Guest Opinion by Kip Hansen — 6 December 2023
One of the absolutely nuttier ideas to come out of the climate change / anti-fossil fuels mania of modern times comes from the international airlines business. They are being pushed by governments and getting unending pressure to signal their virtue by visibly climbing aboard the “Stop Fossil Fuels Now” bandwagon. The hitch is, as we all know, is that airplanes need fuel to fly and currently, fossil fuels are the only choice.
But, thanks to the venerable Old Gray Lady, we are now informed, with interactive media, that:
“Airlines Race Toward a Future of Powering Their Jets with Corn”
The headline is simultaneously literal and tongue-in-cheek – the (I am fighting the urge to use the phrase “corny idea”) concept is to replace the more usual jet fuels with ethanol made from corn.
“Ethanol (also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, drinking alcohol, or simply alcohol) is an organic compound with the chemical formula CH3CH2OH. It is an alcohol, with its formula also written as C2H5OH, C2H6O or EtOH, where Et stands for ethyl. Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colorless liquid with a characteristic wine-like odor and pungent taste. It is a psychoactive recreational drug, and the active ingredient in alcoholic drinks.” [ source The Wiki ]
Ethanol is “alcohol” of the same type one finds in their whiskey, vodka, gin, moonshine, beer and now fruit drinks.
Ethanol is a fairly simple hydrocarbon composed entirely of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen. Products of its complete combustion are CO2 and H2O.
“Wait,” you say, “replacing fossil fuels with ethanol will still produce CO2?” Of course it will, they are both, jet fuels and ethanol, primarily hydrocarbons.
So why make the switch? Already, in the U.S.A., “Today, nearly 40 percent of America’s corn crop is turned into ethanol, up from around 10 percent in the mid-2000s. This was largely because of government mandates that began in 2005 requiring gasoline to be mixed with minimum amounts of renewable fuel.” [ NY Times, linked article – hereafter just NYT ]
How much ethanol are they talking about for automotive gasoline each year? “14 billion gallons”. “….the 135 billion gallons of finished motor gasoline consumed in the United States contained about 14 billion gallons of fuel ethanol.” [ source – US EIA ]
How much fossil fuel-based jet fuel is burned each year? In 2019 commercial 95 billion gallons of jet fuel were consumed. [ source ]. The Covid panic reduced that somewhat, but the total is expected to reach that again this year.
To replace all of the fossil-fuel-based jet fuel would require, if all things were equal (which they are not) another 95 billion gallons of ethanol.
The U.S. already uses up to 40% of its total corn crop to produce the measly 14 billion gallons of ethanol mixed into gasoline. It would take 250% of today’s total U.S. corn crop [ something wrong with my math here – a little help? – kh ] to produce the 95 billions gallons of ethanol to replace jet fuels – not even considering the number of additional ethanol plans that would be needed. Of course, the U.S. need not carry the whole ethanol load necessary to replace worldwide jet fuel use, but it gives us some idea of the magnitude of the suggestion.
In acreage of land planted in corn, that would be an increase from 100 million acres to 250 million acres. Much of that acreage would have to be irrigated and aquifers in the mid-west corn belt are famously overtaxed already.
Other sugar crops such as sugar cane and sugar beets can be used to make ethanol using the same processes as for corn. Ethanol can also be produced from almost any plant materials even cellulosic feedstocks, such as crop residues and wood—though this is not as common.
But wait, there’s more: ethanol does not contain the same amount of energy per gallon as jet fuel.
Jet Fuel contain approximately 135,000 BTUs per gallon. Ethanol contains only 76,330 Btu/gallon which is only 56% of the energy in jet fuel. Thus, many more gallons of ethanol will be needed – around 130 billion gallons of ethanol to replace the 95 billion gallons of jet fuel.
On the CO2 emissions side, burning 1 kg of jet fuel produces about 9.3 kg of CO2 whereas burning 1 kg of ethanol only produces 5.7 kg of CO2. That’s about 2/3s as much CO2 per kg….but, as above, ethanol doesn’t have as much energy per kg (or BTUs per gallon) as jet fuel – only about 2/3s as much, to the actual reduction in CO2 has to be calculated taking into account the extra ethanol that has to be burned or the same energy return.
Then there is the idea of burning food to power jet airplanes. Of the world’s current 8 billion humans, just under 10% do not get enough food to eat – do not get enough basic calories, not to mention vitamins, proteins, micro-nutrients – they just plain do not get enough food. Corn is good food. Land used to grow corn for jet fuel could grow other food or other basics grains which, if transported to areas of need, would help resolve that problem. Corn and other grains are also food for animals raised as food – chickens, pigs, cattle, sheep, rabbits and goats that provide high quality protein around the world.
