're selling coconut scraps to the people who'll squeeze the oil out of them or strawberry waste to the people who'll make dyes and fragrances it's all the same.
This is absolutely nuts!
Maybe those cargo cult guys were onto something
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So we just cut down some ancient rainforests to grow them right? Works for Palm oil! Goooo Planet!