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Science

Hopes For Sustainable Jet Fuel Not Realistic, Report Finds (theguardian.com) 176

Hopes that replacement fuels for airplanes will slash carbon pollution are misguided and support for these alternatives could even worsen the climate crisis, a new report has warned. The Guardian: There is currently "no realistic or scalable alternative" to standard kerosene-based jet fuels, and touted "sustainable aviation fuels" are well off track to replace them in a timeframe needed to avert dangerous climate change, despite public subsidies, the report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank, found. "While there are kernels of possibility, we should bring a high level of skepticism to the claims that alternative fuels will be a timely substitute for kerosene-based jet fuels," the report said.

Chuck Collins, co-author of the report, said: "To bring these fuels to the scale needed would require massive subsidies, the trade-offs would be unacceptable and would take resources aware from more urgent decarbonization priorities. It's a huge greenwashing exercise by the aviation industry. It's magical thinking that they will be able to do this." In the US, Joe Biden's administration has set a goal for 3bn gallons of sustainable aviation fuel, which is made from non-petroleum sources such as food waste, woody biomass and other feedstocks, to be produced by 2030, which it said will cut aviation's planet-heating emissions by 20%.

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Hopes For Sustainable Jet Fuel Not Realistic, Report Finds

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  • by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @10:49AM (#64479025)

    From the moment I heard about it, there was strong smell of, well, not kerosene

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:26AM (#64479113)

      A lesson I learned in first aid class is that if a patient has arterial hemorrhaging and an ingrown toenail, you focus on the bleeding and leave the toenail until later.

      62% of the world's electricity comes from fossil fuels, mostly coal. Dozens of coal plants are currently under construction and will burn coal for 60 years.

      That is the arterial bleeding.

      Aviation is the ingrown toenail. It's a minor problem that is difficult to fix. It isn't where we should be focusing our efforts.

      • by dfghjk ( 711126 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:48AM (#64479173)

        Because we can only do one thing at a time.

        The idea of you in a first aid class is amusing, though, or that they would discuss ingrown toenails.

        Climate change isn't a result of arterial bleeding, it is a death by a thousand cuts.

        • Because some things are a dangerous distraction, promoted only to confuse and deceive you.

        • Because we can only do one thing at a time.

          We can't spend the same money on two different things.

          It is silly to spend billions on biofuels for jets when spending the same money on wind turbines will remove twenty times as much CO2.

          And "just raise taxes so we can do it all" isn't the answer. That will result in Trump being our next president, and then we will do none of it.

          • by HiThere ( 15173 ) <charleshixsn@@@earthlink...net> on Friday May 17, 2024 @02:28PM (#64479685)

            You can't make things work by just building wind-turbines. (Or solar cells.) You need to add large investments in energy storage and voltage regulation, and the ability to pour power into the grid episodically from random locations. This *is* the right way to go, but don't oversimplify things.

            The current grid is not designed to accept random amounts of input from random locations. It's designed to be driven by base-line loads, like hydro, nuclear, coal, or gas. That's what was available when it was being designed. When variable sources get to be around 40% it becomes less stable. (That's what the various huge batteries have been added to handle...but the problem gets worse when the base-line load becomes a smaller fraction.)

            The grid is **In the process** of being redesigned. But the redesign is not near completion. This is only partially because of existing commercial interests.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              Which grid is this? In the UK we are already at about 50% renewables, and our grid is extremely stable. Some days it is much higher than that.

              It turns out that it's not all that difficult to integrate renewables. Beware of energy companies telling you otherwise as an excuse for their unstable grids, because many countries prove it is untrue.

            • Wind is cheap enough to overbuild to solve your capacity problems.

              You do need to build more transmission lines, but you need those no matter what kind of generation you build, and no one wants any of it in their neighborhood so you always have to go long distances.

              If you overbuild wind then you wind up with unused capacity, which provides incentive for new uses for intermittent power. It's not a problem at all because wind can be throttled down at will

            • You can't make things work by just building wind-turbines. (Or solar cells.)

