Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Cautious Optimism; The British Airforce has committed to modifying military aircraft to run on biofuel. My question – does the war end when the chip fat runs out?
British military looking to move aircraft to sustainable fuel sources
By Ed Adamczyk
Dec. 14 (UPI) — A plan to use sustainable sources for up to 50 percent of military aviation fuel was announced by British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace this week.
The British Ministry of Defense on Saturday said it would look to algae, alcohol, household waste, wood and biomass as potential sources of fuel for the nation’s F-35 and Typhoon planes and Wildcat helicopters.
…
A 2017 research paper by U.S. Air Force Maj. Marcus McWilliams of the Air Force’s Air University noted that most U.S. military planes can operate on sustainable aviation fuel. But no funding has been offered to modify the engines of F-35 and F-22 planes — which can’t run on it — and require a 12- to 24-month process of testing and certification.
…
Read more: https://www.upi.com/Defense-News/2020/12/14/British-military-looking-to-move-aircraft-to-sustainable-fuel-sources/5341607977557/
Perhaps this is a good time for the Falkland Islanders to brush up on their Spanish. One of the reasons the Falklands Islands are still a diplomatic flashpoint between Britain and Argentina is they suddenly got valuable, after major oil deposits were discovered in the region.
But if Britain no longer values oil, and if the British military is too busy being green to stay focussed on operational readiness, the next Falklands war may not end as well for Britain as the last war.
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I discovered ‘Bio-Fuel in my local DIY store (B&Q for UK folks)
It was/is intended for pretentious stainless-steel & glass table-top burners/heaters.
In actual fact it is simply methylated spirit that has not been dyed purple and at £5 for 2 litres was bargain of the century. Purple Meths on a nearby shelf was £3.95 for 500ml
An epic solvent and cleaner for my messing around with solder & flux plus myriad sorts of glue – gentler than Acetone but in these modern diseased times, a brilliant disinfectant.
Put a cupful in the ‘softener/conditioner’ compartment of your washing machine especially if you run on only warm washes of no more that 40C. Kills bugs and leaves an ‘epic’ if short-lived smell
But now, 3 years later, those same (were= £5) 2 litre bottles of Bio-fuel are now £9.87.
Errr, wasn’t renewable energy supposed to be getting cheaper and cheaper?
How does that ‘help the climate’
Where does the money come from if *not* from extracting, processing, manufacturing, distributing and selling ‘stuff’ – all= things that *trash* the climate as we’re endlessly told.
You all know *who* I’m looking at for an answer.
And how does that affect the price of petrol – now the stuff is a mandatory additive?
Me smells the stink of Cronyism (and trollery) that even the alcohol cannot remove.
What *would* work there dya think?
Good to see that uncle Ben Wallace has finally achieved his ambition scrabbling for slimy, green, oily residues of household waste, alcohol and algae in Whitehall. He has nothing better to do after all ?
This will be a thing until a very expensive plane falls out of the sky due to fuel quality issues. Then the military will quietly revert to a more reliable hydrocarbon-based fuel.
It appears to be “all talk” to me. It’s fine to announce it, but unless real-world testing on biofuel for military planes has been completed, it won’t be in use for a while. We’ve had biofuels for cars (85/15 gasoline at the pump) for a while now, and cars aren’t melting or running into trees (unless the driver does that).
However, if it stretches the military’s budget, so much the better, isn’t it?
The military is a tool. However, whether defensive, or social justice (i.e. choice, offensive), the funds will be redistributed, the lives aborted, the children dunked (e.g. Mediterranean, Rio Grande, Caribean Sea). In fact, the latter (i.e. social justice adventurism) has a legacy of forcing greater excess deaths (i.e. elective) and anthropogenic dysfunction (e.g. catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform not limited to refugee crises) than the former.
What does it’s use do to the prime limiting factor “Range”?
I have heard that while some mixtures may burn cleaner they also carry less energy per gallon so, in the case of driving, mileage is reduced by upwards of 30%.
I thought most jet fuel ratings were measured in gallons per hour based on average cruising speed at altitude. Do you have any info on how/if gallons per hour figures are affected when biofuels are used?
I would imagine that a fighter that has to refuel 3 times in flight or one that has a potential 30% shorter maximum flight time might be far less useful in times of war. Not to mention maximum range from aircraft carrier operations.
One may also note that many of the seals o rings etc are very sensitive to fuel changes
Again I made a lot of money when the Indonesian Air Force started to use a high silver fuel and resulted
Seal failure
Biofuel for turbo reactors is so common and tired
I want 100% organic missiles.
Your wish is already granted. Absolutely everything that has ever been made, or ever will be made, come from all natural ingredients.
We have history from WW2 to guide us. The Germans bent over backwards trying to find a substitute for oil. As far as I can tell, oil was also the reason they attacked the Soviet Union. link We know how that turned out.
There is no good substitute for cheap plentiful oil. The military is very interested in history. They know the pivotal role of oil in WW2. They also understand logistics better than anybody. They wouldn’t be bothering with this crap if they weren’t forced to do so by the politicians.
Bob, see also my comment at 7:04 below. Highly related.
If oil had been H!tler’s main goal in 1941, he would have concentrated all his armor in the south, or dispensed with Army Groups North (objective Leningrad) and Center (Moscow) entirely.
He’d have had a long vulnerable left flank, but no worse than his defensive line in winter 1941-42. And he’d have gotten the Caucasian-Caspian oil fields.
Oil did become his goal in 1942, leading to Stalingrad.
