Future fuel sources

[Old Koreelah]

Promising new renewable fuel sources:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211119-can-flying-ever-be-carbon-neutral

[onetrack]

There would have to be a very sizeable proportion of the population engaged in growing kelp to provide the quantity required for our current levels of fuel usage. Australia consumes 90,000,000 litres of petrol alone, every day. Daily Gasoline consumption of the U.S. is 1,285,000,000 litres. Jet fuel consumption for the U.S. is 170,000,000 litres daily. And these are 2020 figures, when fossil fuel consumption figures were subdued.

 

I think solar-produced hydrogen, and solar-produced electricity, have vastly more potential than trying to grow our fuel requirements.

[nomadpete]

A new long term accessible fuel source......

 

[facthunter]

Turn them OFF . You are wasting electricity. (as my mum used to say) She wasn't BIG on science. Nev

[Ian]

While I see people mention hydrogen it's a difficult fuel compared anything liquid, I've even see people speak glowing about converting hydrogen to ammonia and suspect that they haven't read the history of ammonia safety in refrigeration. Hydrogen is high in volume and interacts with most structural metals to cause hydrogen embrittlement.

In comparison ethanol is simple, there are already planes flying however it does impact your range. There's a large body of knowledge relating to making combustion engines run using it. Butanol has a similar energy content and octane rating compared to avgas and can be produced in a carbon neutral manner.

Biodiesel and related process can produce jetfuel analogues which have already been demonstrated to work in turbine engines. Yes there are issues associated with things like low temperature stability but they're pretty simple to solve.

As policies change to force transport to be carbon neutral things will change however there are some pretty simple solutions out there. The solution will have a significant  agricultural component so I can see this benefiting countries like Australia enormously.

There is a huge issue will intermittency associated with solar and wind which remains an unsolved problem. A huge amount of power intensive industry is only economic when it runs 24x7, these industries won't function with intermittent power. Storage is expensive and countries like Australia which are flat and dry have very limited hydro options. Long distance power option such as high voltage DC are expensive, about a billion dollars to supply the UK from France.

Frankly I don't see anything but nuclear as being able to fill the gap in the near term.

 

 

[turboplanner]

11 minutes ago, Ian said:

While I see people mention hydrogen it's a difficult fuel compared anything liquid, I've even see people speak glowing about converting hydrogen to ammonia and suspect that they haven't read the history of ammonia safety in refrigeration. Hydrogen is high in volume and interacts with most structural metals to cause hydrogen embrittlement.

In comparison ethanol is simple, there are already planes flying however it does impact your range. There's a large body of knowledge relating to making combustion engines run using it. Butanol has a similar energy content and octane rating compared to avgas and can be produced in a carbon neutral manner.

Biodiesel and related process can produce jetfuel analogues which have already been demonstrated to work in turbine engines. Yes there are issues associated with things like low temperature stability but they're pretty simple to solve.

As policies change to force transport to be carbon neutral things will change however there are some pretty simple solutions out there. The solution will have a significant  agricultural component so I can see this benefiting countries like Australia enormously.

There is a huge issue will intermittency associated with solar and wind which remains an unsolved problem. A huge amount of power intensive industry is only economic when it runs 24x7, these industries won't function with intermittent power. Storage is expensive and countries like Australia which are flat and dry have very limited hydro options. Long distance power option such as high voltage DC are expensive, about a billion dollars to supply the UK from France.

Frankly I don't see anything but nuclear as being able to fill the gap in the near term.

 

 

Good summation, and the key problem is that even if the government committed to a nuclear solution, perhaps in the ACT or NT to avoid delays getting State approvals, the lead time for a nuclear plant is way longer that the hopeful pull back of fossil power.