              You can overbuild wind and solar, but the world is nowhere near the point where that's a problem.

          • by haruchai ( 17472 )

            Because we can only do one thing at a time.

            We can't spend the same money on two different things.

            It is silly to spend billions on biofuels for jets when spending the same money on wind turbines will remove twenty times as much CO2.

            And "just raise taxes so we can do it all" isn't the answer. That will result in Trump being our next president, and then we will do none of it.

            and the wind turbines would be the 1st to go if Tangerine Twitler wins again - which is still a coin toss at this point
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • by period3 ( 94751 )

        Many people work on this. There's no need to focus on one thing. We need to do all of it. Conservation? yes. New technology? yes. Aviation or coal plants? yes.

        • Most of the people should be focused on replacing and coal power though, I think.

          Priority 1: Coal Power
          2. Decarbonize our cars
          3. The rest of the hydrocarbon power plants (and it's a strong contender for #2)
          4. Steel production. ....
          X: Eliminate jet fuel
          Y: Mining and remaining special uses.

          Eliminating jet fuel should be mostly the domain of researchers. We know how to eliminate coal power - build nuclear, solar, wind.

          • You missed heating & cooling buildings. Making buildings more efficient & using zero CO2 energy should be a high priority. It's also relatively easy to do, at least technologically.
        • by pz ( 113803 )

          Conservation doesn't work; we've seen that already in the 1970s.

          One of the very best ideas I've seen was to use specially-developed algae that are something like 30% lipid and grown by percolating CO2-rich warm air through bio-reactor tanks placed on the rooftops of power plants. CO2 + heat + sunlight -> diesel fuel + scrubbed powerplant emissions + fertilizer.

          • specially-developed algae that are something like 30% lipid

            That's an idea that's been around since the 1960s.

            Over the last 60 years, here's a list of all the progress we've made: { }.

      • Electricity accounts for about 1/3 of total emissions, aviation accounts for about 2.5% (albeit that figure is a little inconsistent between sources). 2.5% is not so little that we should ignore it. We have more than one person, we can do more than one thing.
      • So are you saying that banning plastic straws is a drop in the bucket vs, say, the massive amounts of fishing gear abandoned every year?

      • Aviation is the ingrown toenail

        I know you think otherwise but there's more than one person in the world and not everyone works on the same singular problem. You go solve the power crisis, let other people work on other things, such as the 3% of global CO2 emissions which come from just burning jet fuel.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Well, Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF is what the aviation sector was counting on for reducing carbon emissions. While the affected travel really only consists of 0.1% of total CO2 emissions, they are probably the most visible part of the population - that is, private jets. (Aviation itself, including the commercial sector, accounts for 3-5% of total emissions).

      So there's a lot of money behind it, because private jets are one of the most visible ways of declaring one's wealth, thus forming a very easy tar

  • Lighter than air (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @10:52AM (#64479031) Journal
    The most realistic clean form of flying is lighter-than air travel. Airlander is working on an all-electric version of their lifting-body airship, and that is the most realistic option to really reduce pollution.
    • But it's also entirely impractical, not to mention dangerous. It will always be bog slow. But the fatal flaw is that the ground handling will always be a disaster waiting to happen, it is inherent to the concept.

      • Why? In a fixed field where you can have arbitrary amounts of equipment, what's stopping you from simply attaching a "sufficient" number of cables to draw it down, similar to strutting in KSP?

    • by necro81 ( 917438 )

      The most realistic clean form of flying is lighter-than air travel. Airlander is working on an all-electric version of their lifting-body airship, and that is the most realistic option to really reduce pollution

      It's an interesting notion, but...

      Has anyone calculated how much helium we would need to replace the existing jet fleet with lighter-than-air vehicles? An FAQ on the Airlander website [hybridairvehicles.com] even has an entry for "Is there a helium shortage?"

