An Airbus A380 was flown on fuel derived from cooking oil

https://hackaday.com/2022/07/12/airbus-a380-completes-flight-powered-by-cooking-oil/

by prostoalex • 4 years ago

59 95 4 years ago

metadat• 4 years ago

an Airbus A380 airliner was flown solely on fuel derived from cooking oil.

Clickbaity, derived from cooking oil is a little different than flying on straight up cooking oil (like what diesel engines are capable of, just dump it in).

I doubt there is enough [used] cooking oil on earth to power all the jet engines on a daily basis. Cool as a PoC, though.

tyingq3• 4 years ago

Kerosene freezes at -47°C. Cooking oil freezes at temperature ranges you're more likely to experience in an aircraft. I don't think we'll see any straight cooking oil jet aircraft.

kylehotchkiss2• 4 years ago

Would you just dump used cooking engine into your engine? I’d imagine there’s a few particles that don’t burn off super cleanly and gunk up the pistons or valves or something

stephen_g2• 4 years ago

If you filter it well, you actually can run a diesel engine from waste cooking oil directly (but it's not great for it, which is why it's often converted to biodiesel or HVO/HEFA).

The hydro-processing that HEFA/HVO (the kind of fuel used in the above trial) goes through is mostly for cold handling properties, viscosity, etc. - it actually makes it basically chemically identical to the fossil derived hydrocarbons that are normally used, which is pretty cool and interesting.

tyingq3• 4 years ago

The tricky part of cooking oil in engines is that it's higher viscosity / thicker than diesel. So straight cooking oil only really works well in the types of diesel engines that use glow plugs and swirl chambers...where the fuel gets fully atomized despite the high viscosity. Direct injection diesel engines have more trouble with cooking oil, with lots of deposits and gummy build up.

The dirty bits aren't a big issue, other than for any fuel filters if you don't filter it first.

bombcar• 4 years ago

It can be done: https://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2009-09/taking-chances/

it's well known enough that the grease bins behind McDonalds and places now have locks, people were looting the oils

fy202• 4 years ago

Car Throttle had a good video about it a few years ago:

https://youtu.be/WNJH1rikujI

The most important point is you need an older car with mechanical injection (before ~2005). Modern diesels with electronic injection are much more sensitive to the fuel used, as they run at much higher pressure and components have tighter tolerances.

On an older car, yes you can just dump it in after some crude filtering (e.g. with cheesecloth). I have a neighbour with an old Land Rover and he has been running it for years on cooking oil. Some people start on diesel then switch to cooking oil later. It has a higher viscousity at room temperature than diesel, so it works better once everything is warmed up.

ge96• 4 years ago

Sewer oil industry will be booming

Stevvo3• 4 years ago

A jet turbine is a diesel engine; you could run one on straight up cooking oil the same as any other diesel engine. The same principles apply you just have a combustion chamber instead of a cylinder.

ummonk• 4 years ago

Commercial aircraft engines run on kerosene formulations, not diesel.

fy202• 4 years ago

You can also run diesel cars and trucks on kerosene. The winter blend of diesel fuel in cold climates is a mixture of diesel and kerosene (which has a lower freezing temperature).

Straight kerosene would work, but it is less lubricating that diesel fuel, so you need to mix some engine oil in with it to avoid damaging the engine. And on a modern car you are probably going to destroy any emissions control system, as kerosene has much higher sulfur than diesel.

rzzzt• 4 years ago

I remember a 70s? book speculating that jet engines could run on a wide variety of sources, eg. shredded straw (intended for tractors and combine harvesters). I don't think that idea was well received... don't see too many jet tractors around.

jahewson• 4 years ago

Jet engines aren’t actually Diesel engines though. They don’t use a Diesel cycle but a Brayton cycle. The principles are different - a Diesel engine works by having a fuel which ignites when compressed in a confined space, while a Brayton engine specifically avoids that and ignites its fuel via a heat source.

But the fuel known as “Diesel” is pretty close to jet fuel, both of them being almost kerosene, so it should burn just fine in a jet engine.

chrisseaton• 4 years ago

A jet turbine is a diesel engine

I though jet engines used heat to ignite the fuel? Diesel engines use compression alone to ignite it.

jaclaz2• 4 years ago

The accent should be on the "solely".

Mixing small quantities of fuel derived from cooking oil has been done before, even at industrial level:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2181821-how-to-make-jet...

nsxwolf• 4 years ago

Could you ever grow enough crops on Earth to replace jet fuel at current usage, without starving everyone to death? I have no idea how to evaluate this. How realistic is it?

stephen_g2• 4 years ago

I think it's a bad idea. But I saw a statistic saying the waste oil collected now could satisfy about 2% of the demand, and I think if we looked at thermal depolymerisation and hydroprocessing of other biodegradable waste we could possibly get up to a decent chunk, maybe 20-30%? If done with zero emissions energy that would be pretty carbon neutral.