Remember, because this idea touches on the topics of fossil fuels, the environment, agriculture, animals as food and fresh water use, there is and will be a great deal of controversy.
Bottom Lines:
1. It is my opinion that it is ill-advised, bordering on criminally negligent, to convert much needed food into fuels for cars or for airplanes, when so many people are in want of basic calories.
2. Whether or not any real world net reduction in CO2 would result from a shift from jet fuels to ethanol in air transportation is questionable.
3. Arable land is just too precious to be wasted in the misguided effort to grow corn in order to replace jet fuel with ethanol – given that arable land could be used to grow better food for the underfed peoples of the world.
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Author’s Comment:
In short, growing five times more corn so that it can be turned into ethanol is just a stinking rotten idea when there are plentiful fossil fuels.
Revisiting the idea if and when fossil fuels ‘run out’ might get my vote – but I doubt it.
If we must, for some as yet unknown reason, restrict emission from airplanes, then forbidding our governments from flying politicians around the world all the time would be my first suggestion. Junketing businessmen and women would be next on the list – let them have video conferences.
OK, in truth, whole books and journals full of research would be needed to cover this topic and do it justice. I’m just sticking with “Bad Idea”.
Thanks for reading.
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Yes, you are dealing with fact-free & math-free politics.
Facts are Racist. So is math!
And all of this corn is grown with fertilizer made from fossil fuels, so the ethanol is not that renewable to begin with.
I better ?
An A380 superjumbo just completed a flight powered by cooking oil
It’s huge, it’s wide, and it’s potentially a lot more sustainable. The Airbus A380, a behemoth of the skies, has completed a trial flight powered on cooking oil.
The test airplane completed a three-hour flight from Blagnac Airport in Toulouse – Airbus’ French headquarters – on 25 March. It was powered by Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or SAF – predominantly made of used cooking oil and waste fats – and operating on a single Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine.
Another problem with this is that jet fuel has a higher flash point and lower vapor pressure than gasoline or ethanol, so is safer. There is also a lubricity issue. Jet fuel running thru the system helps keep the pumping and injection systems lubricated. Ethanol will not provide that.
Guilty, guilty, guilty!
Kip H is guilty of confirmation bias with a bad case of liar, liar pants on fire.
First there is not a food shortage, American farmers have a market shortage.
Second, the protein part of feed corn is processed out when producing ethanol.
This is a value added process that created corn belt jobs at a time when we were sending manufacturing jobs to China.
I was in the navy and went to Purdue U during the 70s energy crisis. corn and energy was the subject my senior project. As a navy officer, I supervised the operation of nuke plants. After getting out I certified SRO and worked at nuke plants around the world.
That was until POTUS Clinton became president. My job at new reactors went away. I moved the family to work at a nuke plant and then that job went away because of cheap gas from Canada. NAFTA paid for grad school where I focused on biomass to energy.
So after 20 years of dealing with anti-nukes, I am thinking I will now be a good guy.
What I learned is if you have a job where your hands get dirty providing what families need, there will be some scum bag like Kip against it.
After 8 years of scum bad Clinton the US again had energy issues. The energy bill debate was halted till 2005 by the WOT. By 2006 I had a job back in new reactors.
For those who did not read the 2005 Energy Bill there is no mandate for corn ethanol. There was a small mandate for biomass in fuel which was easily demonstrated.
So what is the perspective of a sailor from the Midwest? OPEC and China go F___ yourself. You need our food but we do not need your energy. The USN is not going to bleed for you.
If you want to replace 95 billion gallons of jet fuel with the equivalent amount of BTU’s from ethanol you’ll need 161 billion gallons of ethanol not 135 billion.
95 billion gal x 135 thousand BTU/gal = 73300 BTU/gal x ? gallons
Chemman ==> My Hero! I knew someone would correct my math on that.
Thanks for that.
Also, how big will the aeroplanes’ tanks have to be to hold all the ethanol?? Quite a lot bigger I would guess.