      According to the US Geological Survey, there are at least 50

      • by suutar ( 1860506 )

        Why not just use hot air? Sure, helium is more buoyant but as you point out it's also a limited resource. (Hydrogen is even more buoyant, and not as dangerous as people think, but has a terrible reputation)

        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          Use hot air with a hydrogen fuel to keep it hot. (Batteries MIGHT work for that.)

          OTOH, it would be slow. There's no way around that. It could be a good replacement for a luxury liner, I suppose. And it might be useful for freight that wasn't too heavy and didn't have an extremely urgent delivery requirement. That's a pretty niche market.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The best form of flying is a maglev train. 100% electric, zero emissions, as fast as current aircraft.

      Obviously they can't replace every flight, particularly long haul, but a lot of domestic and trans continental ones could be maglev. Much more comfortable and spacious too.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The big problem is landing them. They do not cope well with wind, but even at the best of times you need a big open area at the very least.

    • and that is the most realistic option to really reduce pollution

      There's nothing realistic about substituting a jet plane for a blimp. You think you're going to move 2.2 billion people a year at 1/10th of the speed with 1/1.5th of the passenger capacity, and 1/3rd of the payload (assuming Airlander's *big* ship). If so you're delusional.

  • by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @10:53AM (#64479037) Journal

    It's becoming pretty obvious that for these "advocates", the answer is "common people can't fly anymore".

    Important people on their private jets will be excluded from this new zealotry, of course.

    • This is not new information, it has been clear for years, incliding the IPCC, that the entire "movement" is an economic revolution, not about the science.

    • It's time to nationalize freight and the national network of rails under Conrail and passenger operations under Amtrak and start expanding hardcore. The biggest contributor to the problem is US domestic air travel.
      • by skam240 ( 789197 )

        While rail will certainly work in some places going all in on rail for the entire country would be horrendously expensive. We would need the rail to run to every city center it went to or no one would use it and the cost of buying all that urban property and the endless lawsuits that would follow the very wide spread use of eminent domain that this would require makes this completely unworkable in any reasonable amount of time or for any reasonable amount of money. All that money would be far more productiv

    • You've got the summary backwards. The airlines are advocating for alternative fuels so that they can pretend that what they're doing isn't harmful and more people will fly more. The author is the one saying, "No, this is bullshit. You really should just fly less."
      • The airlines already discourage people from flying.

        Have you been on a passenger plane in the last 20 years?

        Miserable experience and getting worse over time.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DesScorp ( 410532 )

        You've got the summary backwards. The airlines are advocating for alternative fuels so that they can pretend that what they're doing isn't harmful and more people will fly more. The author is the one saying, "No, this is bullshit. You really should just fly less."

        Then I got it exactly right. I stated that the authors of the report were essentially anti-human activities, and demand that people fly less.

        It's becoming pretty obvious that for these "advocates", the answer is "common people can't fly anymore".

    • Yes, you will not fly. Adapt.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Funny, when I listen to them I hear them saying that maybe everyone should have one or two free flights a year, and then the tax increases. So ordinary people can go on holiday or visit relatives, but it gets expensive for the business travellers who take many flights a year.

      Obviously it would need to be a personal allowance, companies would have to cover your mandatory work flights.

  • While it was never my best subject in school, it doesn't take much to understand the whole thermodynamic issue here.

  • by devslash0 ( 4203435 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:06AM (#64479073)

    This is exactly why we should make STEM education mandatory at schools in this day and age. So that basic physics and relation between mass, distance and energy required to move this mass from point A to B become common knowledge and so that everyone on this planet is capable of calling bullshit on claims like this before they get out of proportions.

    • by Hodr ( 219920 )

      What does this even mean, are you saying if they were knowledgeable about physics they would know that "sustainable" jet fuel is impossible? The Navy seems to think their 50-50 JP-5 / Camelina BioFuel counts as sustainable and Super Hornets seem to run just fine on the stuff.