Not sure where we go after that for aviation, it's definitely one of the most tricky applications for alternate fuels. Maybe efuels would be next for some portion. Hopefully electric aircraft can eventually do regional short haul but I'm not holding my breath on energy densities getting competitive for that to take a huge chunk of aviation any time soon...

adrianN• 4 years ago

Since plants are very bad at converting sunlight to oil, I would assume that it will always be much more space efficient to use solar panels and synthesize the fuel. But there is waste biomass, including oils, that can supplement a small fraction of our energy demands with little extra effort.

sofixa• 4 years ago

I think the idea is to use waste cooling oil, meaning oil that was already used for cooking, then blended with whatever to make it more usable as jet fuel and reused. So it wouldn't be a waste of crops, but reuse of a waste product already manufactured and used for other things.

rob74• 4 years ago

That's nice in theory, but in practice most biofuels in use today are manufactured from food crops. So worries that producing kerosene from cooking oil might worsen the already existing food crisis are not completely unfounded.

Related article from today: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/13/halt-use...

a-dub2• 4 years ago

around fifteen years ago at the start of the synthetic biology boom, there was lots of talk of genetically engineered algae as a potential stand in for fossil fuels. i haven't heard much in a while so i'm guessing there were problems with it, but it always sounded like the most elegant of solutions to me....

jabl4• 4 years ago

Algae fuels have been researched at least since the 1970'ies. In principle they are very promising, but it seems it's almost impossible to make these theoretical yield predictions work out in practice.

blinding-streak• 4 years ago

Did the smoke detector go off? /s

kelseyfrog2• 4 years ago

They can fly an A380 on cooking oil, but can't phase out avgas? How does this make sense?

TheSpiceIsLife2• 4 years ago

Vastly different fuels.

Jet engines run on a Jet A1, kinda like diesel or kerosene, ignites under pressure with oxygen.

Avgas is a high octane (100) petrol that requires a spark for ignition.

Last time I was reading about unleaded avgas it seemed to be mostly a regulatory inertia problem, though I'm not well versed in aviation engine requirements.

hef198982• 4 years ago

In the case of cooking oil, it is (I assume, didn't check) a trial and neither the engine nor the oil are certified for regular flight. Even if ao, it most likely would be the specific engine that would be recertified, not the cooking oil derived fuel.

AvGas is different, there it is not individual engines that get re certified for using lead free fuel (faster for each engine but impossible due to the agevand obsolescense of these old engines), so the fuel has to certified for all engines at the same time.

Merad2• 4 years ago

The issues are totally unrelated. Jet turbines have always been capable of running on almost any fuel. I would hazard a guess that what Airbus did here was mostly certifying that the alternative fuel wouldn't cause any major problems, maybe also things like tweaking the engine management systems to ensure consistent power output and throttle responsiveness with the new fuel. The problem with avgas is that there are a huge number of aviation piston engines still in use that were built with 1930s-1960s era technology (in some cases the engines themselves are literally that old) that were designed to use leaded gasoline. Getting those engines to run on unleaded gas would at best require extensive modifications to the engine and at worst just isn't possible. In the cases where it's possible, someone has to foot the bill to figure out how to modify the engines and get the changes certified with the FAA, both incredibly expensive propositions. Once that's done all of the owners will have to drop the money to upgrade their engines.

The death of avgas is inevitable but unfortunately it's probably going to take some sectors of general aviation with it. Those older planes are still flying in large part because newer planes have gotten so incredibly expensive. Also from what I've read the warbird community is working on the problem but many of them aren't very optimistic about being able to get those big WW2 era engines to run unleaded.

jabl4• 4 years ago

There is G100UL which seems to be promising as a 1:1 replacement for the current 100LL. Though regulatory inertia seems to be delaying a large scale rollout: https://www.avweb.com/insider/faa-continues-to-stall-on-g100...

I'm not aware of any experiences of G100UL with warbird engines.

krastanov• 4 years ago

I am not a chemist so maybe I am naive here. My understanding is that lead additives were necessary to "fake" higher octane content (and the 0.1% lead additive is much cheaper than the 99% octane). Why can't we just go back to expensive high-octane fuels instead of adding lead (or just use the various alternative additives used in other high-performance engines)?

Edit: an internet search tells me that avgas has an octane rating of 100... So why can't we just use actual pure octane in these engines?

kelseyfrog2• 4 years ago

For sure, Thank you. I meant it 100% with a not toward the regulatory/economic constraints at stake and have zero interest in the physical workings of engines.

kayodelycaon• 4 years ago

Gas turbines (which includes jet engines) can potentially use a lot of different fuel sources. For example, the M1 Abrams tank can run off a variety of different fuels. If it’s liquid and burns, it’ll probably work.

