AndyinPA wrote: ↑Tue Nov 28, 2023 7:19 pm
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... lands-saf/
For the first time ever, a commercial plane flew across the Atlantic Ocean without using fossil fuels.
Virgin Atlantic said the test flight Tuesday from London to New York was powered only by sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, a broad category of jet fuel that creates fewer carbon emissions than standard kerosene blends. The fuel on this flight was made from waste fats and plant sugars and emits 70% less carbon than petroleum-based jet fuel, according to a press release. It landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Tuesday afternoon.
The EU has mandated aggressive use of SAF in relatively short time frames. Everyone's working on it aggressively. The engines don't really care where their fuel comes from as long as it has chemical composition within certain ranges. There's work to be done to ensure that the engine control computers will account for differences between SAF burn characteristics and that of Jet-A, just like how automobile engine control computers have to be reprogrammed to deal with European gas formulations versus American.
The biggest near-term issue is volume production of SAF. On one axis, it's obvious that scaling up production from biomass of any sort is going to be tough. There's only so much bacon grease to go around (I'm helping by eating bacon every opportunity I can, saving the planet by being the opposite of a vegan). And we don't have any facilities operating at scale today, so there could be many unforeseen engineering problems in building something that produces consistent product. Perhaps a retired engineer who built oil refineries (*cough* Volkonski *cough) could contribute some perspective on how hard that is.
But the other tricky issue is making sure that the energy required to refine biomass inputs is less than that required to refine oil. If we considered the total energy cost to create a gallon of SAF versus to refine crude oil to get a gallon of Jet-A, we might find out that SAF is actually a net negative. I don't know one way or another where SAF is today and where it's likely to go tomorrow, but policy makers need to understand this so that SAF is an actual environmental benefit and not just a feel-good showcase.
We've been down that road before. Early environmentalist movements focused on the hazards of nuclear waste storage and steered people towards fossil fuels. They thought the fossil fuel problem was solved with scrubbers that lowered particulate and visible smog. If any scientists researched overall CO2 levels and climate change at the time, they were outshouted by the anti-nuke activists. We now have a much bigger problem than nuclear waste storage, and it may not be reversible in time. So we don't want to go down that road with SAF of a foolish local optimization that actually causes a bigger global problem.
Politically, SAF is a very important focus area for the EU's industrial strategy, so we'll see them stick with it even if there's a negative financial cost to SAF over fossil fuels. The European population has always been more sensitive to environmental issues as a voter issue than Americans, even before Trump made climate change denial a large-scale thing and even if European per-capita fossil fuel use isn't that much better than other advanced economies.
SAF is good for the European hight-tech industrial base. I've long said (including on The FogBow) that there are two capabilities a country must have to enter the club of first-rank high-tech economies: the ability to make current-generation semiconductor chips and the ability to make cutting-edge jet engines. Europeans are OK but not world class in both; the US retains its lead for the foreseeable future. Japan and Korea are both big players in semiconductors and Taiwan is starting to acquire lithography and design capability as well as being the global manufacturing hub. The EU is still far and away dominant in lithography, the key technology for chip-making, courtesy of Dutch chipmaking equipment giant ASML, but the EU doesn't have a leading position in much of the rest of the semiconductor technology chain. (As a side note, ASML's development facility for next-generation Extreme Ultraviolet [EUV] lithography is in Connecticut, not in Europe, because, surprisingly, the pool of optical engineering talent in Fairfield County is deeper than anywhere else in the world, even versus Germany or Silicon Valley.)
In aircraft engines, Japan and Korea are coming up fast. They and the Taiwanese are also getting good very quickly at airframes and aerosystems (doodads like radios, radar, landing gear assemblies, hydraulics, generators, actuators, etc.). India is lurking out there and learning, with a lot of engineering capability (much trained in the West) and a go-it-alone geopolitical strategy, but they're not as far along as other people... yet.
Europe's shining global success in aircraft manufacturing is Airbus, which is now the global leader in airliners, in part because of Boeing's disastrous screw-ups over the last 10+ years. But the European military aircraft makers have some serious headwinds. The American-built F-35 has taken the European market by storm for advanced fighter jets. Current 4th generation programs like the Saab Gripen, the French Rafale and the Eurofighter Typhoon are good 4th generation planes, but they have struggled for years to get the production volumes to be economically viable and they are not sufficiently cheaper than the F-35 to win much new business. The German acquisition of F-35s in 2022 sparked by the Ukraine invasion and last year's Swiss buy could become a significant inflection point in the viability of European-built 4th generation fighters.
The Europeans have sixth-generation fighter projects under way (Germany is leading one and the UK/Japan are leading another). But these are extremely risky, and Brexit has turned the Brits into competitors for the EU effort rather than partners.
Back to engines as the marker of advanced economies: Rolls-Royce is struggling financially for a variety of reasons and Safran has challenges in broadening its success beyond its 50/50 partnership with GE in building the phenomenally successful CFM56 engine that powers smaller Airbus airliners and a number of other aircraft. While there are smaller engine makers in Central Europe (Poland, Czech Republic and Ukraine) that are poised for success, it's going to be tough for the European engine leaders to maintain position in the engine market.
I've gone on this long-winded discussion of the state of the aircraft industry to suggest that SAF is essential to the Europeans, to help them buttress their aerospace industry in the face of strengthening competition, both from existing leaders (the US) and emerging players. However, there are significant challenges that will need to be solved on the economic front for it to become the operating model for the global aviation industry.
I'm absolutely in favor of increasing sustainability in aviation. However, given the risks that must be taken to get there, I'm tempering my optimism or my assessments as to whether and when this all takes off (no pun intended). As always, I think the focus for sustainability efforts needs to be on energy consumption for built environments (40%-50% of energy/fuel usage) and surface transportation (~40% of energy use). Aviation is only about 3% of hydrocarbon consumption (IIRC) and is less than ocean shipping. And we can do much more, much faster for building energy use and automotive than we can for aviation. Again, not an excuse for doing nothing, just trying to put it in perspective.
Fascinating stuff. That would have been scary AF if he'd managed to pull those handles. (And would have made for an interesting episode, though that's not actually a good thing...)
Not sure what I'll binge on next!
During the pandemic, we tried getting a wheelchair for Dr. Vicklund. It took four tries to get something that fit (they kept sending extra-wide chairs for bariatric patients, but they don't fit through normal doorways and are too wide for Dr. Vicklund to manually drive). The first one was our fault, but the next two were the fault of the shipper. Unfortunately, one of them we opened before we realized it was the wrong size, so we would have had to pay for it to be shipped back. In the end, I gave it away to the guy who replaced our garage door (he had a mother that needed a bariatric wheelchair, and I hadn't heard back from the charities I'd reached out to). Made a grown man cry that day. Even the most basic wheelchair is expensive and difficult to get.
You can't wait until life isn't hard anymore before you decide to be happy.
