US air force, Boeing press on with alternative jet fuel tests

It's the future...

"he likened the coming shift to the distribution of computing power outward from mainframes into PCs"

Hoorah! Tanks of algae in every home!

There's probably a joke in there about 'the tank has detected an illegal operation in algae.dll' but I can't be bothered to get my coat...

Yay!

A fairly impartial article by Lewis, involving both the military and climate change!

Merry Christmas Lewis!

Farm Lobby

It's not just the farm lobby, it's the Iowa Caucus for the Presidential election that drives ethanol. On January 3rd, Iowa voters will become the first people in the US to vote for who they want as presidential candidates. If a candidate doesn't stand up in Iowa's cornfields and take the pledge to ethanol they will sink without trace. A candidate does badly in Iowa and that gets mentioned all the way to New Hampshire and beyond, hindering their chances of getting the final nomination.

There's an episode of 'The West Wing' about just this pork-barrelling.

Poetic Justice

So much of the stuff on supermarket shelve is now made out of processed petroleum, it seems only fair to run machinery on food.

Why biofuels?

Biofuels schmiofuels! What those boys need is something like those di-lithium crystals. Quick Dubya, drop some funds on DARPA/NASA to scour the galaxy for crystals so we won't have to play nice with no one. Heeyuck!

It will serve them right

It will serve them right to choke on their oil. Every time the wind blows the price of oil goes up. Let 'em swim in it for a while.

Let's look at the refineries for a moment...

Having a family of petroleum engineers has allowed me to tour various refinery facilities around the US, and it provides an interesting perspective on how something like a high-volume algae farm COULD practically feed a refinery.

Most refinery complexes are relatively small - a surprise to anyone not familiar with the industry. Typically there will be a couple of refining facilities in a geographical location that take pipeline crude and create fuel, synthetic feedstocks, chemicals, etc.

A sufficiently large algae pond could provide feedstock for a small-medium refining complex, and do so in enough volume to support a regional fuel/chemical infrastructure. If tailored algae or bacteria are used to produce the raw material for the refinery (yes, it will be a decade off in the future at least) small-medium scale producers could proliferate in short order.

Focus the production of the "designer refiners" on specific products (e.g.: jet fuel) and it's only a matter of getting the economics right before they could displace the "conventional" petroleum fed facilities for this role.

This does NOT mean the end to petroleum based refining. Rather "conventional" refineries would quickly change their production to focus on more profitable outputs - like the chemical and plastics feedstocks - boosting their income as well as improving the environment.

Again, this will be determined by economics, not Green wishes or political mandates.

I think my Dad, a former petroleum geophysicist, put it succinctly back in 1969 when the oil depletion allowance was about to be retired:

"There's plenty of dollar a gallon gas sitting out there in the ground..." (Gas was US$0.30/gal when he said this...)

Er?

"Speaking to Flight, he likened the coming shift to the distribution of computing power outward from mainframes into PCs."

So we'll all be flying our own small planes across the Atlantic?

Ecologically useful

Let's harvest the algae blooms caused by fertilizer runoff in the Gulf of Mexico, which will get rid of the perennial dead zone there. Kill a couple of birds with one stone. Might need to 'seed' it with the right species, but that shouldn't be too hard.

mechanical whales

harvesting algae seems familiar somehow.

@Anonymous John

Yes but you'll have to stoke up aplenty on baked beans just before take-off....