Might as well expand on these ideas, hell they make ice cream from seaweed. Pretty soon all new turbines will have to meet CARB tier III compliance, not just your weed whacker. I just don't feel that comfy with a gearbox however, having seen them come apart they FOD out everything in their path.

I think they have the gearbox issue pretty much figured out by now. Pratt has a WHOLE lot of experience with this, combined with modern NDT QA. I also assume that that turbojet gearboxes are not much harder than turboprop boxes...the tprop is probably geared down lower than an N1 Fan would need to be, and you may not have as many blade pitch changes jerking the turbofan gearbox around.

Gearboxes on jets are new, and will obviously need some operational experience to be considered fully proven.

The gearbox is near the fan, so the same type of containment should work for both I would think.

Algae biofuel business won’t bloom soon.

(11/02, San Francisco Business Times, S.E.F. Brown) Sandia National Laboratories Algae is considered a prime candidate to serve as feedstock for biofuels because of its high energy content and yield, rapid growth and ability to thrive in seawater or wastewater. A report from Berkeley’s Energy Biofuel Institute says developing and testing biofuel based on algae will likely take at least a decade. Even though about 100 companies in the United States are seeking this particular grail, making oil from algae “will be neither quick nor plentiful,” say authors Nigel Quinn and Tryg Lundquist. A research team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (which is a partner in the EBI) worked with scientists at U.C. Berkeley and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to crunch numbers for this study. While some companies have scored successes growing algae in closed labs, the know-how to grow strains that are stable “under outdoor conditions, while achieving both high productivities and oil content, is still to be developed,” the report says. The U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Defense are both paying for pilot studies of technology available today for growing algae in open ponds, but their results aren’t yet complete. Technology to cheaply and efficiently harvest the algae cells and get their oil out also has to be developed and tested. This report hypothesized a big algae facility in California’s Imperial Valley. It assumed productivity at such a plant would be higher than possible right now due to some “plausible technological advances.” Even so, it cost $21 million to set up a 250-acre facility and about $1.5 million a year to run it. The facility would produce about 12,300 barrels of oil a year, meaning it would break even if oil cost $330 a barrel. To get the break even price down to $240 per barrel the facility had to quadruple in size to 1,000 acres. Right now, oil costs less than $100 per barrel.


USDA unites with aviation to develop biofuels.

[Editor note: This is a news item that has already been covered once. In addition by posting clips like this, endorsement or rejection is not implied.]

(11/04, K. Reals, FlightGlobal) The US Department of Agriculture has teamed with the Federal Aviation Administration on a five-year agreement aimed at developing biofuels for use in aviation. Under the memorandum of understanding, the USDA and the FAA will "work together with the airline industry over the next five years to develop appropriate feedstocks that can be most efficiently processed into jet fuel", says US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack. The two government agencies will work towards developing a tool that will evaluate the status of different components of the feedstock supply chain, such as the availability of biomass from farms and forests. The tool will also evaluate the potential of various types of biomass to be turned into jet fuel, as well as the amount of time it will take to ramp up to full-scale production. The agreement with the FAA is part of a broader US government effort to promote the production of fuel from renewable sources. "Domestic production of renewable energy, including biofuels, is a national imperative and that's why the USDA is working to assist in developing a biofuels industry in every corner of the nation," says Vilsack. "By producing more biofuels in America, we will create jobs, combat global warming, replace our dependence on foreign oil and build a stronger foundation for the 21st century economy." Richard Altman, executive director of the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative, sees the USDA initiatives as a positive step. Before the MoU was announced, Altman said: "The seeds have been sown for a very close relationship between agricultural interests and aviation - this will mature even further as initiatives are announced."

Navy energy czar: Wringing out every barrel of oil

(11/08, J.Steele, SignOnSanDiego) "...Aiming to cut down its dependence on foreign oil, the Navy this year has also pressed forward with testing so-called biofuels in its aircraft and boats. An F/A-18 Hornet running on a 50-50 blend of standard jet fuel and mustard seed oil took its maiden flight at a Maryland air station in April. Dubbed the Green Hornet, the fighter jet has made speeds of Mach 1.7 on the hybrid fuel. Last month, the Navy tried out a 50-50 blend of regular gas and algae-based fuel in an experimental riverine command boat in Norfolk, Va. A SH-60 Seahawk helicopter is one of its next “green” test projects. Hicks said the results have been good so far. “There’s been nary a whisper of any change in performance,” he said Monday. The Navy is shooting to assemble what it is calling a “great green fleet.” It would start with demonstrating by 2012 a “green” strike group, meaning an aircraft carrier and its supporting ships running on “green” gas. By 2016, it would deploy the strike group. Hicks said the experiment will only be successful if the Navy is not forced to make any mechanical changes to its engines to accommodate the biofuel blend..."

Sapphire Energy: Algae Oil in 18 Months?