Getting facts straight is important. Conventional jet fuel has Lower Heating Value (LHV) of ~123,000 btu/gal and a Higher Heating Value (HHV) of ~130,000 Btu/gal. Diesel is higher than jet fuel at 128,450 (LHV) and ~137,000 (HHV) due to the higher density and distillation end point for diesel vs jet fuel. Ethanol has a LHV of 76,330 Btu/gal and ~84,000 Btu/gal HHV. Different sources site different values but many are off, sometimes by a lot. I use verified sources when possible including DOE, Argonne NL, CARB, and my own extensive experience in this field (40+ years) so I take this seriously. But the trends are still the same. Just keep the facts straight.
Burning Ethanol also increase Ozone pollution large cities have problems with.
The EPA never actually approved Ethanol in gasoline. They grandfathered it in before emissions testing of fuels became the norm. Now, any new fuel source must pass stringent emissions testing both engine-out and exhaust out (after cats and traps). Ethanol has aldehyde emissions that would not pass current engine out requirements. The aftertreatment devises essentially make all fuels clean. So there is no meaningful benefit to oxygenated fuels over conventional fuels. In fact, EPA vehicle certification is done on ethanol-free fuel.
The amount of misinformation and misunderstanding about fuels, especially by the EPA, is astounding.
But the NGO’s do anything possible to make fuel more difficult to produce as in California where there are differences in fuel specs from county to county making refiners produce multiple grades of gasoline increasing the cost of production significantly. All to no avail as modern cars emit less pollution than exists in the atmosphere itself. In LA, a car actually cleans the atmosphere.
Kip,
I suggest your calculations are far off. Only the important people, and private jets, need to fly, so less fuel will be needed. Look at the specific restriction goals that the C40 cities plan for their inhabitants. The hoi poi can be better utilized hoeing the corn.
The hoi polloi can eat the corn and tell the elites to stuff it in the engine intake.
Very nice. The whole CAGW/net zero notion is insane we need to put an end to it.
Pretty sure that making 95 billion gallons of ethanol requires a lot of yeast that releases CO2 while fermenting the corn. It’s a great idea, manufacture CO2 to save the world from CO2.
A rapidly growing field of corn will deplete its food source – CO2 – if there is no breeze.
The Corn Belt’s wind turbines might need to reverse the electron flow and supplement the wind.
You can’t do just one thing.
I don’t remember the details but Obama tested the use of biofuels for our military jets.
I think they were paying something like $140 dollars a gallon.
(Don’t forget that Obama’s VP was Brandon. Creepy Joe is just staying the course Obama and the Dems set.)
We need to drop our ethanol mandates for gasoline. That’s a tough row to hoe, given Iowa’s spot as the first contest in the presidential primaries. Every body running for president wants a strong start in the early contest and everyone panders to the farm vote.
We waste too much food and farmland in making ethanol for fuel. There is no net gain in energy and consumers pay more for food. Big Ag is the big winner and everyone else is the loser.
Disagree. The original gasoline/ethanol mandate had two reasons:
The original 10% blendwall was set by LA premium summer gas. Elsewhere usually a less by season. Anything more than 10% is just farm lobby politics.
Second, speaking as a 40+ years dairy farm owner, there is NO impact on net food production volume or costs. All the corn grown on my farm is now sold for ethanol. We buy back the yeast protein enhanced residue ‘distillers grain’, an ideal ruminant feed supplement to alfalfa, better than the chopped fermented green corn (whole unripe stalk) silage we used to make/store in those big blue Harvestores. The ethanol feed conversion is (dry weight meaning less than 7% moisture) corn 42%/distillers grain 27%. Net net, we grow less alfalfa and more corn, have happier cows producing higher butterfat milk sold at a higher price to the local dairy plant (milk, butter, yogurt, ice cream—no cheese), don’t use the Harvestores so avoid the considerable annual maintenance costs to keep them hermetic, and I have a more profitable dairy farm.
Years ago I looked into the corn/ethanol/catfish process.
Ethanol to run the farm and drink, protein to feed the fish, used water to irrigate and help fertilize the fields. Fish sold for cashflow.
I am just too lazy to do all that work so no, I didn’t do that.
Rud ==> Nobody said it was bad for farmers…..
But to try to make another 135 billion gallons of ethanol is a big stretch and I don’t see any advantage,
They’re breaking ground on an ethanol jet fuel plant in South Dakota. Want to say it’s about a 60MW load. Some of that is served by hydro, but most is going to come from fossil fuels. None of that power is coming from wind or solar.
