Qantas Bio-fuel Flight

[Flying Binghi]

The green fairys are loose in Qantas headquarters..:)

Qantas has announced it will operate the world's first bio-fuel flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne.

The flight will take place early next year collaborating with Alt-air Fuels and World Fuel Services,

The aircraft will be powered by an inedible which is an industrial type of mustard seed.

The crop is currently being grown in Canada although researchers are trialling it in Queensland.

Qantas says using this type of fuel can reduce carbon emissions by up to seventy-five per cent.


http://www.skynews.com.au/news/national/2017/11/18/qantas-to-operate-first-bio-fuel-flight.html





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[Ascend Charlie]

Does "early next year" mean April 1?

[27/09]

Worlds first bio fuel flight? I don't think so.

While not a revenue flight Air New Zealand did a bio fuel flight in 2009.

[StickWithTheTruth]

Worlds first *regular* revenue flight perhaps?

Not sure how they will cut emissions by 75% when the aircraft is powered by 30% biofuel. Perhaps of the 30% thrust, there will be a 75% emissions reduction.

[C441]

As mentioned in another forum, bio-fuel may be a great idea provided it has the same or similar calorific value to JetA1.
If not, in some applications simply loading enough fuel and still staying under MTOW may prove a challenge and loading (say) 10% more - and a bit to carry it - may partially defeat the purpose……..but I'm sure they've thought of that!

[27/09]

As mentioned in another forum, bio-fuel may be a great idea provided it has the same or similar calorific value to JetA1.
If not, in some applications simply loading enough fuel and still staying under MTOW may prove a challenge and loading (say) 10% more - and a bit to carry it - may partially defeat the purpose……..but I'm sure they've thought of that!

Also check out how successful the Jatropha bio fuel turned out to be.

Touted as being able to be grown where other plants wouldn't, thus making use of land that was otherwise unproductive. Turns out that wasn't true.

[clark y]

Probably is the world's first bio-fuel flight between LAX and SYD but I'm sure it is not the first between other ports. It is all just marketing- bit like the brand new cutting edge B787.

[clark y]

Forgot to add that Jetstar tried this back in 2012. Not much heard since.

[underfire]

who cares?

[Beer Baron]

who cares?

Well I think we should probably all care. To think that the push to reduce carbon emissions that is effecting nearly every other industry in the world will just skip over air transport is naive. At some point in its future aviation will need to find a carbon neutral fuel source and it will need to be mass produced and economic.

Sure this flight is neither the first, nor is it the biggest contract for bio-fuel but every step toward a carbon neutral aviation fuel is a good thing for the future of our industry and hence our jobs.

[Flying Binghi]

Well I think we should probably all care. To think that the push to reduce carbon emissions that is effecting nearly every other industry in the world will just skip over air transport is naive. At some point in its future aviation will need to find a carbon neutral fuel source and it will need to be mass produced and economic.

Sure this flight is neither the first, nor is it the biggest contract for bio-fuel but every step toward a carbon neutral aviation fuel is a good thing for the future of our industry and hence our jobs.

Beer Baron, if yer believe the greeny global warming hysteria then bio-fuels are not the answer...
"...Statements about biofuels being carbon neutral should be taken with a grain of salt. This is according to researchers at the University of Michigan Energy Institute...
...America’s biofuel use to date has in fact led to a net increase in carbon dioxide emissions, says lead author John DeCicco in Springer’s journal Climatic Change..."

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/08/26/inconvenient-study-biofuels-not-as-green-as-many-think-may-be-worse-than-gasoline/


Back in the day when i were a card carrying member of the Wilderness Society, doing Permaculture courses in northern NSW and wind power courses at TAFE, I made a fairly substantial investment in a now defunct bio-fuel company that had a small refinery on the north side of Brisbane. Imagine my extreme embarrassment when i discovered one of the bio-fuel company's directors had declared his farm to be an independent country when the banks tried to take it away from him..:O

So I'm wondering, when this latest bio-fuel scam falls over will the Qantas directors declare Qantas a company independent of Oz law and fly all the aircraft to Saudi Arabia..:hmm:






.

[compressor stall]

We have all our eggs in the fossil fuel basket for your and my pay packets.

There will come a time when that basket is as good as empty most likely for economic reasons. Why not explore other options? If the fossil fuel price skyrocketing for any reason (and not just availability, there's geopolitical as well) and leads to a decrease in pax travel due to increased costs and pilots start getting laid off, then you will care.

[neville_nobody]

If they want to reduce aviation emmissions they can start by getting rid of ATC holding, build more runways, and build some more gates, so there are no airborne or ground delays.

Kinda stupid that they bang on about how much emissions they saved over 14 hours only to then waste some because the airport can’t be bothered to build a terminal big enough to satisfy demand.

