Fly with Biojet Fuel

[xoxoxoBruce]

This won't be here tomorrow, but it looks like it works and they'll keep working on it to make it economical and ready to go during one of the periodic greed-fest, petroleum spikes.

SAO PAULO (Dow Jones)--A leading Brazilian biofuel plant manufacturer, Tecbio, says it is confident that it will soon develop what could be considered the holy grail of airplane travel in a time of towering world oil prices: a technically and even economically viable bio-jet fuel by 2008
"Within a maximum of two years, we will have an answer to this," said Expedito Parente, the president of Tecbio in a phone interview with Dow Jones Newswires.

The company signed a memorandum of understanding with U.S. airplane maker Boeing last month to jointly develop the bio-aviation fuel, said Tecbio.
Under a verbal agreement between Boeing and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Tecbio fuel may then be sent to NASA for testing and evaluation, added a NASA spokesman on Thursday.

Tecbio says it can't reveal any further details about its product these days due to a confidentiality clause in the agreement. However, the company's new bio-jet fuel may be produced from oils extracted from at least a dozen different plants native to Brazil's north
and northeast region, according to an interview that Francisco Guimaraes, Tecbio's commercial spokesman, gave to local Diario do Nordeste newspaper last month.
Among these plants are different types of palm trees including the babacu palm, the coconut palm, and the macauba palm.

A secret formula for bio-aviation fuel has already existed in Brazil for over two decades.
In 1980, Parente - then a professor at the Federal University of Ceara in the northeastern state of the same name - pioneered Brazil's first biodiesel and biojet fuel experiments.
There was good reason for such experiments back then. Brazil was heavily dependent on imported oil in those years, and its economy was crippled by the oil shock of the 1970s.
Local scientists responded to the energy crisis by designing a range of innovative biofuel solutions to help lighten the country's energy burden, most significantly through the use of
home-grown sugarcane-based ethanol and ethanol technology.

"To produce biodiesel, we tested a wide variety of feedstocks: we used cotton, soy, sunflower, peanut, cow tallow, and fish oil," said Parente, adding that his team also conducted similar experiments from vegetable-based sources to produce biokerosene for aviation use.
At that time, however, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship, and such experiments - which were conducted under the auspices of the country's aerospace agency, or CTA - were kept under wraps as a state secret.

In 1984, at the pinnacle of the program, Brazil launched its first successful and covert flight with biokerosene, in a 600-kilometer journey from the municipality of Sao Jose dos Campos in Sao Paulo state to the country's capital of Brasilia. The plane for the test flight was
manufactured by local company Embraer, now the world's fourth-largest airplane maker.

Despite that technical triumph, however, the government abruptly dismantled the program that same year. "People were really just interested in ethanol back then," remembered
Parente. "The country was drunk on ethanol. And sugar prices were really low then, so millers wanted to divert cane to ethanol. There wasn't much government interest in biodiesel or biokerosene." Times have changed, however, as oil prices have raged over $70 per barrel
in recent months, and doomsday prophets are once again arguing that the twilight of peak oil
is nigh. "It's much more pressing now than it was back then to fill the void that petroleum will leave," said Parente. "Our great challenge is to develop alternative energies - solar, wind, wave, and biofuels."

In 2001, Parente and other investors formed Tecbio - with headquarters in the Ceara state capital of Fortaleza - to capitalize on the world's growing need for renewable energy through the manufacture of state-of-the-art biodiesel plants.
To date, the company - which currently has annual revenues of roughly $15 million from its engineering division - has just built one biodiesel plant, located in the northeastern state of Piaui, for the country's leading biodiesel supplier, Brasil Ecodiesel, the parent company of
Brasil Biodiesel. However, the company is planning to build another 11 plants by the end of
2007, six of them already contracted by Brasil Ecodiesel, said Parente.

In addition, the company is also studying ways of using waste sub-products from biodiesel production in order to yield more energy, a process that could be technically ready within five years time, he added.

Still, Parente never forgot his past experiments with bio-aviation fuel - and when the possibility arose this year to once again carry the idea further - he said he jumped at the chance. "It makes sense now, with oil prices where they are," he said. There are several advantages to using biokerosene in jet planes rather than other biofuels, says Parente.

First, biodiesel is just too viscous a fuel to work properly in jet engines. Meanwhile,
while ethanol can be used in airplanes without any technical problems - Embraer, for example, already manufactures ethanol-fueled airplanes - the biofuel is highly inefficient compared to conventional kerosene.

A jet engine will burn through roughly 2 liters of ethanol for every 1 liter of aviation fuel.
Biokerosene, on the other hand, is ideal for use in jets, since it is consumed at a ratio that is equivalent to normal aviation fuel, said Parente.
And, of course, it is made from renewable sources.