Turbofan engines may need to be redesigned to accommodate a different fuel source, but there isn’t any reason you can’t use automotive gasoline to power a jet. It’s just not a good idea because it vaporizes more readily on the ground, has less power per volume, and freezes in the temperatures jet operate in.

Piston engines aren’t as flexible. They don’t inject fuel in a constant stream, they compress and explode it.

samhuk• 4 years ago

I suppose one could say that the flight was well done, a rare achievement indeed.

KennyBlanken• 4 years ago

Cooking oil is in such short supply (Ukraine produced much of the world's seed-derived cooking oil) that UK fish and chip shops were unable to get supplies.

I've seen news reports of cooking oil thefts here in the US - restaurants being broken into for their frying or cooking oil.

Trying to push these "solutions" is beyond irresponsible. People in many countries can't afford to eat, and we're turning food into fuel?

jzwinck• 4 years ago

The fuel is made from used, waste oil. Not something you can cook with. The article explains this.

Same is true when you read about cars and buses powered by cooking oil. They aren't going to the grocery store to buy the oil.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

It runs on used cooking oil.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 4 years ago

Diesel fuel thefts from road work equipment and farm machinery here in Australia have also recently spiked.

yobbo• 4 years ago

Ukraine produced much of the world's seed-derived cooking oil

Best I can find is that Ukraine accounts for as much as 50% of exported sunflower seed oil, which is different from "much of the world's seed-derived cooking oil" since almost all countries produce cooking oil domestically, and american imports are most likely from canada.

https://www.ifpri.org/blog/impact-ukraine-crisis-global-vege...

2000UltraDeluxe• 4 years ago

There's still cooking oil available but there's definitely less of it and at a higher price. The local stores here are out of the cheaper brands of rapeseed and sunflower oil.

nibbleshifter• 4 years ago

The intent is to use waste oil, so, the oil remaining after shits been cooked in it. Usually this is referred to as WVO (waste vegetable oil).

Similar to how people process WVO from fish and chip shops into biodiesel for vehicles by reacting it with methanol and potassium hydroxide after some cleanup steps.

At the moment disposing of WVO is costly and wasteful.

HeyLaughingBoy3• 4 years ago

restaurants being broken into for their frying or cooking oil

If that were happening, I'd expect to see shortages of cooking oil on store shelves. I don't recall that ever being the case.

FooBarWidget3• 4 years ago

I wonder how viable it is to synthesize Kerosene or some other carbon fuel using renewable energy and some carbon source (stored factory exhaust?). Renewables are intermittent, but if the fuel synthesis process can also be intermittent then isn't that fine? Viola: you got a form of storage. Why does this not seem to be viable despite dropping costs of renewables?

jabl4• 4 years ago

It is possible, the search keywords are "synthetic fuels" or "e-fuels" ("electro-fuels). Currently it's a lot more expensive than fossil fuel, which is why it's mostly a research project and not a large-scale commercial business.

One problem is that while you can get an unlimited amount of hydrogen via electrolysis of water, you have to get the carbon from somewhere to produce hydrocarbons. There is a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it's still a pretty low concentration so it takes a lot of energy to filter it out. And yes, using factory exhaust etc. is an easier option, but if we're gonna solve climate change most CO2 exhaust sources have to be replaced at some point so that might not be a very long term plan.

FooBarWidget3• 4 years ago

Is CO2 capturing the biggest problem that prevents it from being cost-effective?

Buraksr• 4 years ago

Gasoline is maybe 5 dollars a gallon and contains some 35kwh of energy. When burning gas in an engine we don't get 35kwh [1], but that is what is there.

Lets imagine we are building a gallon of gas with perfect efficiency. 35kwh is already about $3.15-10.50 depending on the market [2]. Lets assume however, we are willing to take the capital risk and invest in our own solar plant which gives us a price of $2.10-2.80. We can take this even further.

Lets say we buy our own panels, and don't even connect it to the grid. These panels are only used for this, and we only make gas during the day. Here we pay $1.2/watt of capacity [0]. Solar panels have a life of about 10 years. 8x265x10 -> 29.2Kwh/dollar if we use the energy from the panels entirely efficiently. This is about $1.2 on the absolute low end. Note that panels require some maintenance, and don't just die after 10 years.

Now that we have the energy, lets get our raw materials. Gasoline has a chemical formula of C8H18, a ratio by weight of 96:18 or 16:3. A Gallon of gas weighs about 6 pounds, meaning about 5 pounds of carbon to 1 pound of hydrogen.