 

Aside from intermittancy, the renewables sector has been boasting they can achieve Baseload power. Baseload is the minimum a coal-fired power station can operate at, without the boiler cracking from temperature changes, so is the overnight idle of a coal power station, yet hundreds of thousands of Australians took that to mean renewables were matching coal. Then came the blackouts in Melbourne where Peak Power couldn't keep up with demand, and after 40 years of subsidy renewables were only able to produce the base power they claimed - 1% of that power demand. Since then, renewables have been boasting of records of 40% and even 50% of the power suppy........in the colder months where the distributors have bought the cheapest rates. The States are still encouraging renewables and it is possible that there would be a balance bewteen a much bigger wind/solar component and a small coal-fired plant to crank up on hot days, but the financial model is likely to topple if the cost is added to people's power bills.

 

The hydrogen comments floating around are interesting in that many of the industry people promoting them think there's going to be a supply of hydrogen gas at every service station and you'll fill up like LPG, but when you ask them for the specifications their product is fuel cell which works perfectly well, as shown in an extended trial by MTT Perth buses around 2005, the only issue being the cost - three times the commercial price, so it's no surprise when household budgets won't stand more than about a 10% increase in car cost, that the fuel cell industry failed on cost. Any direct hydrogen gas vehicles would have to jump the chemical hurdles you quote as well as find and cost an infrasructure.

 

What I've found over the years is that you can pretty much assess the viability of the next exciting fuel by putting it on the chart with the other existing fuels for volume, efficiency, emission etc. Some people keep pushing on looking for that breakthrough, there's even a guy still convinced he can build a viable steam car, but unless everything lines up on that chart, the initial promise slowly dies.

 

 

 

 

 

[onetrack]

The Japanese manufacturers are pushing hydrogen fuel as a viable source of power. They are also pushing battery power, so they're obviously having a 50c each way bet.

There are quite a number of global manufacturers who see hydrogen gas being fed into a slightly modified IC engine as the immediate answer. The construction industry is looking at this seriously.

 

Lord Anthony Bamford (he of the JCB digger fame) is not convinced that batteries are the answer for construction equipment and is going down the road of simply modifying his IC (diesel) engines to run on straight hydrogen.

He says the supply chain arrangement for hydrogen can be put in place without difficulty, and "green" hydrogen from solar power provides great promise.

He's organised a deal with Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest for a supply of green hydrogen from Twiggys new hydrogen-generation plants, so it will be interesting to see what comes out of that deal. 

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59107805

 

 

 

 

Edited November 29, 2021 by onetrack

[pmccarthy]

The only solution is to phase in changes over the next 50 years or so. That is what is going to happen, the faster timetables are just political posturing.

[Old Koreelah]

24 minutes ago, pmccarthy said:

The only solution is to phase in changes over the next 50 years or so. That is what is going to happen, the faster timetables are just political posturing.

Crikey PM, half a century? Even the motor car was phased in to replace horses in a couple of decades and that was a century ago! Social and technological changes are accelerating at an astonishing speed, as this graph shows:

Our whole civilzation could collapse in less than 50 years and there are many triggers lining up to do us in. Pollution from fossil fuels is just one of these threats, but at least there is a global movement to do something about it. The world rapidly phased out CFCs to stop the destruction of the Ozone layer, why can’t we do the same with fossil fuels?

 

[onetrack]

The changes will come a lot faster than 50 years or more. Already, numerous Govts have decreed that fossil fuels will not be supported in transport systems within less than a decade. The next stage is, fossil fuel users will be having to wear "pollution taxes", making owning, older fossil-fuel-powered items, a real cost burden. This will happen, "to reflect the true overall cost of fossil fuel burning".

 

Just the same as the Japanese vehicle inspection/registration costs ("shaken" in Japanese) go up enormously after 6 years, forcing owners to upgrade to new, lower-emission vehicles, so will similar taxing regimes start to be applied to fossil-fuelled vehicles within a few short years.

 

Edited November 29, 2021 by onetrack

[Ian]

The changes will take a long time if the change is dependent upon building new infrastructure. For example in the graph above look at  the adoption time of change that required infrastructure with end to end connectivity. Cars required better roads and fuel distribution mechanisms, electricity required distribution networks and power generation stations.