The US and Germany has it’s own version of this stupidity in 2008 with enviromentally friendly bombs which used tetrazole rather than TNT. It’s important to protect the atmosphere while destroying your enemy 🙂
A little known and very relevant story here about a fuel change in the early stages of the Battle of Britain. Interestingly, it was a German colleague who pointed this out to me:
https://www.rsc.org/news-events/articles/2009/05-may/spitfire-fuel/
Other US oil companies boosted their avgas octane with TEL, called “ethyl” rather than “lead” because the latter sounded unhealthy.
Yes, and another little known fact is that Avgas still contains tetraethyl lead.
There is technology out there to replace it, renewable too, but our great leaders are only interested in talking about things like this. Their brains are too small and petty to be able to think about actually doing something.
The Avgas market – piston engines for light aircraft – must be pretty small. The vast majority of flights will be jets, and will use Aviation Turbine Fuel, which needs no lead.
That is really interesting. Thanks for that link!!
fascinating, never heard that before, thanks
Interesting – but though a high top speed and better altitude performance is certainly useful, it was not such a critical issue during the Battle of Britain.
The two issues in the BoB were the ability of the Luftwaffe to deliver bomb loads accurately on targets, and the ability of the RAF to stop them doing this. Fighting was therefore mainly at bomber speeds and altitudes, with Luftwaffe fighters primarily engaging the RAF when the bombers needed defending.
The key advantage of the British, which the Germans never realised until the BoB was over, was the Dowding System. This was an integrated flexible Airspace Command and Control system – the first in the world – which enabled raids to be detected, identified and intercepted at optimal positions for the defenders, across the whole of the UK battle zone, in real time.
Using this system, defending fighters could be deployed with nearly 100% efficiency, and there was rarely any need to engage in long stern chases where extra speed would be critical. Being regularly vectored to a point 2000ft above your enemy and upsun of him with full ammunition and fuel tanks was the key reason why the relatively inexperienced British pilots were able to withstand the onslaught by the highly capable and professional Luftwaffe…
Natural gas has 130 octane rating (a real one).
Here’s the thing: the UK only produces about 55% of the food consumed in the country . . . it is a net IMPORTER of food. It gets the rest of its food, including may grain foods, from the EU and other foreign countries such as Africa, North and South America, and Asia (ref: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/food-statistics-pocketbook/food-statistics-in-your-pocket-global-and-uk-supply ).
Given that most biofuels in use today result from processing plant grains such as corn, soy, and rapeseed (canola) and plant stalks such as sugar cane, it appears that any plan for the UK military to consider biofuels as a realistic source of fuels for a portion of its aircraft fleet will automatically mean making either (a) that military even more dependent on foreign suppliers in time of war, or (b) bringing on nation-wide hunger in time of war.
Soy and canola aren’t grains. Soy beans are legumes and rape seed is in the mustard family.
JT, you are correct . . . my bad!
De nada. Mox nix!
I think they will find this all eventually gets written off as a negative saving on the fuel budget.
To quote a movie I can’t remember the title or actor: Its madness, madness.
I believe the movie was “The Bridge On The River Kwai”, spoken by the British officer when the bridge was blown up near the end of the movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkwyt0ytVJI&ab_channel=Movieclips
Incorrect use of Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife. SOP would have been one hand under the jaw, other hand with knife into the cerebellum through the foramen magnum (Chinese “wind gate”), with vigorous scrambling thereof.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkwyt0ytVJI&ab_channel=Movieclips
Think “the madness” is from Apocalypse Now.
When your primary duty is to provide protection to your country, if the shooting starts, I very much doubt if the environmental status of your killing machines will feature in the deployment decisions too much will it?
Virtue-signalling run amok.
No concept of how much fuel is used by jet engines. Even if all the animal fat and vegetable oil went directly to jet fuel there wouldn’t be enough to sustain an air force for even training flights much less combat.
Only slightly off topic, a friend who is still holding the fort back in California, recently informed me that he has been unable to locate any denatured alcohol to buy. It seems the story is that California has banned the sale on some pretext of saving the ozone.
A lot of tangent on this topic.
The original article is somewhat misleading in its casual combination of sources.
If you read the Air University article by Major McWilliams that is being used as justification then you will find that McWilliams is being quoted out of context.
His argument is NOT that ‘bio fuel good, use bio fuel’. Instead he is pointing out that the civilian sector is already using biofuel and under the current regulations there is no requirement to label fuel has having ‘bio’ in it.
So, his argument goes, if civil fuel may be bio, and if the Air Force is expecting that they will need to use civil refuelling infrastructure then it is going to be highly likely they will be supplied with bio.
Hence the choices:
A – never use a civil supply chain so you can ensure their is never bio
or
B – ensure all aircraft are approved to run on bio IN CASE they are required to refuel via civilian sources.
He recommends B.
He does not, as far as my quick read could see, suggest that bio be used to replace traditional fuels.
Have a look for yourself. The link is active and there is no paywall.
That is encouraging, Craig. Thank you for clarifying it.
Question: How many French fries have to be deep fried to provide enough biofuel for a Typhoon to fly for one hour?
Get a USAF missile within 50 miles of an enemy aircraft and it is game over.
Talk about air superiority.
I imagine the pilots would rather be burning kerosene though.
Await carbon neutral bombers.
I cannot imagine the UK running out of chip fat.
Perhaps the Brits are anticipating looming food gluts, due, in part, to rising CO2 levels. Elevated CO2 (eCO2) improves crop yields through “CO2 fertilization,” making food more plentiful. eCO2 is highly beneficial for all major crops, and it is one of the reasons for improving grain yields:
https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
We’ve got to do something with all that extra food.
“Sorry, we can’t attack you yet – it’s before the harvest of biofuels”
Sad to report, upon reading this my first thought was to change Alex’s insult of Billy-boy (A Clockwork Orange) to “thou globby bottle of cheap, stinking
chip-oilaviation fuel.”Is that Putin I hear laughing uncontrollably gain?