Biofuels for Air Travel Waiting For Takeoff

March 11, 2019

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(Our Daily Planet) Last week, leaders in the aviation sector met to discuss how to speed the development of the infrastructure and technology needed to wean airplanes off fossil fuels and onto biofuels instead. Airplane manufacturers have until now focused on investing in improving the fuel efficiency of new airplanes, but because of the growth in air travel, those advances have not resulted in a decrease overall in carbon emissions from the air travel. The group met in Seattle because the Port of Seattle, which operates Sea-Tac International Airport, has pioneered using biofuels at its airport and now has set a goal of having 25 percent of its jet fuel come from local, low-carbon sources by 2035.

Those sources could include oilseed crops like canola, greasy waste from restaurants and slaughterhouses and piles of wood left by logging operations.
Experts in the region believe that there’s enough raw material in the Northwest to produce 400 million gallons of renewable jet fuel a year.
As a first step, Boeing announced that it will begin offering airlines and operators the chance to have their jets powered by biofuel when they leave Boeing’s delivery centers in Seattle and Everett, Washington and Alaska Airlines immediately signed up.
According to Boeing, since it was first tested 10 years ago, airlines around the world have flown nearly 170,000 passenger flights on a blend of biofuel and petroleum fuel.

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According to the former Navy Secretary, Ray Mabus, the Navy still uses biofuels today, not because of any environmental benefits, but because they make the armed forces more effective. “We have SEAL teams that are net zero in terms of energy,” Mabus said. “They can stay out almost indefinitely.”

Why This Matters: Biofuels for the aviation sector cut their emissions by up to 80 percent, according to Boeing.

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Since biofuels are technologically feasible today without modification to planes or airport infrastructure, with just a nudge from the government – the Green New Deal perhaps — biofuels in aviation will likely take off. READ MORE

Green airplanes? Not on the horizon yet (KUOW)

Port of Seattle, Alaska Airlines and Boeing Partnership to Supply Aviation Biofuel (Aviation Voice)

Boeing to Offer Biofuel for Airlines to Fly New Airplanes Home (Boeing)

Amazon Plans to Cut Shipping Emissions With Shipment Zero (Our Daily Planet)

Excerpt from KUOW: Energy giant BP advertises its “banana fuel”— jet fuel made from food waste. But food waste, while abundant, can’t hold a candle to all the energy used in the aviation sector.

Converting all the waste fats and greases in the U.S. into renewable jet fuel would produce 2 billion gallons of fuel, according to renewable-energy investor Bruce Comer with Ocean Park Advisors.

That’s only about the annual fuel usage at Los Angeles International Airport.

In addition, many of those “wastes” aren’t really wastes, Comer said: They are often converted into other products like animal feed and detergents.

For the towering piles of logging “slash” left behind after timber operations around the Northwest, supply isn’t the problem.

“We burn these slash piles, and now they're a liability to society because we deal with their smoke,” Wolcott said.

Collecting them and processing them into fuel could tackle the smoke problem as well as provide a new source of energy.

But building a refinery to process forest residue into fuel can be a risky, billion-dollar venture, according to Wolcott.

“There are there more than 100 feedstocks today that are actually being used to create sustainable fuels,” former Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said. “We have to do this with a real sense of urgency,” he said.

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The Port of Seattle and others’ definitions of sustainable fuel require that it have a reduced carbon footprint and that it not displace any food production.

Other major emitters of climate-wrecking carbon — like cars and buildings — can run on electricity more easily. But banks of batteries are a lot heavier than tanks of fuel, and long-haul air transport is expected to depend on liquid fuel for the foreseeable future. READ MORE