For example if you had a hydrogen refueling station, how do you get hydrogen to that station? Do you liquefy it, build a pipeline or manufacture it onsite from the electricity grid. Because where you make it isn't where people want to use it. In a side by side comparison hydrogen costs up to 14x the cost of direct electrification. Now I know that these figures are rubbery however it looks like lithium batteries have already won the vehicle transport battle because the infrastructure for charging partially exists. Who's going to build a network of hydrogen stations for an unproven part of the market, especially when the range of a hydrogen car is less than a battery powered one.

Now I've been a fan of fuel cells for a long time, however hydrogen as a fuel a bit of a turd, there is an alternate methanol economy which hasn't had much attention however direct methanol fuel cells currently require platinum so a breakthrough is needed.

I suspect that the reason that hydrogen is being pushed is that the gas companies believe that they can produce hydrogen from fossil fuels maintaining the value of their assets as part of the gas led recovery.

Weaning off fossil fuels will be very very hard. According to the Bill Gates book "How to avoid a climate change disaster" only 12% of fossil fuels are used intransport the rest are consumed making thing and heating and cooling etc. And yet we're finding the first 12% really difficult, think how we're going to do without concrete, steel, plastic and fertilizer. Even aluminium manufacture uses carbon anodes and cathodes which are consumed releasing CO2. So the one structural thing that we refine electrolyticly still produces CO2. Just look at concrete and you'll figure out how hard things will be.

Anyway as I said either batteries need to get a lot better and cheaper or we need Nuclear.

 

 

[turboplanner]

We also need to take a close look at global warming itself to see if all this pain is necessary. In 2018, in a communication to decision makers, the IPCC moved the start date for the magic 1.5 degree increase in temperature from the mid 2000s to 1760, the beginning of the industrial revolution. One possible reason for this is than when people start to ask about the rate of change you can avoid these near vertical front ends of bell curves and show a more gradual upcurve pushing out the inevitable date when people start saying, we're here but it's not hot?

 

One of the most surprising things in the discussion on global warming is that the focus has been almost totally on cars with European decrees that ICE engines will be banned by x date, but cars only represent about 10% of CO2 emissions. Why wouldn't we be focusing on the 90% of activities which also emit CO2?

[Ian]

The pain is necessary, to believe otherwise is naive and change needs to occur on all fronts. Unless you're completely withered you're going to see a massive change in your lifetime, which will probably lead to significant conflict and human misery. Our own bushfires have just been the beginning, the barrier reefs will be a tragedy and mass ocean extinctions due to acidity combined with warming.   

However the key message is carbon neutral not the death of ICE, I would guess that for cars battery powered electric will end up being the cheaper option. However all this is off the topic of airplanes.

In short people will not want to give up international travel and air freight so jet fuel in one form or another will remain. There are choices however if I was looking to build a plane diesel engines would be high on the list simply because they're more efficient and can burn jet-fuel. 

[pmccarthy]

It has taken 50 years to develop a natural gas network here in Victoria. The electric car myth depends on increasing global mining rates sixfold to produce the required minerals. That just isn’t going to happen. Even if technically possible, which it isn’t, the green movement will not accept new big mines in areas that haven’t had mining before. The rare earths are in very low concentrations in rocks, so the tailings dams will be massive and probably toxic. It is a fantasy.

[Ian]

I'm happy to take a bet on this fantasy if you wish. In Norway 80% of vehicles are now electric, in Europe 20% of sales are now electric, Australia's stance is an outlier however we're being dragged into a carbon market. Now I own a petrol burning vehicle however I accept that at some point fossil fuels are going to be taxed like buggery and the tax breaks for electric will be pretty compelling, either that or biofuels. 

 

[onetrack]

The need for a six-fold mining increase is not an accurate projection, because it fails to take into account, the recycling of used batteries. Battery recycling will become a very sizeable operation in the future, in every country in the world.

