Thursday, May 19, 2011

Alternate Energy Source for Jet Fuel

I found this bit of a post by Geoffrey Styles at the Energy Outlook blog to be interesting:
The government of Ontario Province just awarded Rentech, Inc., a company with long expertise in gasification and fuel synthesis, a 1.3 million ton-per-year supply of forest waste and other biomass from Canada's Crown Forests, specifically for the production of renewable jet fuel. The proposed facility would produce around 22 million gallons per year of biojet, along with another 11 million gallons of non-jet products. That equates to roughly 1% of Canada's current jet fuel consumption. Canada might have enough forest biomass available to produce a sizable fraction of its jet fuel needs from such sources, but other countries don't, so it's fortunate that alternative jet fuel can be made through so many different pathways.
The doomsday crowd wants to mandate all kinds of crazy things to "fix" what they see as impending doom with "global warming". I don't expect the earth to burn to a crisp because (a) I think the danger is far over hyped and (b) I believe that man's innovative technology will "save" us far before we start to smoke and burst into flames from runaway global warming.

I do believe that we have exploited all the cheap oil reserves and as the price of oil rises inexorably over the next century, alternatives will keep heaving into view and I expect a lot of them will be "green". So I think any "global warming" will be like the doomsday scenario that England faced in the 17th century of a doomsday of "no more trees to support the building of the fleet". England discovered lots of trees in North America, then it decided to build it ships from steel. So the ever-feared "end of times" scenario of no trees left to build a ship passed quietly without the apprehended disaster raising its head.

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