Posted on 10/02/2009 7:11:27 AM PDT by larry hagedon
Sustainable Oils, Solazyme, Cargill to supply 600,000 gallons of jet biofuel to US military
In Washington, the US Air Force has ordered a total of 400,000 gallons of renewable biofuels from Sustainable Oils, Cargill and Solazyme for testing as a military aviation fuel. the companies, in turn, will use UOP’s processing technology to convert oil from camelina, algae and animal fats into renewable jet fuel.
According to UOP, fuel will be delivered in 2009 and 2010 to support flight certification and testing efforts. Combined with a 190,000 gallon US Navy order recently placed for algal fuels, using feedstock provided by Solazyme, the military has ordered a total of 600,000 gallons of renewable jet fuel over a 2-year period, in a series of contracts issued by the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC). For the Air Force order, DESC tapped Cargill and Sustainable Oils to provide jet fuel made from rendered animals fats and camelina, respectively.
(Excerpt) Read more at biofuelsdigest.com ...
Obviously we still need to drill here drill now.
Sustainable Oils, Cargill and Solazyme ..connections connections connections
That, too.
I'm sure that engineers could chime in on this.
OMG! Did the gubment finally get something right?!!
But I am reminded that one of the key advantages which helped the British win the Battle of Britain was that the Spitfires and Hurricanes were getting fuel of superior quality.
As long as the quality is as high as possible, I don't care where our jets get the stuff.
http://www.elon.edu/pendulum/Story.aspx?id=1201
With biodiesel that meets the [ASTM] D-6751 specification, there have been over 45 million miles of successful, problem-free, real-world operation with B20 blends in a wide variety of engines, climates, and applications. The steps taken by the biodiesel industry to work with the engine companies and to ensure that fuel meets the newly accepted ASTM standards provides confidence to users and engine manufacturers that their biodiesel experiences will be positive and trouble-free.
I’m not an engineer, but military engines are rarely as persnickety about the grade of fuel they use as civilians are. For one thing, military engines have no emissions management systems, as your car does, so they aren’t likely to clog. Also, even though Jet-A and diesel are nearly the same, jets use it in a very different way. A turbine is essentially an external-combustion engine, which uses the combustion process to turn the impellers in its compressor, and which generates incredibly high temperatures. A reciprocating diesel engine has a much lower tolerance for temperature, so it has to use a fuel that is less likely to create deposits when burned at lower temps. Not to mention that your car will probably run just fine on nearly pure biodiesel, but the manufacturer wants to minimize any warranty repairs that might stem from someone trying to run homebrew biodiesel that is largely glycerin. By excluding biodiesel, they are making an accounting decision, not an engineering one.
So we can kill people at the same time we can be kinder to mother earth? How bizarre. This is as stupid as forcing soldiers to use non lead bullets in firing ranges.
I’ve run cars on pure vegetable oil from the bottle.
“a form of perversion to pass over, literally, the oil resources in the ground”
If we’re talking perversion, how about letting US resources sit idle, drilling a big hole in the ground, pouring in product from the suadies & calling it a “strategic reserve”
Nice! This ought to go well with the lack of water in the San Juaquin Valley and 25% crops this year!
Corn to be $8 an ear next year? Sheesh.
You know sometimes our “pig military” does do nice things.
Like now they are using C 17s to haul supplies to Samoa for disaster relief.
ALternate fules for the military are important. Remember, the German war effort carried on for more than a year on mostly ‘alternate fuels’....where would be be if the A-rabs decided to cut us off - again?
I've seen stories saying that that was possible with older diesels.I think the newer ones might be more complex...or maybe it's just for emissions purposes.But we're talking military jets here.If standard jet fuel (or some special blend made to DoD specs) works...why fool around with success? Unless,of course,you harbor some secret contempt for our military.
(The "you" I referred to is Hussein...not you)
The GELL POINT of 100% biofuel is about 37 degrees (F). Ahould be interesting at 50,000 feet!
The only fuel that could potentially work and that is being developed by Bell Bio-Energy! This is REAL oil, not subject to GELL at temps above 0 degrees(F).
http://www.bellplantation.com/images/BPH_Newsletter/April_09/Fort_Stewart_Press_Release_No-2.pdf
It’s not about being kind to the environment. It’s about developing a supply chain that does not extend back to the enemies territory.
As far as non lead bullets, I have seen range officers with lead poisoning.
The engineers whose opinions matter are testing bio-jet-fuel extensively, and have been doing so for a couple of years. To the best of my understanding, the tests have gone quite well.
The Germans had no alternative. And they made fuel out of coal not biomass.
Well we are at the point where the government gets one out of every twelve things it does right. So essentially we have a “Stopped clock government”.
Yeah they were older cars. ‘94 & cheap, and I was never quite sure whether there was a mileage drop-off that countered the lower cost of the oil. Some cars are better than others.