 

Lead acid batteries are now recycled at a rate better than 60%, with huge savings in reduced landfill costs and reduced pollution. All batteries are recyclable, the common household batteries are being recycled at an increasing rate and very shortly lithium battery recycling will be rapidly increasing. We have to do better than just constantly digging up new resource metals, using them for a relatively short period, then throwing those valuable metals into landfill.

[spacesailor]

Iv,e never recycled a lead acid battery !.

Had to get my Fishing weights from somewhere & my diving weights, to day,s batteries are not much cop for collecting lead.

Putting me out of that Job. LoL

spacesailor

[Ian]

On the fuel note, does anyone know if an experimental diesel powered airplane has flown in Australia? I think that someone in Tasmania was looking to put a Subaru diesel in a plane and I'd be interested to know how far they've got or did it all become too hard.

I think that the biodiesel route is probably simpler and cheaper than the other fuel pathways in the longer term.

[onetrack]

I bought a Subaru diesel engine at a farm clearing sale, where the seller told me he'd planned to install it in an aircraft. I questioned him about whether the engine was an excessive weight for an aircraft, and all he said was, "No, not if you have the right aircraft!". But he never told me what that particular "right" aircraft was, I was too busy picking up and loading the items I'd bought. 

The engine has reputedly only done 11,000kms, but I can't see myself selling it to anyone with an aircraft. The engine is only a basic engine, it came with no ECU, no intercooler and no muffler - but it did come with starter, alternator and turbocharger.

I have no idea why he sold it, or why he sold the farm, and nearly everything he owned - but he virtually got rid of it all, and moved off to some other location. Maybe he won Lotto, and moved to some exclusive airpark, and bought a Learjet.

 

I haven't actually weighed it, or found a factory weight for it, but it's a pretty heavy donk, I'd have to guess it's at least 130kgs.

Diesels need some serious metal thicknesses to resist the much higher combustion pressures and longer burn time for the fuel, which places a lot more pressure on the likes of conrods and crankshafts - the reason why diesels have much higher torque  output than petrol engine equivalents. I understand that high torque output and strong power pulses can lead to problems with aircraft propulsion, specifically the propellor, and any reduction drive arrangement.

 

[onetrack]

Ian - There is a company in the U.K. reworking the EE20 Subaru diesel for aircraft engine use. Their version does produce 240HP for takeoff (140 maximum sustained HP), but it also appears to weigh over 170kgs, all-up.

 

http://www.cktaeroengines.com/

 

Subaru had problems with the earlier EE20 engines breaking crankshafts - but they carried out engineering modifications to the crankshaft around 2010-2011 that appear to have eliminated the crankshaft breakage problem.

The-CKT-240-TSD-Diesel.pdf

[turboplanner]

5 hours ago, Ian said:

On the fuel note, does anyone know if an experimental diesel powered airplane has flown in Australia? I think that someone in Tasmania was looking to put a Subaru diesel in a plane and I'd be interested to know how far they've got or did it all become too hard.

I think that the biodiesel route is probably simpler and cheaper than the other fuel pathways in the longer term.

Diamond built a production line diesel around 2005, as far as I know it was successful with no issues, however, diesel became popular in Australia because it required less refining to be a commercial fuel (than  petrol), so it was much cheaper. In 1986 I towed a camper trailer from Melbourne to Fraser Island, spent a wee on the island and back to Melbourne for a total cost of $238.26. Fuel wasn't an issue in holiday costs then.

 

Farming was even cheaper because bulk diesel was not subject to excise.

 

That sparked the shift to diesel utes, then 4 passenger diesel utes, diesel 4WD wagons antil we reached the point we are at today where Australia's car market leaders are all light commercials.

 

However things have changed; the fuel companies simply jacked up diesel prices to make up for lost sales of petrol and excise increased, so diesel has finished up in the middle of the fuel mix, and the Nissan Patrol V8 with scheduled maintenance was the first petrol engined car in recent times to offer a lower cost of life than the diesel version.

