4 ms·

What’s the endgame here? $3,000 “carbon neutral” coach class tickets from LA -> NYC? I’m being a little ridiculous but I legitimately don’t get it. Tech like

What’s the endgame here? $3,000 “carbon neutral” coach class tickets from LA -> NYC? I’m being a little ridiculous but I legitimately don’t get it. Tech like this only works under some carbon credit scheme that provides no value and just transfers wealth to the inventors of these Rube Goldberg machines and their already wealthy investors.

nycdotnet 4y ago
There will come a time when there is no more oil in the ground that is economic to extract. Land transport can use batteries with current tech fairly effectively in many scenarios but aviation, as we currently understand it, needs energy densities that are not possible with batteries (and are unlikely with current mainstream battery tech). This claims to provide a way to get kerosene from the air using (thermal) solar power, which may become economical sooner rather than later if their claimed efficiency improvements come to pass and the price of gasoline continues to rise (which is very likely due to economic infeasibility of building any more refineries due to long payback periods)
- eru 4y ago
  > There will come a time when there is no more oil in the ground that is economic to extract. The qualifier about needing to be economic is really important here. We will never really run out of oil, but we might run out of cheap oil. As market prices for oil rise, more and more alternative ways to get at it become economical. Shale oil was one example of this process. (Another one is to create something like oil from coal. The Germans did a lot of this kind of thing in WW2, because they had access to plenty of coal, but were short on oil. Similarly, world coal reserves seem to be much larger than oil reserves.) However, renewables are getting better and better and thus prevent energy prices from rising as fast as the cost of oil extraction will increase. Thus eventually making oil uncompetitive, as you say.
alvah 4y ago
New tech becomes cheaper when widely adopted. See: solar panels.
d4mi3n 4y ago
I think the take-away here is that we can manufacture the same product (kerosene aka aviation gas) without the traditional inputs (oil/petroleum). This seems like a good capability in and of itself. Not sure what the economics look like, but there could be a market if this enables other trade offs in the production or avgas—maybe producing some nominal amount with much lower electrical grid requirements?
- mynegation 4y ago
  “kerosene aka aviation gas” - I thought these were different fuels. Aviation gas is a gasoline with TEL (that is now forbidden in regular motor gas) and is used in the internal combustion plane engines. Kerosene is used as a fuel for jet engines.
  - p_l 4y ago
    If you're not into aviation then it's hard to complain about not knowing fuel names ;-) But generally, you have kerosene and gasoline based fuels gmost popular of them are JET-A1 (kerosene with additives) and AVGAS100LL (gasoline based, low lead). There are others, including jet fuels that are heavily cut with paraffin (or infamously with lighter fluid) iirc and AVGAS variants that don't contain any lead. Fully synthetic fuels have been used in the past, mostly for high efficiency (USSR had an R-7 aka Soyuz variant for extra hard orbits that used syntin in place of RP-1 aka kerosene) though lost people remember "coal to fuel" attempts of axis forces in WW2
7952 4y ago
Tech like this works if you can make it cheap enough.

nycdotnet 4y ago

There will come a time when there is no more oil in the ground that is economic to extract. Land transport can use batteries with current tech fairly effectively in many scenarios but aviation, as we currently understand it, needs energy densities that are not possible with batteries (and are unlikely with current mainstream battery tech). This claims to provide a way to get kerosene from the air using (thermal) solar power, which may become economical sooner rather than later if their claimed efficiency improvements come to pass and the price of gasoline continues to rise (which is very likely due to economic infeasibility of building any more refineries due to long payback periods)

eru 4y ago
> There will come a time when there is no more oil in the ground that is economic to extract. The qualifier about needing to be economic is really important here. We will never really run out of oil, but we might run out of cheap oil. As market prices for oil rise, more and more alternative ways to get at it become economical. Shale oil was one example of this process. (Another one is to create something like oil from coal. The Germans did a lot of this kind of thing in WW2, because they had access to plenty of coal, but were short on oil. Similarly, world coal reserves seem to be much larger than oil reserves.) However, renewables are getting better and better and thus prevent energy prices from rising as fast as the cost of oil extraction will increase. Thus eventually making oil uncompetitive, as you say.

alvah 4y ago

New tech becomes cheaper when widely adopted. See: solar panels.

d4mi3n 4y ago

I think the take-away here is that we can manufacture the same product (kerosene aka aviation gas) without the traditional inputs (oil/petroleum). This seems like a good capability in and of itself. Not sure what the economics look like, but there could be a market if this enables other trade offs in the production or avgas—maybe producing some nominal amount with much lower electrical grid requirements?

mynegation 4y ago
“kerosene aka aviation gas” - I thought these were different fuels. Aviation gas is a gasoline with TEL (that is now forbidden in regular motor gas) and is used in the internal combustion plane engines. Kerosene is used as a fuel for jet engines.
- p_l 4y ago
  If you're not into aviation then it's hard to complain about not knowing fuel names ;-) But generally, you have kerosene and gasoline based fuels gmost popular of them are JET-A1 (kerosene with additives) and AVGAS100LL (gasoline based, low lead). There are others, including jet fuels that are heavily cut with paraffin (or infamously with lighter fluid) iirc and AVGAS variants that don't contain any lead. Fully synthetic fuels have been used in the past, mostly for high efficiency (USSR had an R-7 aka Soyuz variant for extra hard orbits that used syntin in place of RP-1 aka kerosene) though lost people remember "coal to fuel" attempts of axis forces in WW2

7952 4y ago

Tech like this works if you can make it cheap enough.