I suppose in case of a protracted war you’d want to have options.
“suadies”?
You mean the Bedouins that struck it rich and moved to Beverly Hills?
That could very well be true.Perhaps bio-diesel is "do-able" *and* a good idea for your typical truck or car.But as I said before...when you're talking military aircraft *why* fool around when you know something works (the current fuels used)? IMO,when it comes to our military...if ain't broke,don't fix it.
Why test the heck out of it? To make sure it's a viable and reliable alternative source.
IMO,when it comes to our military ... .if ain't broke,don't fix it.
IMPO, declining to improve current capabilities, with "ain't broke don't fix it" as the excuse, is a guaranteed road to stagnation, eventual inferiority, and defeat.
I don't like defeat.
That would be bad.
Remember last winter when school buses in a Minneapolis suburb stalled leaving kids stranded in the cold because their mandated bio diesel gelled in the cold. I’d hate to be flying in a plane experiencing that problem.
Great! so when our millitary planes are dropping out of the sky over Afghanistan it wont be because of shoulder fired surface to air missiles at it but because of our millitary shooting itself int he foot. Our own idiocy when it comes to trying to make the planet a “greener place” will come back to haunt us.
Nor do I.Perhaps you're an engineer...and if you are your opinion on the feasibility of this would be worth considering.I am *not* an engineer.And I do understand your argument about alternative sources of supply,etc.But I smell a rat here.An Environmental Defense Fund rat."Oh my goodness...the aircraft of our Department of Peace are using bio fuels.How very progressive".
Jet fuel can be...and is...stored.I'd wager that the DoD has the resources to store *very* large quantities of fuel if it wanted to.But if the darn manufacturer of my silly little car only allows 5% bio-diesel,why in God's name are we thinking of putting it into F-18s and F-22s?
Think of the horror when people in a certain part of the world realize our jets are spewing PIG Fuel into the very air they breathe.
OMG! MOG!
OK - I warmed up to the idea!
Exactly.All diesel fuels "gel" in cold weather,as I'm learning from various literature about my new car.I've read that jet fuel and diesel fuel are almost identical.If true,one would think that "gelling" would be of particular concern for aircraft in general and military aircraft in particular.
Especially because people don’t realize it can get far far below freezing for aircraft flying at nearly 500MPH at 10,000 ft or more.
I am all for Bio-fuels if they can be “Bio-identical” to conventional fuels in terms of operational and energy characteristics.
“Close but no cigar” won’t cut it in critical applications.
That being said I read recently there was a company working to make a biologically sourced form of Octane rather than ethanol, looked promising.
I'm an engineer, but not in fuels ... so my opinion isn't worth that much, and I only invoked it to defend the idea of continual improvement.
As for the fuels ... Jet-A is not JP-8 is not Highway Diesel. And a diesel engine is very different from a jet engine (duh!). I don't know why your car manufacturer will not warrant its engine for bio-fuel use. It could be for engineering reasons, legal reasons, or logistical reasons. I suspect the last ... they cannot control the bio-diesel supply chain, don't know what's in it, and don't have the resources to sort it all out.
DOD, however, can and does control its supply chain. If testing validates the use of one or more synthetic fuel formulas in jet engines, DOD can obtain that formula in large quantity. Finally, I believe that turbine engines are much more flexible in regard to the sort of fuels that they can digest than are piston engines.
“I’ve read that jet fuel and diesel fuel are almost identical.If true,one would think that “gelling” would be of particular concern for aircraft in general and military aircraft in particular.”
Jet fuel is essentially kerosene, not diesel.
It doesn't surprise me to hear that they're not *identicle*.But am I mistaken in believing that jet fuel,highway diesel and home heating oil are very similar?
And a diesel engine is very different from a jet engine (duh!).
Understood
I don't know why your car manufacturer will not warrant its engine for bio-fuel use. It could be for engineering reasons, legal reasons, or logistical reasons. I suspect the last ... they cannot control the bio-diesel supply chain, don't know what's in it, and don't have the resources to sort it all out.
It's a BMW.I think it's the Germans that have done much of the heavy lifting in recent times in refining the diesel for passenger car use.They have two fuel requirements...1)that fuel is no more than 5% bio-diesel and 2)that it meets some obscure (to me,at least) standard for quality,purity,etc.
Finally, I believe that turbine engines are much more flexible in regard to the sort of fuels that they can digest than are piston engines.
One would think that an engine capable of putting an aircraft into a pure vertical climb at Mach 2 would be substantially more picky about the fuel it uses than any car would be.But then,you're the engineer and I'm not.