 

Diesel, with its lower level of refining has been much more difficult to engineer to meet our stringent emission standards on NOx and particulates to the point where Caterpillar closed down its truck engine operations, and diesel vehicles clean the exhausts either with Urea injection or Diesel Particulate Filter. DPF brings you a surprise as your car gets older because it needs to be replaced. I was quoted over $2000.00 for one by a Subaru dealer and did it myself for about $1500.00

 

On the other hand petrol has responded well to emissions engineering and the development of things like compression ignition and multi-injection now gves expectations of moving 4 people on a 100 km/hr highway for around 4 litres/100 km. These engines are also producing much longer life cycle, further reducing total cost of life.

 

So it is likely that we will see a drift out of diesels and back to these low emission, low fuel burning petrol engines.  While there are plenty of commentators comparing CO2 emissions of ICE vs EV, it would be interesting to see where those CO2 figures come from becaise Australia doesn't measure CO2 and there are no regulations for CO2. One of the main reasons is that CO2 output is dependant on the condition of the fuel.

 

Biodiesel was one of the exciting new developments about 20 years ago, and at one stage a farmer near Melbourne had a contract to take waste cooking oil from restaurants and was running a tractor on it, starting it with a blow torch, much like the old Lanz Bulldog tractors, but I suspect Biodiesel today would not be able to meet our current emission levels where we've taken 97% of particulates and 98% of NOx out of exhaust emissons since 1992.

 

 

 

[turboplanner]

8 hours ago, Ian said:

I'm happy to take a bet on this fantasy if you wish. In Norway 80% of vehicles are now electric, in Europe 20% of sales are now electric, Australia's stance is an outlier however we're being dragged into a carbon market. Now I own a petrol burning vehicle however I accept that at some point fossil fuels are going to be taxed like buggery and the tax breaks for electric will be pretty compelling, either that or biofuels. 

 

Norway is used universally as an example of EV success

Its population is only 5.379 million - about the same as Melbourne

Its area is only 385,207 square kilometres compared to Vic 227,444, NSW 801150, SA 983,482, Qld 1.853 million.

It's rich in hydro power to the extent that the UK, which has run out of power before EV starts to demand more, is building a line to Norway and will be buying its power from Norway.

So when you do the analysis, Norway is an obvious fit for EV.

The news media may have been saying Australia's stance is an outlier, but when it comes to putting a new vehicle on the road, the law of physics applies.

Australia EV exponents have narrowed the magnifying glass down to the capital cities and in particular commuters who just want to drive to the local train station, or on a short commute, coming back home for a single phase overnight charge. Nothing wrong with that for EV.

However, that's not Australia's transport task.

Take a look at our current market share - dominated by high power consuming requirements like towing heavy trailers,long distance trips. Then the commercial requirements PUD (Pick up and delivery) trucks starting in country towns in the morning and dropping off at the airport for night overnight express. Sales people in the car for six or eight hours per day. A business trip or delivery from Rockhampton to Longreach at 100 km/hr cruise speed, 110 km/hr cruise in some states/territories. Regional travel with its long distances at 100 km/hr, power consuming all the way. Light trucks which operate in Japan and Europe with 60 kW, requiring 100 to 145 kW to be viable in Australia. So far the EV exponents simply write off regional Australia as too hard, but if you went down the path of banning ICE you finish up with a massive political problem which would require a reversal until EV could meet the power/range combination each specific application and area requires, and we know that very well, and we factor that in when we set up a vehicle for an application, so to encapsulate all that in the comment that "Australia is an outlier" is standing on a bar of slippery soap, hence the government stance.

 

A few months ago we were discussing engines and I figured that if Rotax was going to be affected it was best to do some research on the pressure Austria faced, Europe being an EV leader, with EV market share like the 20% you quote. At the time the Australian EV market share had dropped back from about 1.5% to about 1% and several states had approved EV road taxes to cover road construction and maintenance like all other road users. I was stunned to find EV market share in Austria wasn't much better than Australia, and they had started to cheat, incorporating Hybrids as EVs. I think the total market share was around 5.9%, where 5% is usually where people in the industry are fired. I'm not saying all of Europe is fudging the fihure by including CO2 producing hybrids, just that if anyone wants to quote "Europe" better to do the research on which Europe.

