High Flying

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Can you make ultra-performing diesel and jet fuels from essential oils found in hemp, a/k/a cannabis sativa, a/k/a marijuana? Turns out, you can.

Beta caryophyllene — regardless of source — is in the news this month because of Ben Harvey and his troop of advanced military fuel Tony Starks at China Lake, home to the Naval Air Warfare Center, Weapons Division. Now, they’ve have come up with an ultra-performance renewable diesel, and a high-performance renewable jet fuel candidate, made from that essential oil.

China Lake is a complete misnomer — there’s no lake and it’s not in China. In fact, it’s located on a pretty good candidate for “the most inhospitable strech of US Highway 395,” about 40 miles or so north of Edwards Air Force Base in the heart of the Mojave Desert.

Right now, a tremendous amount of fuel flows out of the Middle East, and the US spends an estimated $99 billion annually to keep the global fuel sea-lanes open. Meanwhile, there are some unfriendly regimes, who obtain funding for considerable global mischief from selling petroleum or raising money from amongst those who do. The cost of that petroleum is highly volatile, making it tough for the Navy to control costs and assure a flow of money for training and operations.

For all those reasons, the Navy is looking for alternative fuels, focusing in the past decade on domestically-produced renewable biofuels. But in the Navy’s case, they’ve insisted on infrastructure-compatible, cost-competitive fuels. They’re happy to buy, but they’re not changing the ships and planes and not interested in paying more on an on-going basis. For research and certification purposes, they’ve bought test quantities at “minuscule quantities” prices — but that’s as far as it goes.

Recently and intriguingly, a new opportunity has been consistently cropping up in research. What if alternative fuels could be developed that not only meet the renewable, domestic, cost and infrastructure requirements — but actually outperform conventional fuels?

But here’s the better news. Regardless of performance in the nozzle, there are super-dense terpenoids that can be used to make ultra-performing military fuels — both diesel and jet.

This article, published by the American Chemical Society in Energy & Fuels, concludes that a new diesel fuel can be made from a blend of 65% carophyllene and 35% SPK, meets all the performance needs of a diesel fuel, and has roughly 4% more energy content in the fuel. A new jet fuel made of 40% carophyllene and 60% SPK hit all the performance goals and equalled conventional fuel in energy content.You can get the full scoop here — keep your built-in, shockproof, “replete with scientific terminology alarm” on, though. But the article is filled with valuable nuggets of hard data.