Biodiesel is not historic.
“Today is a historic day for aviation. After more than a century of commercial flights powered by kerosene, we are at the dawn of a new era.”
God only knows how much it would cost to have enough biodiesel to power all the transport category aircraft in the world, or what that would do to the environment, food supply, and economy.
Doesn’t burning fake kerosene produce the same “greenhouse” gases as real kerosene?
Nice story, but the numbers unfortunately add up as any sort of sustainable solution to the eventual need to transition from fossils.
The international standard for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is ASTM D7566, which only allows for “up to a 50-50 blend of biomass-derived blending components and petroleum jet fuel.” You start with plane old D1655 or equiv. milspec kero and then add some bio product.
So at MAXIMUM permissible, SAF is still at least half kero. It’s misleading to say “After more than a century of commercial flights powered by kerosene, we are at the dawn of a new era,”” Nope, they are not. Without at least half kero in the tank they are not going anywhere. Also, they did not disclose their blend - It could have been 99% kero and 1% bio and they could still pat themselves on the back since that can be called SAF according to specs.
The aviation industry uses 95 billion gallons on a typical year
All of the vegetable oil in the world for you know… eating and other nice stuff like cooking, cosmetics, lubrication, and 8% of the current diesel process, adds up to only 60 billion gallons a year.
Aviation is only 10% of petroleum used, so to move to biofuels in general, in total we’re talking about about needing 1.5 trillion gallons of something with equivalent energy
so to recap:
(Of course, even if we gave up eating, not all 60 bil gal would be available as fuel)
You could get some bump from used oil (the market is currently about 6 bil gal annually worldwide) assuming you can get a net positive energy result from capturing it. (Veg oil does not contain same energy density as kero)
Yes we can make more veggie oil, but the easiest and cheapest and most popular oil is palm, which is an environmental and ecological nightmare that is undeniably a net energy loss. I think we’ve all seen the data that growing corn for fuel is actually a net energy loss.
So unfortunately, we need to find something else to move off of dinosaurs, the numbers are no where near adding up to a viable solution for biomass aviation fuel.
Stories like this remind me of when the local news shows a 8 yr old girl holding a bake sale to pay off the national debt - it’s not a bad idea per se, but unfortunately it would not go very far in solving the problem…