Here's the major big problem with all these pie-in-the-sky ideas about alternative fuels, at least for aviation, and it's a huge bucket of financial cold water on all the dreams and promises.
Jet transports have a service life of some 20 to 30 years, and in the case of the 787 and A350 perhaps 50 years. They are hugely expensive and represent a massive investment on the parts of the financial houses that pay for them (If you think airlines pay for their planes out of their bank accounts, think again).
Let's assume for the moment that airlines make money (They don't and in fact are one of the worst long-term investments on the planet but aviation is a really sexy business to be in so a lot of people are willing to invest a lot of money simply to play the game.) But if we assume flying people and cargo around makes money, it's a very long-term investment because of the huge costs involved. So a 737 or 777 or A330 or A380 or whatever has to keep flying for 20, 30, 40, even 50 years to repay the investment the financial institutions have made in them and the supoprting organizations and systems it takes to keep them flying and, hopefully, making the investment worthwhile.
The engines on these planes are also really, really expensive and they are sold separately from the planes. We and Airbus put them on, but we don't sell them, we don't warranty them, we don't provide parts for them, we don't have anything to do with them so to speak. All that stuff is between whoever made the engines and whoever bought them.
So you have these massive investments flying around and their only hope of becoming profitable investments is if they keep flying around for whole hell of a lot of years.
Which means that whatever alternative fuel someone comes up with, it has to work in these existing engines. The investment in them is way too high to simply take them off the planes and scrap them just because someone comes up with a new kind of fuel and an engine to run it in.
But let's forget about the new engine and just look at the new fuel. The only way it can be economically viable to the airline industry is if it's produced in the same volume as the fuel we use today is, and it is as easily distributed around the planet as the fuel we use today. Going from something that works in a lab to something that comes flowing out of a stall fuel feed in Dubai at a zillion pounds a minute is not something that's going to happen in a big hurry.
But we have to do something, right? So for the airline industry the short-term sustainable solution is biofuel made from third generation feedstocks like jatropha, soapberry, mangrove, salicornia, and so on. The long term susteainable solution is currentlyi seen as algae. Fuels made from both these sources works great in today's engines, and large scale production is not only feasible, it's in work.
So even if Joe Smarguy comes up with a way of using cold fusion to generate the power needed to fly a plane, it's going to be a cold day in hell before we see it in actual use. Because as nifty an idea as it may be, and as theoretically or even practically possible as it may be, it won't work in the GE115s on the wings of the 777-300ERs that we're putting together today and will have to be flying around earrning a living for the next 30 because it has to repay and make a worthwhile profit on the investment HSBC made in it.
Even the alternative fuels we already know we can produce and we already know work fine in today's engines face huge hurdles before they can become a viable energy source. The cost of creating fuel standards for them and building volume production facilities that meet these standards and the time required to reach the point where the volume being produced meets the demand all require huge amounts of money.
But---- the fuel produced needs to cost no more than the fuel the planes use now. Why? Because the more the fuel costs the more the tickets cost. And if you and me and the neighbor down the street decide that the cost of flying to visit grandma is simply too high, then there's not much point in flying the planes around anymore at all, right? And all those investments will go belly up and the people who made them will be Not Happy.
So massive, massive challenges to meet in moving the commercial aviation industry even into the alternative , sustainable fuels we have now and that we know work.
That's not to say that things like cold fusion or something we haven't even thought of yet won't work or someday become the norm in the transportation industry. But it's not going to happen for a long, long, long time. Money calls the shots every time.
There is good news at the end of the page, however. Fortunately for us and the people who come after us, there are enough people in industry and in countries with an inherent ability to look far into the future, see an worthwhile objective, and have the determination to keep working toward it until they get there--- China being a good example of this--- that there is more and more action than talk now. It's a shame the US government is not partiulary pro-active, at least not in the right direction, but there are plenty of US industries that are. Like Boeing.
Based on what I've been seing, hearing, and learning in places like China, the Middle East, and (yet to come this year) Australia, the objective of sustainable, environmentally friendly, or at least more friendly, aviation fuel is reachable. It's going to be a long time coming--- in China they talk about 30 years out before they can start providing enough sustainable fuel to meet the aviation fuel demand in that country--- but we've all started down the road. One step at a time.