(Greentechmedia, 11/16, M. Kanellos) The first big test for Sapphire Energy is not that far away. The company, which hopes to produce oil with genetically modified algae in open ponds at an economically attractive price, will soon break ground on a 100-acre facility for growing algae in New Mexico, said Tim Zenk, vice president of corporate affairs at the company during an interview. Construction time takes about 16 to 18 months he added. Sapphire has also completed a good portion of the biotechnology needed to raise organisms that can produce large amounts of hydrocarbons, Zenk noted. Hence, in 18 months or so, the world might have a better idea of whether Sapphire's strategy actually has legs. The pond won't be optimized for commercial production but it will give a general idea if the company is headed in the right direction. Sapphire has provided algae oil to trials with airplanes and cars but the oil did not come from the genetically modified organisms being created by Sapphire nor did these oils derive from the processes Sapphire hopes to use commercially. Algae fuel as a concept has already scaled the peaks of hype and plunged into the trough of despair. But guess what comes after that: the emergence of a few commercially viable companies. Sapphire, along with Solazyme and a few others has always sat in the top tier of the algae world, so the fact that progress is occurring is news. The market circumstances have also begun to improve slightly for biofuels. Oil prices are inching up again and the U.S. government has not retreated from its biofuel goals which come to 36 billion gallons by 2022 (The Department of Transportation also has raised the CAFE standards to 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016 and may raise it to 62 miles per gallon in 2025)...

An internal writeup that I saw on this stated that the current cost to the navy was $400/gallon. That's GALLON, not barrel. If that's correct and not a typo (maybe they meant barrel?) they have a loooong way to go.

I vote it's a typo.

1. The Air Force and Navy together bought a total of 600,000 gallons of biofuel last year for testing from several of the new startups. 600,000 x $400 = $240 million. $4.4 million is what you get by dividing that figure by 55 gallons which seems more plausible to me. Honeywell UOP, Sapphire, and Solazyme are the startups that provided most of the fuel.

2. DARPA publicly stated last year it can already make biofuel for $3 a gallon. Problem is they can only make a few gallons. Facilities do not presently exist for large-scale production although the startups above are working very hard to tool up as we speak. 2013 is an most optimistic projection while others put it around 2018. Even the more pessimistic estimates put the price of a barrel at about $300- see article above dated 11/02.

3. Jet biofuel will have to be priced like crude oil to get the airlines to buy it, and the numbers there are huge. Airlines use a LOT of fuel, and they represent a key test of its commercial success. An large array of for-profit, nonprofit, and government groups are currently supporting the invention of economical biofuels for jets. Although the effort only began a couple of years ago it is off to a rapid pace. From what I gather it will be no more than a few years from certification to mass production. Algae won the contest for the version most suitable for development, and the performance of algae-based fuels has thus far been excellent. I doubt the military would be very interested in fuel costing $400 a gallon even with their latitude for expenditure, but in this case they may have justified it as a necessary use of the taxpayers money.

Aviation industry ditches hydrogen development due to high cost.

(BBC News, M. Fitzpatrick, 11/17) Is the sun setting again on hydrogen-powered aviation? It took just 32 seconds to extinguish faith in the airship and the hydrogen that once buoyed the Hindenburg, which erupted in a fatal inferno 73 years ago. Hydrogen is being dropped again by the aviation industry. But this time the promised "green" fuel for powering flights of the future has been quietly shelved in favour of biofuels and more fossil fuel-sipping aviation. And while hydrogen as a potential "greener" fuel for foreseeable flights gets dumped worldwide, airlines and aircraft manufacturers are also jettisoning their once radical ideas for such hydrogen-burning, sci-fi-like, cryoplanes...

Butanol is where it's at. It can be made more efficiently than ethanol, and has a freezing point low enough to prevent coagulation. The additional methyl groups have enough hydrophobic & van der Wals interactions to lower the freezing point below normal cruise SAT...

Oh brother. What a huge surprise. Not.

Gaseous H2 takes up tremendous volume...an airliner would need to tow a gasbag the size of the Hindenburg.

Liquid H2 is off the charts for volatility, corrosiveness. It's at the far end of the cryogenic chart, creating even more handling and storage challenges.

It does have great specific energy and is zero-emissions though.

Lufthansa To Power Some Flights With Biofuel.

(AP, 11/29) "Germany's biggest airline, Deutsche Lufthansa AG, says it will launch the world's first passenger flight using biofuel next year." Lufthansa "said Monday that an Airbus A321 aircraft on daily flights between Hamburg and Frankfurt will be powered with a biofuel blend made from 50 percent vegetable oil. The flights will begin in April 2011 and continue for six months as part of a government-backed study on the long-term impact of biofuels on aircraft performance."

Forecasts 2011: Environment - Turning on to biofuels.

(Flightglobal, K. Reals, 1/05) Securing enough investment to scale up the production of biofuels for use in commercial aviation hinges on the authorisation of such fuels by certificating body ASTM International. This approval was expected in mid-December, but the anticipated date for authorisation has slipped to the first quarter of 2011. Richard Altman, executive director of the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI), describes 2011 as a "critical year" for initial investment in production programmes aimed at scaling up feedstock availability to commercially viable levels.Altman had been hoping an ASTM subcommittee would authorise hydrotreated renewable jet (HRJ) fuel during a series of meetings in December, which would have kick-started the huge amounts of investment needed to scale up production. However, he says the work is "99% done" and is confident the full ASTM committee will still be able to vote on whether to approve the fuels before the end of the first quarter, as originally planned. A recent five-year agreement between the US Department of Agriculture and the Federal Aviation Administration to work together on developing feedstocks that can be processed into jet fuel will go some way toward increasing feedstock availability. "There is concern that the amount of agricultural crops available will be limited," says Altman. "The seeds have been sown for a very close relationship between agricultural interests and aviation. This will mature even further as initiatives are announced." There are also cost concerns, with Airbus chief Tom Enders recently estimating that biofuel is 25 times as expensive as normal jet fuel. Ausilio Bauen, director of sustainable energy consultancy E4tech, says: "It is difficult to see the cost of biofuels at less than $100 a barrel."