New plane runs on alcohol
I attended a seminar about 6 months ago on bioproducts and commercialization. The Professor speaking said the big breakthrough in commercial biofuels is going to be in the military aircraft field, for a few reasons...
a) Automobile manufacturers are increasingly focused on hybrid, and not biofuel production...
b) The US military doesn't care about FAA rules and their classifications on aircraft fuel
c) The US military has the money to spend on R&D, and
d) It's politically attractive as a commercial fuel alternative to middle eastern oil.
Well - it's not a military jet, but it is a jet none-the-less... a commercial aircraft in Brazil is the first to use ethanol as a fuel.
Bioproducts and biofuels don't mean much unless they're commercially viable. But steps like this mean commercial viability is very real. And with commercial viability will arrive a whole new set of challenges - like building trust and credibility to a skeptical public.
2 Comments:
I just hope they're not jumping too fast on ethanol. It seems the production of ethanol is causing undue pollution such as here, and there are some reasonable questions about other problems it can cause when used as an additive or as a fuel as indicated in California here. MTBE turned out to be a disaster even though it did accomplish the one thing it was supposed to do. The trade-offs were not tolerable. I do like the idea of an energy source we can produce instead of relying on fossil fuels. I just hope they are progressing with reasonable caution.
for whatever reason the links did not get included in my post. They are as follows...
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/topstory/8019/8019notw3.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/12/31/BAGB8418VG1.DTL
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