back to article Boeing recipe turns cooking oil into jet fuel

Aircraft maker extraordinaire Boeing has joined forces with its Chinese equivalent to engineer a way of converting discarded cooking oil into aviation fuel. The project is being overseen by Hangzhou Energy Engineering & Technology, an alternative energy specialist, at a brand new R&D centre set up by Boeing and Commercial …

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  1. Yobgod Ababua
    Pint

    Best. Tagline. Ever.

    I may need a new keyboard.

  2. Dave 15

    Burn in power plants

    This is an interesting answer from a lot of people. Why stop at waste oil though? If you visit Cambridge (UK one that is) there is the museum of technology. Basically this is an old sewage pumping station in the centre of town. Once upon a time this did stirling work shifting crap from the centre of town to the then out of town sewage works (now really in town but there we go). To do this work they took the cities waste and chucked it in damned great fires to create steam to drive the pistons. This had two useful effects, first the sewage could be pumped without the need to import (from elsewhere) expensive fuel like coal, and second getting rid of the waste so you didn't end up with it in a huge pile on the edge of town.

    'Progress' and the EU now dictate that we burn Russian gas (bloody expensive) in French/Belgium/occasionally our own power stations and ship the electricity across to power the pumps. Meanwhile we pay tax on the volume of rubbish now carted out of town to be left to rot (and create methane) in huge dumps. Does this seem stupid only to me?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Burn in power plants

      Trouble is that in the intervening century, we've gotten a better grasp of what happens when you burn trash. One of the unfortunate realizations is that there can be some very nasty byproducts. Burn anything subject to bleach, and you can easily end up with a very nasty substance called dioxin: a known airborne carcinogen. Toxic at tiny concentrations (1 part/billion) and known to be the key agent that resulted in two American communities being razed to the ground (Love Canal, NY and Times Beach, MO) and incinerated (you have to burn it at very high temperatures to render it safe). Who knows what else you might unleash if you carelessly burn trash? That's why many communities have burn ordinances.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Burn in power plants

        You're both behind the times. Most landfills in current use now have gas collection fields and use the methane to generate electricity (likewise sewage sludges), and scrubbing dioxins from flue gas isn't a particular problem (although costly if you need to add it after you build your incinerator, and didn't factor the costs in).

        Having said that, waste to power is very slowly gaining traction in the UK, but locals are resistant to any form of incineration which makes planning permssion a problem, and the public sector is resistant to new fangled technology such as pyrolysis (not new, proven in Europe).

        Interestingly, if you have a pyrolysis plant, then it should change the recycling regime, and that's something else the tree huggers don't like. Everything goes into the pyrolysis plant, except metals (worth recovering), and glass (probably not worth recovering, but equally not worth burning). So all this separation of food waste, plastics, fabrics, paper, plastic etc can stop. And the pyrolysis plant would be quite happy to accept the waste oil that started this thread.

        1. Charles 9

          Re: Burn in power plants

          Thing is, pyrolysis is an ENDOthermic reaction, which means you need to feed it energy to keep it going, so it's hard to picture how a process that absorbs energy can then produce energy. Pyrolysis is good for turning waste products into other products you can use like biochar, but what's the ratio of waste in to useable product out? Somehow I suspect it's something greater than 1:1, which will make the tree huggers scream that it's inefficient and that we should still recycle like we did because we get more out of the process.

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