      • by sfcat ( 872532 )
        We can make a sustainable jet fuel from nuclear power and sea water already yet look at the comments on this article. Every crackpot scheme that we know won't work has been suggested yet again. But the one solution we know will work we don't try. I'm not sure it is technical knowledge that is missing but perhaps. It seems to me that the media is full of scientifically illiterate people. So instead there should be a $1,000,000 fine on media organizations every time they publish a scientifically incorrec
        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          From the summary:

          To bring these fuels to the scale needed would require massive subsidies, the trade-offs would be unacceptable and would take resources aware from more urgent decarbonization priorities.

          We could have sustainable aviation fuel any time we wanted, probably using solar and wind to make it; it's cheaper than nuclear and it would be a great use of excess capacity. BUT it would cost more than the pumped out of the ground variety, about twice as much currently, and would require a massive effort t

        • You would have to be an idiot to use nuclear for that when you can get more capacity for less money with other solutions. Since the resulting fuel is cheap and easy to store, intermittency of supply is a non-issue.

    • STEM education has been mandatory at every public school for many decades (centuries?). It means nothing in this case. Even if this was as simple as you say, disproving it would still require data and time and effort. It's not like you can hear about waste products being turned into fuels and just know whether is not it's economically feasible.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not really a physics issue, it's where the alternative fuels come from. Biofuels are not good for the environment and not really carbon neutral.

      Hydrogen is clean but you need to mass produce it and transport it.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Sorry, biofuels CAN be carbon neutral. But it's more expensive to do it that way, so nobody does. Generally they're just greenwashing PR, so they don't try to make it actually work. Alternatively, they're a research project that gets written up as if it were a reasonable operational choice. (Or both, of course.)

        This is more a problem with our decision making strategy than it is a technical problem, even though of course there are technical components. We are really poor at dealing with long term proble

    • This is exactly why we should make STEM education mandatory at schools in this day and age. So that basic physics and relation between mass, distance and energy required to move this mass from point A to B become common knowledge and so that everyone on this planet is capable of calling bullshit on claims like this before they get out of proportions.

      I don't know what you think you are saying but you're doing so from a position of insane ignorance. You seem to think the issue is somehow the storage of energy? There's already been 100% SAF transatlantic flights. SAF has the same energy density as kerosene. You should really go and do one of those STEM degrees you're advertising.

      The problem is ultimately one of production and economics. SAF is hard to produce, doesn't have any meaningful scale at present, and doesn't have an upstream sourcing industry cap

  • by Required Snark ( 1702878 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:23AM (#64479107)
    At this point the propaganda is so predictable and omnipresent I don't even bother to go and read the article. This has the stench of the fossil fuel lobby on it like smog on a day when you're supposed to stay indoors and only take shallow breaths.
    • by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:35AM (#64479145) Journal

      At this point the propaganda is so predictable and omnipresent I don't even bother to go and read the article. This has the stench of the fossil fuel lobby on it like smog on a day when you're supposed to stay indoors and only take shallow breaths.

      Guess you missed this part:

      the report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank

      This isn't the oil companies. These are people that, at their core, basically want a lot of humans to go away, and the ones that are left, their lives will be severely restricted in the name of "the Earth".

      • These are people that, at their core, basically want a lot of humans to go away, and the ones that are left, their lives will be severely restricted in the name of "the Earth".

        Um. ... So you're right that this isn't the fossil fuel industry, and the rest of this crap is just fanciful thinking on your part. But since you've more-or-less identified your ideas as the opposite of these things, let me ask you: what is up with all the baby-making rhetoric that I've been hearing lately? There are a bunch of right-wing pundits who have been pushing the notion that having more babies, an ever-increasing volume of bloated human biomass, is a good thing. A positive. Where does that idea tha

        • by sfcat ( 872532 )
          Project much?
        • by HiThere ( 15173 )

          The economic reasons I've heard is that with an aging population, a much smaller percentage of younger folk need to support a much larger proportion of the elderly.