The U.S. already uses up to 40% of its total corn crop to produce the measly 14 billion gallons of ethanol mixed into gasoline. It would take 250% of today’s total U.S. corn crop [ something wrong with my math here – a little help? – kh ] to produce the 95 billions gallons of ethanol to replace jet fuels –
2.5*0.40=1.0 14B=0.40X X=2.5x14B=35B 95/35=2.71= 271% (I cheated and used the Windows calculator for the last step – percentages can be a pain, I never know what is meant when someone says “x is 200% more than y”, is it two times y or three times y?)
Hmmm. No more editing option? I immediately noticed I’d use “x” instead of “*” in the second equation, but couldn’t find any icon to edit.
Another problem with burning ethanol in jet turbines is lubrication. That’s one reason they burn what’s essentially more refined diesel fuel. Gasoline and alcohols are solvents. It’s hard enough keeping oil inside the engine bearings operating really close to very high temperatures. The jet fuel can get to the bearing seals and since it’s an oil if any gets past seals it has little, if any effect.
But run a turbine on a solvent fuel like gasoline or alcohol, if it get to the bearing seals it can get past them, thin out and break down the oil.
Jet turbine bearing sealing has improved over the years since their invention, but it’s best to not be burning a solvent for fuel.
Early jet engines didn’t bother with sealing the bearings near the super hot combustion chambers and power turbine. They ran total loss oil systems where the lubricating oil was pumped into the bearings and allowed to blow out the exhaust. Such engines could easily be identified by the sooty black trails left behind at higher throttle settings. The oil couldn’t all be burned before going out the exhaust. Thus when refueled the planes also got their engine oil topped up.
That oiling system is what led to the crash of a YB-49 flying wing prototype during testing to decide if the military would buy new bombers from Northrup or Convair. The fuel and oil tanks were filled the day before the demonstration but during flight the next day, the engines all ran out of oil. Someone had to have sneakily drained most of the oil out during the night. There could only be two obvious culprits, someone at Convair who wanted to secure the contract, or someone in the military who didn’t want to have that “weird” flying wing in the fleet.
Kip: This notion is not a credible one, and not at all what the SAF thrust is aiming for. (SAF = Sustainable Aviation Fuel) SAF is in fact NOT ethanol, ethanol will not work with any modern turbofan engine designs. SAF is a reformed fuel that is similar to the properties of actual Jet-A fuel, which is essentially kerosene with additives.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/sustainable-aviation-fuels
It is of course still a stupid idea, but not as delusional as using ethanol. And from the actual SAF gov web blurb above, you only need a billion tons of biomass to make 60 billion tons of SAF. Even that sounds like a perpetual motion machine… how do you increase the mass of this stuff by 60 times via heat and catalysis??? Magic beans?
And your figure on CO2 produced by burning Jet-A is completely mistaken.
Jet fuel is approximately C12 H26. And the formula of combustion is as follows:
2(C12 H26) + 37O2 > 24CO2 + 26H2O
where 1 mole of JetA is 170 g/mol; C=12 g/mol; H=2 g/mol; O=16 g/moll and CO2=44 g/mol.
Which means 340 grams of JetA + 1184 grams of O2 yields 1056 grams of CO2 + 468 grams of H2O,
So the ratio of CO2 to fuel by weight is 3.106 after combustion. So for every 100 grams of Jet fuel burned, produces 310.6 grams of CO2. It is not 9.3:1 as you incorrectly stated.
There can be no argument against molar chemistry and the conservation of mass therein.
Its would take 670% of current corn-ethanol production to make the 95 million gallons. However, this becomes 1340% when taking into account the lower energy content of ethanol. A non-starter. Dumber than one can imagine.
“Dumber than one can imagine.” So, based on past performance, the Biden regime will be pressing forward with this shortly.
How strange that our ancestors and previous generations have worked out the best fuels to use to get the best output and our politicians of today think they can change that??
It’s because our western political class have all been indoctrinated to believe that they know best and can do no wrong.
This would actually be kind of fun to watch. The FAA, even by comparison to the usual risk-averse government agencies, is notoriously risk-averse. And the FAA only governs operations of US airlines or aircraft operating in US airspace; there are multiple other national and supra-national agencies all invested with the power to regulate all things aviation-related, plus an extensive set of international treaties to impose some commonality to all this regulation.
The conversion of existing commercial aircraft to ethanol-based fuel would be a multi-decade undertaking before the first corn-fueled passenger flight could take off.
Heck, it’s probably a decade or more to develop, test and certify a new aircraft engine designed from the start to run on ethanol.
Forget the impact on food production, bourbon is at least 50% corn. What’s it going to do to bourbon production and prices?