A deal announced overnight between Boeing and China to evaluate a sustainable biofuels industry in the People’s Republic of China is part of a push to turn shit and other biological wastes into a clear fluid that will burn exactly the same in a jet engine as aviation-grade kerosene.
It’s the “killer innovation” that air transport is chasing to end the burning of fuels that release fossil sourced carbon.
Is it being over-sold or over-hyped? No one can be sure given the commercial secrecy surrounding the competing projects, but Boeing and Airbus keep pouring cash into them to ensure they lock up as much of any future benefit as they each can.
Imagine a China in which a network of biofuel refineries turn the crap that pours into its rivers into the fuel that it will need to run the 3770 new airliners of all sizes Boeing forecasts it will need by 2030.
That’s what is driving the Boeing-sponsored deal.
China is 1.3 billion people on the move to their place in the sun, but who can’t get there with the limitations of current energy technology.
It has an economy that “qualifies” tens of millions of new consumers each year for whom air and high-speed rail travel is being made affordable. In the past five years the average growth in numbers of China air passengers was 16%, with air freight growing 15% per year over the same interval.
Boeing’s partners in the China program include PetroChina, Honeywell’s UOP division, Air China, and engine maker United Technologies.
There is also a second agreement involving the Chinese Academy of Science’s Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology concerning algae based biofuel developments.
The Boeing deal follows an agreement between British Airways and the US alternative fuel developer Solena to take over a single suburban waste reprocessing plant in London by 2014 and turn sh-t and vegetable matter into enough fuel to replace all the kerosene it puts in the fleet of small jets it flies to Europe, and on a special executive service to New York, from London City Airport.
In the past five years alternative fuel researchers have devised and proven multiple pathways for refining a wide variety of organic wastes into the identical end product of a synthetic jet fuel that could be run through existing airliner engines without modification.
At a recent Sydney green skies conference Billy Glover, the MD for Environmental Strategy at Boeing, said biofuels from a range of sources would become affordable in existing airliners by 2015.
This would depend, at least in the early stages, on pricing assisted by emissions trading scheme benefits, where the costs of using the fossil carbon releasing component could be offset by the biofuel component.
Alternative fuel observers are beginning to wonder whether the airline sector is pursuing a course that will inevitably bring it into collision with the vested or sunk interests of big oil in the production, refining and distribution of fossil fuels, which in the London and China projects, is replaced by the equivalent of cottage industries, locally feeding airports and perhaps maritime and surface transport users.
Whatever the fight for the spoils of new biofuel technologies, the answer to eliminating the fossil fuels that cause global warming could already be immediately behind us.
Ben, hard as it may be to believe, but there’s not enough raw material – even coming out of Canberra – to supply a significant amount of fuel from sewage.
At a rough estimate, the good citizens of Melbourne produce about 1600 tonnes of feces a day.
Three quarters of that is water, so you’re left with about 400 tonnes of organic compounds.
Assume for a moment you converted all 400 tonnes into biofuel. That’s still less than twice the maximum fuel capacity of an A380.
It may be worth distinguishing between the carbon content and the energy content of the fuel.
It might well be efficient to collect non-fossil carbon from sludge, wheat husks, straw, etc, then upgrade it to a hydrocarbon using energy from another source. Because it is just energy, it can come into the process just as electricity. Whether that electricity is from coal, wind, solar, nuclear may well be invisible to the consumer.
Indeed its fossil component may be invisible to the auditor as well. Perhaps that is why the scheme has been proposed for a “developing country”, to avoid close scrutiny.
Robert,
Fortunately it seems the ‘other’ biological wastes may tip the scales a bit. The London project claims (on the Solena site) to work with 500,000 tonnes of annual waste and produce 16 million gallons of synthetic kerosene. Of course, show and tell time for these claims draws nigh.
Roger,
The source of the energy inputs in all of these processes really counts, as you point out. The NASA N+3 ‘airliner of the future’ papers underscore this in relation to the light weight battery packs that Boeing anticipated in its SUGAR hybrid electric/liquid fuel study. If the power stored comes from coal fired stations little is gained. I published extracts from those papers in Plane Talking at:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2010/05/20/five-amazing-airliners-for-the-future/
I now understand that some of the material may have been commercial-in-confidence but had been inadvertently linked to on the NASA site. We are left guessing as to which bits were ‘secret’, and the links are broken.
It is exceedingly unlikely that aviation fuel could be produced on a sufficient scale in Australia from sewage, especially situated where most people live – SYD/ MEL. The alteration in infrastructure alone would surely make it cost prohibitive. London is well placed to do this with the massive sewage treatment plants west of the city.
However, there is another possibility and that is brine algae grown in coastal locations using seawater as the medium. Salt is produced in sim. ponds and the colour is red. That’s algal biomass and Dunaliella salina cells to be exact. With expertise in Australia and plenty of sunshine and sea water it can be done. The costs measure up pretty well with current costs, the R&D is well underway and there are trained people in Australia to run the plants. early days, but a pilot plant is underway near Karratha.
This is a step in the right direction as it is gonna make this environment pollution free. We are in the middle of an energy crisis and we need to find out its viable alternatives at the earliest and biological fuel or sun energy are one of them.
Quick Trim