          I really think that this argument doesn't work in a world with improving AI and robots, but it's true currently, and has been true for the last century or so. (Probably really true only since antibiotics supplemented public sanitation, though.)

    • At this point the propaganda is so predictable and omnipresent I don't even bother to go and read the article. This has the stench of the fossil fuel lobby on it like smog on a day when you're supposed to stay indoors and only take shallow breaths.

      Errr the fossil fuel lobby is all in on SAF production. That is the main solution they are pushing. Are you saying they are investing billions upon billions to scale up SAF all the while undermining their investments before they've even had a chance to reach breakeven ROI?

      Your conspiracy theory makes no sense, your conspirators are conspiring against themselves.

  • by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:30AM (#64479125)

    Synthetic fuel costs more, because nature didn't put it in the ground pre-loaded with energy waiting to be released - you're going to need to add your own. If you use fossil fuels to do this you're making things worse. If you use green energy that could have gone elsewhere and someone else used fossil fuels instead, you're making things worse.

    But the increased cost would probably reduce air travel and be a net reduction in carbon release, so there's always that to consider.

  • by cellocgw ( 617879 ) <cellocgwNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:31AM (#64479131) Journal

    I would love to start a campaign to tax airline fuel heavily, and twice as heavily for freight-only flights (to avoid the obvious workaround, tax the shit out of packages shipped on passenger flights).

    The slogan: "Because it absolutely, positively, does NOT need to get there overnight."

    • The slogan: "Because it absolutely, positively, does NOT need to get there overnight."

      The ironic thing about your rant is, given the cost of airfreighting something this form of transportation of goods is usually reserved for things which *DO* need to get there overnight.

      • The ironic thing about your rant is, given the cost of airfreighting something this form of transportation of goods is usually reserved for things which *DO* need to get there overnight.

        Yeah, no. You've clearly never worked in manufacturing. And even without that, if something really has to be there the next day, it means a lot of screwups already happened.
        FedEx isn't getting rich on the microscopic part of their overnite shipping that is a true need for the next day

  • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:31AM (#64479133)

    Until you shutdown the existing AND NEW coal plants in China.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      AND India. (And probably elsewhere.)

    • Until you shutdown the existing AND NEW coal plants in China.

      The existing ones are being shutdown. That's what the new ones are for. There's a reason China has built many new coal plants and has had no significant increase in coal consumption in over a decade now.

      But hey, look over there, it's a China. We can't do anything until they fix their power plant. We just don't have the time to solve problems while also bitching about China (a country whose green investment far outpaces the west's in a per capita and total basis).

  • Well. better luck with the next planet then. This one seems to be incompatible with airlines.
  • While we wait for sustainable jet fuels to become practical, we could decarbonize a LOT of travel by building bullet trains between highly trafficked city pairs, [reddit.com] or wherever the land is flat and empty and therefore cheap to build through. Even JetBlue thinks short haul flights don't make sense. [sfexaminer.com]

  • by kbahey ( 102895 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:51AM (#64479191) Homepage

    People always talk about how flying is a major contributor to global warming ... but its share is actually not that high compared to other emissions.

    According to these data from 2020 [ourworldindata.org], aviation is 938 million tons.

    That is significant, but is actually dwarfed by things like fugitive emissions (3.22 billion tons, more than 3.4 X).

    And there are the big four sectors: (Electricity/Heat at 47.06 Bt, Transport at 7.29 Bt, Manufacturing/Construction at 6.22 Bt, Agriculture 5.87 Bt).

    I am not saying we should totally ignore aviation, but that efforts should be focused more on the largest contributors, because they will have more impact when reduced.

    But from what I see, there is little political will and leadership on GHG emissions, and there is little public buy-in that action is needed.

    Even here in Canada, only two provinces have adopted carbon taxes intended to change behaviour and reduce emissions. The rest of the provinces are pushing back on the federal plan for this carbon tax.