[Thruster88]

Growing food versus fuel is always going to be controversial. On a typical Australian broadacre crop farm the farms diesel requirement could be produced off 4% of the farms area. 1 ton of canola = 400l bio diesel.

 

It is often said that bio diesel and grain ethanol produce more carbon pollution from the inputs than is saved from the renewable products produced, obviously from economics that is simply not the case.

 

At the moment world grain supply and demand is very well balanced as indicated by reasonably high grain prices. Any major increase in bio fuels will result in higher food prices. There is limited ability to increase production as I see it.

[Ian]

Quote

but I suspect Biodiesel today would not be able to meet our current emission levels where we've taken 97% of particulates and 98% of NOx out of exhaust emissons since 1992.

 

The emissions reduction index from the United States National Biodiesel Board showed that the combustion of biodiesel wholly as a transportation fuel decreased total hydrocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon, and sulfur emissions by 67%, 80%, 48%, and 100%, respectively. There's a slight increase in NOx however this is not across the board. NOx is just an equilibrium chemistry reaction, the hotter and hence more efficient your combustion process is the more NOx you produce. Cool the flame, inject water or add some exhaust gas and you force the reaction the other way. The other option is to remove it from the exhaust.

In terms of lubrication biodiesel is a much better lubricant and makes your diesel engine last much longer. If fact it beat all of the aftermarket lubricants as fuel additive for ordinary diesel for lubricating injectors.

 

In terms of fuels competing with food crops that's an economic question which markets are good at dealing with. Basically coal and fossil fuels and cow farts are out and agriculture, solar and nuclear are in. Europe has some great resources for electrification which we don't have and France especially is madly exporting Nuclear generated power generating 3B Euro per year in exports.

 

The key point isn't electric vehicles and banning ICE it's zero emissions, hydrids can be zero emissions if they burn a zero emission fuel, it's not cheating. While this is the sane choice which anyone with a basic understanding of maths and science should be able to comprehend, when you are running towards a cliff, simply slowing to a walk doesn't solve the problem, stopping solves the problem.

Economically we're going to face very large tariffs if we don't go down this path so pragmatically we need to change our approach. The wealthy countries which buy our stuff are watching our emissions and will tax the buggery out of us if we don't comply. Poor countries which don't have these policies don't have the budget to buy our goods so telling the rich clients to bugger off will be expensive.

So even if you want to say "I don't believe that sciency stuff" you're community is going to face a huge hit to the hip pocket by taking a contrary view. It's a bit like being a christian butcher in a primarily jewish and moslem community, the meat that you sell will be kosher and halal but do you believe in any of that hockey pockey? No, but you make a pragmatic business choice.

 

Anyway planes will require liquid fuels for the foreseeable future so what is the zero carbon emission fuel of choice and what will your baby run on? Lycomings will run on ethanol however storing it in Fibreglass tanks is a bit problematic 🙂

 

 

 

 

[onetrack]

There are two things that will govern the direction that energy sources for transportation comes from, in the next decade or two - and that is R&D, and any outstanding technological breakthroughs, such as in battery storage/efficiency.

With the amount of money and effort going into R&D for potential future fuels and battery development, I would not be in the least bit surprised to see a major breakthrough in some area in the very near future - and I suspect that breakthrough will be in battery storage ability and efficiency. Virtually every major university in the developed world has a team working on these problems, and usually in conjunction with major industry players. 

One of the problems in recent years is that improvements in these areas have only been incremental, and it really needs a major breakthrough that produces a sizeable increase in efficiency, to produce a more definite direction of where we're going with future energy sources and energy storage. 

One thing is for sure - with the decline in use of fossil fuels, the alternatives will be a very fractured variety, and individual industries will more than likely decide on an industry-specific energy/storage type, that will more than likely not be suitable for anyone outside that industry.