BY WILL JONES
Net Zero targets aimed at encouraging airlines to use so-called green aviation fuel are driving fraud “at a mass scale” and deforestation, campaigners have said. The Telegraph has the story.
Exporters in China and Malaysia are using virgin palm oil instead of recycled cooking fat to make sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), research from lobby group Transport & Environment (T&E) suggests.
This means that rather than reducing CO2 emissions, the drive to adopt SAF may instead be driving deforestation.
SAF accounts for just 0.2% of total jet fuel use, although the British Government has ordered U.K. airlines to lift that proportion to 10% by the end of the decade.
Cooking oil forms the basis for 80% of the world’s SAF, making old chip fat a valuable commodity.
However, unscrupulous suppliers are seeking to turn a profit by cutting out the kitchen altogether and shipping virgin palm oil to unwary refiners and airlines.
Malaysia is the worst offender, according to T&E, as campaigners cast doubt over the country’s claims that it exports three times more used cooking oil than it collects.
Last year Britain secured almost 30% of its SAF from oil shipped from Malaysia.
Cian Delaney, the group’s biofuels campaigner, said: “With Malaysia being one of the world’s largest palm oil producers, it would heavily indicate that used cooking oil is simply a backdoor for palm. Fraud is almost certainly happening at a mass scale.”
China also appears to be engaged in cooking oil fraud, T&E said.
While figures on the collection and export of oil appear to match, China has a large market for “gutter oil” that is illegally resold for cooking.
Taking that into account, there are “strong suspicions” that some exports include virgin vegetable oil mislabelled as waste oil.
Worth reading in full.
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The Virgin Oil is probably blended with the used, reused, and re-reused cooking oil to give it less viscosity making it easier to refine
OK, moderators, I am going to swear.
“…using virgin palm oil instead of recycled cooking fat to make sustainable aviation fuel..”
The very idea that either of these is a sensible idea is, well, the province of fucking morons.
It does not matter what you burn in the Stratosphere, you are still spewing out water vapor and warming the planet.
No doubt, you have a zero carbon footprint?
Carbon is a meaningless metric, it has nothing to do with climate. What size shoe do you wear?
I gave you an upvote – other people have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone saying something warms the planet.
You were writing about water vapour and not CO2, and you didn’t say how much warming, and there was no indication of climate disaster, so you’re correct. Thanks!
In a way you are correct. Water vapor is indeed a warming gas. Even Tony Heller would agree. By the same token, less pollution by shipping of late has increased the warming effect of the Sun, because of the clearer skies. Funny old world.
When the US skies had no planes after 9/11, they used the opportunity to measure the effect of planes on land temperatures. What they found was no increase, no decrease, just a different day-night range. So no, planes “spewing” water vapour do not warm the planet.
The effects of burning 50 – 80 billion gallons of fuel at the stratospheric / tropospheric boundary cannot be measured from just a few days in a pause. I would say that the climate science community has very little useful knowledge about radiative transfer in the stratosphere (they are fixated with CO2), but HT just proved that increasing water vapor in the stratosphere warms the surface and that it is highly likely that general aviation is the cause of global warming, and it is anthropogenic. The water vapor that you do not see from jet exhaust continues upwards for approximately 3 years, and with an approximate 1:1 ratio of equivalency of water produced from combustion, the world is constantly supplying a stream of 50 – 90 billion gallons of water vapor into the stratosphere annually with the most at the Northern Hemisphere and the least at the South Pole.
While the graph is a hatchet approach, throw in 9 billion gallons into the pristine stratosphere of the early 40’s and the correlation with global temperatures is quite impressive.
Just remember you heard it first here.
Here is my experiment, please try and kill it.
Isn’t science lovely…
Note: The Redoubt volcanic eruption in 2009 caused a short-term pause and took a few years before the warming from ever increasing aviation commenced as the transmission data in Hawaii recorded.
Interestingly the latest transmission value indicates a significant monthly drop, better make sure you have some extra wood for the winter.
ESRL Global Monitoring Laboratory – Global Radiation and Aerosols (noaa.gov)
Yeah isn’t science lovely… Let’s do some simple math shall we? Thunderstorms deliver water to the stratosphere. Every year NOAA says there are 14.6 million thunderstorms annually, globally. A recent paper details actual measurement of the water injected into the stratosphere by thunderstorms. It is 1,100 tonnes per storm.
So that totals 16.1 billion tonnes annually delivered to the stratosphere by global thunderstorms.
90 billion gallons of jet fuel annually is 269 billion kg, which is 269 million tonnes. Each kg of fuel burned yields 1.367 kg of water vapor, so total water from jets is 367 million tonnes of water from aviation.
367,000,000 / 16,100,000,000 = 0.0227 which is 2.27%.
So global aviation deposits 2.27% more water into the stratosphere than does thunderstorm convection. Seems your point is rather a nothing burger….
Not only is the idea that jet travel is causing warming silly compared to natural water injected into the stratosphere by thunderstorms, but logically there must be a natural way this constant injection by storms, gets returned to the troposphere, else the concentration of water in the stratosphere would rapidly rise, which it doesn’t. It stays around 4-5 ppmv.
So I call double negation of your lament about jet travel injecting too much water into the stratosphere…
That is exactly what I am saying, assuming that the recent paper you referenced has anything to do with reality, 2.27% is significant if you have any understanding radiative transfer, a forcing is a forcing. And we have not even used a feedback, burger boy.