    Here is a McGill professor explaining how the carbon tax and rebate work [youtube.com]. And here is more on the carbon rebate [youtube.com].

    The opposition conservatives, who are surging well ahead of the the ruling party, have made "axe the tax" their war cry for the next election, and have not said what they will replace it by.

    So the trend of global warming and all of what it causes will be with us for some time unfortunately.

    • "People always talk about how flying is a major contributor to global warming ... but its share is actually not that high compared to other emissions."

      The fraction of the emissions isn't the main issue. The point is that flying is a luxury no one had until 1903. We are entirely capable of living without it. And as a society we are not willing to give up even a totally unnecessary luxury for the alleged crisis of climate change.

  • I imagine it must be pretty hard for any business model to survive as long as people can find workable alternatives to your product in a hole in the ground.
  • by eepok ( 545733 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @11:58AM (#64479215) Homepage

    Climate change is the result of a portfolio of greenhouse gas emissions. Aviation makes up ~2% of the global GHG profile while energy use for buildings makes up ~18% and road transportation makes up ~12%. We could literally negate the entire GHG contribution of the aviation industry if we improved road-vehicle fuel efficiency by 17%.

    It is a fallacy that every sub-industry needs to bend over backwards to solve every single issue regardless of the rationale fitness of the industry to do so. It holds us back from doing what we actually CAN do!

    We CAN eliminate the legal loophole in America that allows manufacturers to ignore the CAFE (tailpipe emission) standards when building pickup trucks.
    We CAN require that all new homes (multi-unit and single units) come built with full Level 2 EV charging functionality (not just capability, stubouts, or panel space).
    And so on...

    • by Ichijo ( 607641 )

      We could literally negate the entire GHG contribution of the aviation industry if we improved road-vehicle fuel efficiency by 17%.

      Improving road-vehicle fuel efficiency by 17% will make the aviation industry carbon-free?

      No, that would be magic. We need to work on making both more carbon-efficient.

    • Don't problem shift, just fix the aviation fuel waste problem. of the global GHG profile you claim aviation is 2% and road transport is 12%. We can reduce 1/7th of emissions between both by simply grounding planes. Air transportation has always been a huge money and energy sink; it is about time it pays it's fair share of taxes just like ground transportation.

      What am I saying? I will make it clear: tax aviation fuel at least as much as ground transport fuels. This will reduce usage and in the end also re
      • by suutar ( 1860506 )

        Sounds fine to me. Taking a 737 cross country uses about half as much fuel as driving my car; I can deal with the ticket being closer to what the gas would cost.

        • And how often would you take that car to drive cross-country? You wouldn't.

          So wth are you doing, moving so far out!?

          Let's suppose Jet A1 were taxed like everything else tomorrow. Yoy know that currently governments worldwide are subsidizing your ability to fly all of us into disaster, right. And you do it just because you can.

          AprÃs-nous, le déluge.

        • People say that, but if you bring a friend with you in the car you have now broken even with air travel. Just imagine the savings on a family trip!
  • Follow the money...

    BTW. Propeller airplanes are easier to electrify. Might be cheaper than a high speed train.

  • by pitch2cv ( 1473939 ) on Friday May 17, 2024 @01:17PM (#64479459)

    "" To bring these fuels to the scale needed would require massive subsidies ""

    Already jet A1 is tax exempt. If that isn't subsidies...

    If tomorrow kerosene were taxed like car fuel, that'll be the end of your all-in trips to the sun, too. Only because nearly all of aviation is tax-exempt, has it grow to the killer scale it's got now.

    How about we skip all subsidies to the petroleum industry for a start?

    • How about we skip all subsidies to the petroleum industry for a start?

      "That's an excellent idea. We'll get right on i..."... "JOBS"... "Who said that? Oh right oh right, no no no can't do that, can you imagine if the fossil fuels industry loses jobs! Drill baby drill!"

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