Hydrogen is not cheap [4], Electrolysis costs some 2.4K USD per ton, 1.2 dollars a pound. Electrolysis is more than energy in, hydrogen out. It uses up electrodes for instance. If we are allowed to use fossil fuel derived hydrogen the price comes down to 0.2 dollars a pound [5].

Carbon is $35/ton, but this increases to $75/ton if we want beverage grade [6]. You could argue that we will need to purify the CO2 ourselves either way so we can use the cheaper carbon. Carbon to oxygen by weight is 12 : 30 or 2 : 5. So for 1 pound of carbon we need 3.5 pounds of CO2. This brings our cost to $122.5/ton or about 0.12 cents a pound.

Thus our material cost, including no synthesis is already in the ball park of $2 -> $12.9 per gallon.

We should also consider that gasoline has costs that our hypothetical fuel would also need. Additives make up 30-70 cents per gallon. Distribution another 30-60 cents a gallon. Taxes another 40-60 cents a gallon [7].

Adding these costs, our hypothetical fuel now costs $3 -> $14.8 per gallon. But we still need to actually add the costs for turning the ingredients into fuel. We also don't have any labor costs, or costs of capital.

[0] https://a1solarstore.com/solar-panels/panasonic-solar-panels... [1] - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/98966/maximum-th.... [2] - https://www.electricrate.com/electricity-rates-by-state/#:~:.... [3] - https://homeguide.com/costs/solar-panel-cost#:~:text=Residen.... [4] - https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Green-Hydroge.... [5] - https://www.chemanalyst.com/Pricing-data/hydrogen-1165 [6] - http://www.dotyenergy.com/Economics/Econ_Physical_CO2_Market.... [7] https://voltaoil.com/what-makes-up-retail-price-for-gasoline....

a-dub2• 4 years ago

does the used cooking oil gas station in berkeley still exist?

nanomonkey• 4 years ago

Biofuel Oasis, yes! They still sell biodiesel.

alkonaut3• 4 years ago

Biofuel from forest byproducts seems like a much more reasonable source than to use anything edible.

JoeAltmaier• 4 years ago

It's just that we use 2B litres of cooking oil every year. They're always looking for something useful to do with used cooking oil.

alkonaut3• 4 years ago

Used cooking oil is a great product use because it’s basically waste. It’s a logistics nightmare though because it’s distributed and must be collected. Even if it’s free, it’s expensive.

jgraham• 4 years ago

The problem with biofuels in general is that they're always sold as "from byproducts". But of course as soon as you set up a market for fuel it becomes a product in its own right. So they tend to drive the conversion of natural habitat into land managed like agricultural land, which has all the same problems as normal agriculture (habitat destruction, use of ecosystem-destroying pesticides, pollution from fertilizer runoff, soil erosion, etc.) and it's not even producing food. Land usage for food crops (destruction of tropical rainforest habitat for soy and palm oil, destruction of atlantic rainforest for sheep farming, etc.) is already contributing to a rate of species lost three orders of magnitude higher than the expected background rate. And there's a limit to how much we can eat; the amount we can burn as fuel is almost unlimited.

"Sustainable" solutions that incentivise turning over more land to agriculture are nothing of the sort. And it's really the incentives that matter more than whether the initial prototypes are using existing byproducts.

alkonaut3• 4 years ago

My personal perspective growing up in Sweden is basically that there are thousands of trees per capita and the tragedy is that forests are slowly taking over old farmland. In the northern half of the country you can’t grow wheat due to the short season. It’s wildly different from the more densely populated parts of Europe, but in Russia and Canada there are probably tons of similar areas with spruce and pine forests the size of small countries have always grown, and where the climate is perfect for forests and bad for food crops. I don’t think there is ever a demand for forest byproducts where it would be profitable to grow trees where corn or wheat could be grown instead.

poulpy123• 4 years ago

now the only meal served in flight will be french fries with fried chicken

arghwhat• 4 years ago

A significant improvement over most current in-flight meals...

iasay• 4 years ago

Yes. To be fair the last time I flew it was clear that the packaging had more nutritional value than the food.

FunnyBadger• 4 years ago

With farmers being attacked, there won't be cooking oil for this soon enough...

credit_guy• 4 years ago

The obvious question is whether we could switch all aviation from jet fuel to cooking oil. Commercial aviation consumes about 200 million tons of jet fuel per year. The world annual production of palm oil (by far the highest yielding vegetable oil crop) is about 75 million tons. Can we expand this by a factor of 3.5?

Currently palm trees for palm oil are planted on about 50 million acres of land. For comparison, in the US about 30 million acres are planted with corn for ethanol production.

An Airbus A380 was flown on fuel derived from cooking oil

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