And as far as 4-5 ppmv, do you believe that proxy number has anything to do with reality?
How much thunderstorm convection is there under the jet lanes below the Arctic circle.
Get some rest, and just look at the data.
The water vapor in the stratosphere keeps rising for 3 – 4 years, until it either is catalyzed in the destruction of Ozone or conversion of SO2 to SU, or it eventually rises through the ozone layer in which extreme UV splits the molecule and the hydrogen and oxygen transverse into the mesosphere. There is no convection in the stratosphere the temperature profile is inverted.
So, in closing yes, science is lovely, you confirmed my hypothesis, quite by accident I am sure, thanks for the input. Words are part of science, data is everything. Thanks for the words.
The data is clear, aviation exhaust is and will continue to cause global warming.
Taking advantage of one fraud in order to perpetrate another.
The whole AGW scam is based on fraud…
Why should any “climate action” taken be any different.
Fraud was fairly obvious in the past when dancing, beating drums, tossing virgins into volcanoes and burning witches were the approved climate actions that didn’t work.
Nowadays, governments just print money and hand it out so that climate actions will work. But not until 2050. Or 2100, I forget which.
“But not until 2050. Or 2100, I forget which.”
ah.. the imaginary world of Never-Never Land. !!
“The Haze” is an annual event in SE Asia where forests are illegally logged and burned to plant palm oil.
Corruption is widespread in SE Asian palm oil. Land grabs in the name of saving the planet, sub contracting the work repeatedly to hide the owners. When someone does get busted it is some poor indigenous farmer, kicked off the land, trying to make a buck. Paid a few dollars cash to walk through the freshly logged fields of slash with a burning kerosene container. The tropical hardwood is gone/stolen, the burned land snapped up by palm oil companies using carbon credits for the palm oil trees.
As usual, what the left thinks is good promotes fraud and waste and unintended consequences.
More great moments in unintended consequences…
Net zero anything, an impossible dream. Why? Complete control of the masses by the Cabal and their puppet politicians and media.
If you believe the Life Cycle Assessment analysis of biofuels made from FOG (Fats, Oils & Greases), Used Cooking Oil (UCO) has a Carbon Intensity (CI) of 20-30 gCO2e/MJ compared to 87 for refined jet fuel from crude oil. Animal fats have a CI of 30-40 and virgin Soy Oil is in the 60 CI range. Indirect Land Use Change (iLUC) adds about 29 gCO2e/MJ to account for using food based feedstocks for producing fuels. Thus, taking everything into account, it is hard to justify using FOG for fuel.
This just gets worse for ethanol-based fuels. Growing corn and fermenting the starch into EtOH (ethanol) and then producing SAF jet fuel from it is no better than using fossil fuel per IATA (International Air Transit Association) who oversees such issues. Yet the EtOH to Jet (aka Alcohol-to-Jet) is the fastest growing route to SAF as EtOH producers seek both new outlets for fuel ethanol which is currently in decline and growth opportunities if the gasoline fuel market actually grows is (when) EV’s fail to take over the car market.
But none of this is “good for the environment”. But EcoNuts keep pushing this failed agenda in their unrelenting quest to displace fossil fuels. The sad point is, the US uses 16 million barrels/day of fuels and “renewables” can only displace about 4 million of those barrels and at great cost to food production.
Until this failure to perform becomes obvious, we will continue to push this meaningless agenda.
Its the same nonsense as wood pellets, forest fires, and burning various other non-fossil fuels: their CO2 doesn’t count.
How can shipping used or virgin oil or wood pellets halfway around the world get even close to “reducing carbon” (not that it matters in the real world)
Aviation fuel from GM algae aka Green Crude was proven back around ’06 or so but the
disruptive innovation of fracking won that contest. I still believe it’s a good
alternative to fossil fuels should it occur that FF become unavailable
which is are not. Palm oil vs Green Crude would be a no contest if were
done on a level field… The Green Fascist’s deceptions need to stop.
Petroleum-based aviation fuel is usually distilled from the kerosene fraction, and the best kerosene consists mostly of straight-chain hydrocarbons with 10 to 15 carbon atoms per molecule, and is treated with hydrogen to remove sulfur compounds. Compounds with less than 10 carbon atoms are too volatile for jet engines, and compounds with 16 or more carbon atoms will tend to freeze at the temperatures at the altitude where planes fly, so the kerosene fraction represents the best jet fuel.
Synthetic jet fuel can be made from discarded cooking oil and even animal fats, which contain triglycerides, whose molecules contain three long-chain fatty acids bonded to glycerine. The raw material is relatively cheap, usually gathered from grease traps in restaurant kitchens or next to the grill in fast-food kitchens, and also animal fats gathered from butcher shops. The problem is gathering it in sufficient quantities and transporting it to a processing plant.
Palm oil is rich in palmitic acid, which is a 16-carbon fatty acid. If this is hydrotreated to remove the carboxyl group (which produces water), the resulting straight-chain hydrocarbon is near the borderline between the kerosene and diesel fractions, and would likely be distilled into bio-diesel, not jet fuel. Unlike cooking oil and animal fats, which are waste products from food production, palm oil requires deforestation to produce the raw material.
Whether the jet fuel comes from petroleum, cooking oil, or palm oil, its combustion still releases the same amount of CO2 into the air. The only difference is whether the carbon used to produce the fuel comes from underground (petroleum) or from recently-living plants (the other sources).