Bacon? I smell bacon
Piston engines, as in your BMW, are much more sensitive to fuel viscosity, burn rate, burn temperature, ignition temperature etc than turbine engines. In a piston engine a small, metered sample of fuel must burn within a very narrow time frame, and at a very precisely determined time. In a turbine engine, the fuel burns continuously. Temperatures must remain within design range, and the fuel must still flow through injectors, but the fuel tolerances for the turbine are much less strict. Although that monster P&W turbofan in an F16 can drive the plane well in excess of Mach 1, it is in many ways a simpler engine than your BMW diesel.
As others have correctly noted on this thread, gelling is a problem with heavy fuels. The entire aviation industry (civil, commercial, and military) is well aware of this issue, and fuels are carefully formulated with anti-gel additives to keep them fluid at the -60 (or worse) temperatures experienced at high altitudes. The testing program for the synthetic jet fuels includes operation at high altitudes to validate the anti-gel compounds' effectiveness.
But Im rambling. I guess I find this stuff interesting, even if it is more than a little bit outside my field of expertise.
Dont try it with petroleum based #2 diesel fuel either.
That was a foul up in fuels somehow, but a very isolated incident. I always suspected that they had inadvertently used #2 petroleum based diesel, which jells just like that, but I never heard for sure.
They said we could not use ethanol blends higher than 10 percent too, then they very grudgingly are agreeing to allow 15 percent.
I have a 92 Chrysler that I use 85 percent ethanol in quite often, and have for a year, with no damage.
This is why the DOD ordered several different bio jet fuels from several different sources to test. They are writing the military procurement specs based on that testing.
They are writing the military specs for bio fuels based on the testing now being done. They will be stringent, but very attainable.
The article, from an obvious bio-fuel advocate, makes no mention of whether or not the effort is to provide fuel that is totally compatible with existing jet engines under all current and projected uses, and all of their fuel delivery components. The costs and downtime of such an effort should be obvious.
Currently, where does the fuel come from on overseas missions, is it from local sources, or is it from CONUS?
Sure we need to drill here drill now. I am 100 percent for that.
At the same time bio technology takes any bio based carbon containing material on earth and makes it into useful products. This includes garbage, sewage, animal manures, storm damage, construction and demolition debris, road kill, nutrient rich run off from farm fields and any crops that can be grown in field or ocean.
You mention not using food based crops to make fuel. If we stopped making fuel from corn, we would have to cut back drastically on corn production, which would throw many thousands of people out of work. At least 10 million farm acres would have to be retired from corn production, at a cost of billions of dollars in federal subsidies to farmers to not grow corn on their land.
The Iowa bio processing Center near me, tips a semi load of corn every two and a half minutes, makes around 30 separate products, including various foods and fuels, and employs well over 2,000 people at good paying technical jobs.
Three points here.
As we ramp up technologies, we will reclaim water from garbage, sewage, animal manures, corn, and many other bio feedstocks, use it to grow green algae perhaps to get the nutrients out of it and purify it as needed. We will then use it for things like watering livestock or irrigating the San Juaquin Valley.
We always, always, always produce more corn than we have markets for. Corn could well hit 8 bucks next year, but it will not be because of corn shortages. The biggest factors causing the corn price spike last year were petroleum prices and market speculation. We always produce all the corn we can sell, and are constantly developing new products to make from corn to increase the market. We still have the capacity to double American corn production.
Corn has a big competitor coming on the market for most of the corn based products marketed. Green Algae production is ramping up at a high rate of speed, and you can make nearly anything out of green algae you can make from petroleum or corn, including food and gasoline.
Your info is way out of date. They solved the gell problem months ago, proly the military solved it years ago.
Trust the military on this one, they do not want expensive bombers and fighters falling out of the sky. They did not buy 600,000 gallons of jet fuel that gells up in use.
It is extremely expensive to ship fuel to remote war zones.
Being able to produce large quantities of truck, tank and jet fuel on board old oil tankers sitting along the coast or a few miles at sea will be very valuable to the military.
Many bio fuel processes are coming in at under a dollar a gallon. No way you can ship petroleum based fuel half way around the world from Colorado or Texas oil fields and refineries for that.
The race is on with the Russians and Chinese to develop these technologies. We need to at least stay even with them on this.
You will not experience the same gell as those school buses did.
That was either a bad batch of fuel that was not inspected properly, and that the military would not have accepted, or it was # 2 diesel inadvertently put in the # 1 tanks.
Number two petroleum diesel does gell like that.
Forget the greener place.
Look at the thousands of companies, the hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs being created. Look at using our corn crop for best uses with hundreds of food products, animal feed products, pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals, plastics, and fuel too, instead of just feeding it to hogs.
Look at making hundreds or thousands of valuable products from garbage, sewage, animal manures, nutrient rich run off from farm fields, all kinds of wood wastes, industrial wastes, paper company black liquor, heck even road kill.
The incoming Age of Bio Technology is an exciting time to live in.
Planes spewing pig fuel...Now that is a good one. It is coming.
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