Climate Home News is trying to sell us “sustainable aviation fuel”, right out of the frying pan into the fantasy. You see while normal people are looking forward to flying somewhere on their summer holidays to the scolds at CHN “in a warming world, flying comes at an environmental – and for climate-conscious passengers – a moral cost.” So the airlines have turned to Used Cooling Oil (UCO) which is supposedly sustainable and comes from ethical sources with supply chains deep into back alley greasy spoon kitchens in Southeast Asia so it's got to be legit right?
The problem is that Europeans want to fly everywhere while maintaining their net zero fantasy so, according to CHN, the airlines’ main hope “lies with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), which today is made primarily from waste vegetable oil.” And to their credit, CHN tries to pry into the vexed question “is SAF as green as its backers claim?” More and more such people, as the synthetic rubber hits the lack of road, are realising that any huckster or crank can call a thing green and you have to look behind the curtain.
Moreover, in trying to figure out whether you could even get enough of it to keep a steady stream of jet aeroplanes in the air over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and so forth, they discover that “a global supply chain that leads thousands of miles back to restaurant and household kitchens in Southeast Asia” is, of all things, rather shaky when it comes to documentation. Indeed, naively or deeply cynically, “the international system of green certification relied on by fuel providers and the airline industry is rooted in self declaration by small-scale suppliers.” Who would never, ever fib for money, of course.
Aaack! Yes they would:
“We found widespread concern among collectors and traders that palm oil which is barely used or fresh – banned in Europe because of its links with rainforest destruction – is being passed off as [Used Cooking Oil] UCO, raising doubts about its climate benefits.”
Who saw that coming? Or that:
“we report on how the holy grail of e-SAF – not made from plants, but CO2 and green hydrogen – is still far from becoming the commercial success needed for truly guilt-free flying.”
Egad. Green hydrogen not ready for prime time? But all this stuff actually misses the combustible point, which is that if you want to get a tube of metal weighing between 50 and 500 tonnes to hurtle through the sky at hundreds of kilometres per hour five miles up and full of people and their collection of apparently brick-laden carry-on bags, you are going to need some serious energy. And to get that energy from cooking oil, new or used, you are going to have to … oh dear. Burn it.
Yup. Burn burn burn. Turning carbohydrates into… aaaaaaah!... water and CO2. Whereupon one group of cranks will holler that the water is secretly chemical manipulation of the weather or our minds, and another that CO2 is “carbon pollution.” What the dickens does it matter whether it first cooked a French fry?
OK, it’s true that making it once instead of twice could lead to some reduction in the total carbon wingprint. But the big point, and if you’ve ever stood near a running jet engine you’ll grasp how big, is the energy extracted from it to fly the dang plane. By burning it and releasing the chemical energy in the complex molecule bonds by turning them into simpler ones.
Maybe take your next vacation at a science camp.
P.S. As for this fabled “green hydrogen” that by turning water and CO2 into carbohydrates would actually escape this trap, though not via vegetable oil, Canary Media whimpers that “The Senate’s plans for the “Big, Beautiful Bill” may just solidify green hydrogen’s demise. The budget legislation will quickly end hydrogen incentives, which could be the last straw for the already-struggling industry”. So yeah, far from a commercial success. Something to do with the laws of physics.
Soooo...it sounds like we have makers of 'sustainable aviation fuel' doing the same sort of project as I've read about in times past, involving individual diesel truck owners going around to collect barrels of used french fry oil from fast food places, then processing these through home-made redistilleries in their garages, into fuel for their vehicles.
Climate change is no longer a science, if it ever was, but has become a religion. Most religions are based upon the expiation of guilt - you have done wrong, you must confess your sins, and so on. The climate science religion provides endless opportunities for huxters to cash in on this. People want to go on summer holiday trips but feel guilty about it, so if you offer them something to assuage their guilt, such as flying their aircraft on used cooking oil, they won't look too closely at what it actually is or where it came from. As Phineas T. Barnum said, there's one born every minute.
The SAF field is somewhat more complex than this. It is also inextricably linked to the other main distillate fuel, diesel. And increasingly, there will be a call on the original oil...for example, Canola here in Canada in order to make any real dent in meeting total demand. What excited governments and the two separate distillate user groups have yet to appreciate is, making the more costly SAF blending component (fuel failure at 35,000 feet is a bit more concerning then on terre firma) is at the expense of the less costly RD and gives no net GHG reduction benefit for Mother Earth. Sensible policy (for those who believe it to be key to "saving the planet") would use all currently available neo-renewable oils to make RD until supply reaches demand (2150 anyone?) and only then spend the added costs to make SAF-blending stock after then. And when you look at the CO2 abatement achieved for either RD or SAF bending streams ("green" is a relative term) we'll be paying close to or north of $1,000 per tonne.