Used Cooking Oil As Aviation Fuel; Another Fantasy?
Climate Home News is trying to sell us “sustainable aviation fuel”, right out of the frying pan into the fantasy
You see while normal people are looking forward to flying somewhere on their summer holidays, to the scolds at CHN “in a warming world, flying comes at an environmental – and for climate-conscious passengers – a moral cost.”
So the airlines have turned to Used Cooling Oil (UCO) which is supposedly ‘sustainable’ and comes from ethical sources with supply chains deep into back alley greasy spoon kitchens in Southeast Asia so it’s got to be legit right?
The problem is that Europeans want to fly everywhere while maintaining their ‘net zero’ fantasy so, according to CHN, the airlines’ main hope “lies with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which today is made primarily from waste vegetable oil.”
And to their credit, CHN tries to pry into the vexed question “is SAF as green as its backers claim?” More and more such people, as the synthetic rubber hits the lack of road, are realising that any huckster or crank can call a thing green and you have to look behind the curtain.
Moreover, in trying to figure out whether you could even get enough of it to keep a steady stream of jet aeroplanes in the air over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and so forth, they discover that “a global supply chain that leads thousands of miles back to restaurant and household kitchens in Southeast Asia” is, of all things, rather shaky when it comes to documentation.
Indeed, naively or deeply cynically, “the international system of green certification relied on by fuel providers and the airline industry is rooted in self declaration by small-scale suppliers.” Who would never, ever fib for money, of course.
Aaack! Yes they would:
“We found widespread concern among collectors and traders that palm oil which is barely used or fresh – banned in Europe because of its links with rainforest destruction – is being passed off as [Used Cooking Oil] UCO, raising doubts about its climate benefits.”
Who saw that coming? Or that:
“we report on how the holy grail of e-SAF – not made from plants, but CO2 and green hydrogen – is still far from becoming the commercial success needed for truly guilt-free flying.”
Egad. ‘Green’ hydrogen not ready for prime time? But all this stuff actually misses the combustible point, which is that if you want to get a tube of metal weighing between 50 and 500 tonnes to hurtle through the sky at hundreds of kilometres per hour five miles up and full of people and their collection of apparently brick-laden carry-on bags, you are going to need some serious energy.
And to get that energy from cooking oil, new or used, you are going to have to … oh dear. Burn it.
Yup. Burn burn burn. Turning carbohydrates into… aaaaaaah!… water and CO2. Whereupon one group of cranks will holler that the water is secretly chemical manipulation of the weather or our minds, and another that CO2 is “carbon pollution.”
What the dickens does it matter whether it first cooked a French fry?
OK, it’s true that making it once instead of twice could lead to some reduction in the total ‘carbon’ wingprint. But the big point, and if you’ve ever stood near a running jet engine you’ll grasp how big, is the energy extracted from it to fly the dang plane.
By burning it and releasing the chemical energy in the complex molecule bonds by turning them into simpler ones.
Maybe take your next vacation at a science camp.
P.S. As for this fabled “green hydrogen” that by turning water and CO2 into carbohydrates would actually escape this trap, though not via vegetable oil, Canary Media whimpers that:
“The Senate’s plans for the “Big, Beautiful Bill” may just solidify green hydrogen’s demise. The budget legislation will quickly end hydrogen incentives, which could be the last straw for the already-struggling industry”.
So yeah, far from a commercial success. Something to do with the laws of physics.
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VOWG
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Every day another idiocy.
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Howdy
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I remember in the past, deisel vehicle owners buying fresh cooking oil and pouring it into their tanks at the car park.
It wasn’t long before this practice was made useless by raising the price of cooking oil.
You can process your own used oil to filter particles, and remove glycerine, though the mass ‘market’ isn’t viable – certainly not commercial aircraft.
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Gregoryno6
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Sometime back in the 1980s an Australian farmer became a minor celebrity when he started fueling his tractor with used oil from the local fish and chips.
Sounds like a great idea! What could possibly etc etc.
Nothing much really went wrong. But as I recall the tractor couldn’t run all the time on the used oil; it wasn’t good for the engine. And then, as other folk tried the idea, the second hand fuel not only became less available but the suppliers started charging for what they’d formerly given away. In a short time it became just another story in the Nice Try, But… file.
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