Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
44% Positive
Analyzed from 3384 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#fuel#oil#more#jet#energy#coconut#poor#carbon#hydrogen#food
Discussion Sentiment
Analyzed from 3384 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
Discussion (90 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
More egregiously FAME is a polar solvent that eats your elastomers, even some fluoroelastomers. It will also attack your polysulfide tank sealant. The remark that it's "technically feasible" to decrease oxygen through hydrogenation is not at all sufficient. Now you're into requiring catalyst beds and a hydrogen plant which makes this much less appealing. Plus ester instability when you sink heat into fuel. Plus freeze point. This is literally a tracked contaminant banned above mg/kg levels that doesn't even have very good properties otherwise they want to run as a major constituent of fuels.
Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.
My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.
Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
International markets and all that...
Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi...
Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.
There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1] But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense.
This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though.
Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle.
Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).
If we were to globally tax oil extraction proportional to the actual cost of equivalent carbon capture I imagine biofuels would begin to look quite reasonable.
That said it seems to me that tying the energy and food supply together economically in such a direct manner is likely to have some deleterious effects on poor countries.
In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel.
But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel. [0]
Coconuts could be a breakthrough!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel
If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.
Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.
Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...
Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?
Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.
Me neither, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating possible breakthroughs in decarbonisation.
Who are you to dictate where Chinese and Indians can and cannot visit or enjoy delicious watermelons?
If someone wants to eat a watermelon like a dirty slave that is their business and you are not going to deny them that right. This is pure insanity.
China and India are the biggest domestic aircraft markets in the world. The manufacturers literally cannot keep up with the demand. If trains were more effective they would have built them already. If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.
I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses, it would take a year to respond to them all.
Air travel is not going anywhere and we are not setting society back 100 years on account of dubious climate histrionics.
Want to save the environment?
Ditch smartphones (future e-waste) and all their useless apps (and resource-sucking infra) we could all live without tomorrow.
Turns out we were as effective in moving goods and services and leisure travel in 2008 as we are today.
We just couldn't post to social media about how uncomfortable the airplane seat was and how the onboard Wi-Fi sucked.
I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible.
BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well.
Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less.
I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation.
Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…
I.e. measures like massive taxation (also for private jets of course).
As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
> https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...
It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.
Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.
Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.
The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.
Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.
Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?
Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.
Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification.
The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on.
I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive.
The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.
I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.
A drop-in compatible jet fuel can be made by hydrodeoxygenation of biomass, using Virent's process. The waste cellulose in current US waste streams would be more than enough to displace all current US jet fuel consumption. An extra source of hydrogen would be needed to do this, but hydrogen can be made renewably (and, indeed, that's a good way to provide dispatchable demand to help deal with renewable intermittency, and will have to be done anyway to displace the use of natural gas to make hydrogen.)
As an example, a house in NH can generate a lot of excess solar power in the summer months when it uses hardly any electricity. If all that energy could be stored as hydrogen, in the winter (when solar power is less due to the far northern latitude and snow covering the panels) it could draw down on the hydrogen to generate electricity and also use it for a backup heat fuel.
> New research found that aviation biofuel made from coconut oil can power a small jet engine about as efficiently as traditional jet fuel, with lower unburned hydrocarbon emissions, though the blends burn more fuel and emit slightly more carbon monoxide.
It will be similar (worse?) implementing a new type of fuel for commercial jets, especially when it comes to wide adoption across a majority of countries around the world. Basically you need something which is as least as reliable, clean (I.e., won’t clog/solidify), non corrosive, etc. and remain that way after being mixed with standard jet fuel.
I too want to see alternatives but expect to see more failures than success at this stage.
biofuels won't work. they take too much land and are inefficient in terms of producing.
This statement seems disingenuous. Surely they did not invent a novel way to extract coconut oil as part of this study and not choose to publish it. Surely this is just existing byproduct that already has plenty of commercial use.
If you look at how many coconut plantations you would need to make even a measurable dent in jet fuel demand, this would be an unmitigated environmental disaster.
I want to solve climate change as much as the next guy, but chopping down all our tropical rainforests to make it happen sacrifices exactly what we're trying to save.
Not to mention another glaring omission here: "By adding acetone to a mixture of alcohol and coconut oil"
How much energy is needed to produce those two ingredients, and the things THEY are made from?
If I were a junior-high teacher, I'd probably give this paper a C.
https://youtu.be/Zvhd3tt7fx4
If you thought habitat destruction from palm oil was bad, that would be nothing compared to coconut oil making up any significant fraction of jet fuel.
I don't think the answer is obvious. And I think many of us are blind or numb to environmental harms of oil outside of carbon exhaust and the occasional spill, simply because we've accepted it as status quo.
The issue with oil is CO2 and other green house gases and then the occasional oil spill or leak. Land area wise they don’t take up much space
Various other bio-fuel and synthesized replacements for petroleum-based jet fuel have been tried and are in development. The aviation industry is very slow to approve and adopt changes.