Whether or not Tecbio's bio-jet fuel takes off in the future, however, Parente points out that the sector has an incredible range of possibilities just starting with biodiesel.
"There are about 90 species of Amazonian plants that can be used to produce oils that can be used as biodiesel feedstocks," he said. "Our vision is that parts of the Amazon could be reforested with these plants to produce these feedstocks, without a loss to the region's biodiversity," he said.

No one at Boeing was available on Thursday to comment. However, NASA is already actively pursuing research in alternative jet fuels - through its Subsonic Fixed Wing project - "to both reduce emissions and increase the nation's energy independence," said a NASA spokesman in
an email.

Brazil is one of the world's leading biofuel producers, as well as the world's top ethanol exporter.

[xoxoxoBruce]

If Biojet Fuel doesn't blow your skirt up, synthetic Jetfuel may be the future.

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- A 46-year-old jet lumbered off a runway this week on a flight that could lead to a new domestic fuel source, not just for the military but for commercial aviation as well.

An Air Force crew took the aging B-52 bomber aloft for more than two hours above the Mojave desert test range here in the military's first jet flight powered with synthetic fuel.

Air Force Undersecretary Ronald Sega declared the flight a success, even though an unrelated technical problem -- a balky hydraulic landing gear -- prompted the crew to cut short planned test maneuvers.

The Air Force's experiment is being watched by a commercial aviation industry eager to stabilize and cut fuel costs, which have soared along with the price of oil this year.

Sega, the Air Force's top energy official, said establishing the viability of synthetic fuel "is potentially important to others as well as" the military. Once testing on the B-52 is complete, he said, the Air Force will try the fuel in more modern jet engines, including those that power the KC-135 airborne refueling tanker, which uses the same engines as the Boeing 737, a workhorse of airlines.

"Some of the engines we have are the same as in commercial aviation," said Sega, a pilot and former space shuttle astronaut who rode in the cockpit for the test flight.

"We think this is a test that has potentially huge ramifications," said Maj. Gen. Curtis Bedke, commander of the test center here.

The Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade group, said it "strongly supports the development of alternatives to traditional oil-based jet fuel."

The bomber took off just after dawn with two of its eight engines powered with a 50-50 mixture of jet fuel, called JP-8, and a colorless synthetic fuel produced by a Tulsa-based company, Syntroleum. The synthetic was produced from natural gas, but officials said coal -- which the nation has in abundance -- could be used to produce an identical fuel.

The Air Force previously conducted more than 100 hours of ground tests with the fuel mixture. Within days, it plans to conduct more test flights, including use of the synthetic in all eight of the B-52's engines.

The objective of the tests is to establish that the 50-50 synthetic mixture produces engine performance equal to that of pure jet fuel, Air Force officials said. Their hope is that a switch to a synthetic mixture can be made without modifying aircraft engines, fuel systems and performance standards. The B-52was chosen because its relatively old-fashioned fuel system permits crewmembers to manually direct fuel from specific tanks to each engine, making it easy to isolate the new mixture and measure its performance. Also, said Col. Arnie Bunch, crews were trained to land the craft under partial power if two engines fail.

Sega said engines running the new fuel appeared to operate identically to the other engines, though researchers will pore over flight data before reaching conclusions. He said the Air Force may also consider other mixtures, including a higher proportion of synthetic, which tests suggest burns with less pollution than regular fuel.

While new to the military's skies, synthetic fuel has a long history. It was championed in the late S by the Carter administration, before the collapse of oil prices reduced interest and economic viability.

Sega said the method of turning raw carbon sources such as coal or natural gas into usable fuel was developed by German scientists in the 1920s and used briefly by Germany during World War II and later by South Africa.

The Air Force, which is the military's largest user of fuel, began looking at the idea anew in 1999, said Michael Aimone, the Air Force's assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics. He said the Air Force uses 2.6 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, at a cost of $4.5 billion.

Commercial U.S. airlines burn more than 53 million gallons of jet fuel per day, the industry group says. Fuel now amounts to 20% to 30% of total airline operating costs, twice the historical average, it said.

The project took on a new priority after President Bush, in his Jan. 31 State of the Union speech, set the goal of using technology to replace more than 75% of oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

Bedke and other military officials said they don't know yet what kind of cost savings, if any, could be gained from using synthetic fuel. But its viability has grown with the price of oil. Beyond such savings, however, the officials said there are strong potential benefits of synthetic fuel, including cleaner emissions and a stable domestic energy source.

Hopefully this program will have legs, with the price of oil declining, for a while. At least long enough to perfect it and it's manufacture, so it will be ready to roll when we need it.

[MaggieL]

Should be interesting to come up wih a usable formulation that doesn't take more petroleum to produce than it saves.

And biological contamination of jet fuel is a known problem...:-)

[xoxoxoBruce]

It kind of reminds me of the flying car articles in Popular Science/Mechanix.
Well, yes......it can be done.....BUT.....er, we have issues...um....

But that said, it's nice to know that much of the basic research has been done to get them pointed in the right direction. Usually it's easier to make incremental improvements to something that works.