On saying all that though if they can get biofuel to work without burning up millions of aces of farmland to produce the stuff then it’s probably a win/win.

[Derfred]

Binghi,

Really?

Biofuel recycles atmospheric CO2.

Fossil fuel digs up sequestered CO2 and releases it into the atmosphere.

Even pilots should be able to get their head around that.

Your website is, as usual, full of garbage.

[CurtainTwitcher]

Derfred, listen to the words of Richard P Feynman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman) very carefully about how easy it is to be wrong in science (he really was a rocket scientist, being a theoretical physicist on the Manhattan Project):


tWr39Q9vBgo

Could we substitute climate science for social science in his example?


From his talk Cargo Cult Science (http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm):
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A‑Number‑l experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat‑running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat‑running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of Cargo Cult Science.

Doubt is important. Science is never "beyond doubt", because then it is no longer science, it is something else. Suppression of doubt is the hint this is no longer science.

Here are a couple of posts that cast doubt on the BOM measuring equipment, and it's method of 1 second recording and the effect it has skewing the hourly & daily temperature records. That is good science, drilling right down and doing the work as per Feynman.


Summer Temperatures in South-Central Queensland Part 1: Diurnal Patterns of Temperature Change (https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/summer-temperatures-in-south-central-queensland-part-1-diurnal-patterns-of-temperature-change/)
Summer Temperatures in South-Central Queensland Part 2: Weather Events and Spikes (https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/summer-temperatures-in-south-central-queensland-part-2-weather-events-and-spikes/)

[le Pingouin]

Bring along some peer reviewed science. Anything less isn't science either. Everything else is just opinion and worth very little. Funnily enough that's about all the anti side brings to the table. Uninformed opinion.

[Traffic_Is_Er_Was]

because the airport can’t be bothered to build a terminal big enough to satisfy demand.
Demand is fickle. Look at Auckland. Four A380's on the ground at once at the moment. Imagine the infrastructure costs to support that. Come March next year, there will be none (and Auckland apparently found out about that at the same time everyone else did). Who covers the costs of that infrastructure after that? Runway demand drives holding delays far more that gate space. Under the current (for the short term future anyway) terminal structure at the major east coast ports, gate access is Airline specific. so if you roll of the runway and your gate isn't ready, that's your companies fault. The airports operate to a slot system, but if 3 or 4 aircraft push at once (and that happens all the time), all but one of them are going to be sad. Who's to blame there? Ground infrastructure is a huge expense, and it takes time to build, and you can't just terminate the lease and give it back if things don't work out like you can with aircraft. You have to be damn sure the demand is there, and that it is long term and sustainable. If you had built heavily during the east coast FIFO boom, you would be very unhappy now.

[Derfred]

Derfred, listen to the words of Richard P Feynman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman) very carefully about how easy it is to be wrong in science (he really was a rocket scientist, being a theoretical physicist on the Manhattan Project):


tWr39Q9vBgo

Could we substitute climate science for social science in his example?


From his talk Cargo Cult Science (http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm):


Doubt is important. Science is never "beyond doubt", because then it is no longer science, it is something else. Suppression of doubt is the hint this is no longer science.

Here are a couple of posts that cast doubt on the BOM measuring equipment, and it's method of 1 second recording and the effect it has skewing the hourly & daily temperature records. That is good science, drilling right down and doing the work as per Feynman.


Summer Temperatures in South-Central Queensland Part 1: Diurnal Patterns of Temperature Change (https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2017/10/15/summer-temperatures-in-south-central-queensland-part-1-diurnal-patterns-of-temperature-change/)
Summer Temperatures in South-Central Queensland Part 2: Weather Events and Spikes (https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/2017/10/30/summer-temperatures-in-south-central-queensland-part-2-weather-events-and-spikes/)


CurtainTwitcher,

I appreciate that you've put a lot of effort into this post, but it demonstrates nothing in the field of climate science other than that you have joined the realm of climate change deniers who will post reams of irrelevant "science" in an effort to discredit the relevant science.

This is nothing but pure obfuscation, but of course for the masses who are not well educated in science, and who love a conspiracy theory, and who tend to believe anything a "shock jock" or "business leader" will tell them, it works quite well. It won't work with me, I'm sorry.

The difficulty climate science faces is this: if they are correct, by the time they are proven correct beyond all doubt, it might be too late. They warn that we can't afford to wait that long before action is taken.

So to believe them involves a risk, and it might hurt the economy in the short term. Arguably it will benefit the economy in the long term, but the "shock jocks" and "business leaders" I refer to aren't particularly concerned with the long term, they want to make their money NOW.

Hence the obfuscation, weird science, conspiracy theories etc that control the anti-climate change argument. There is big money at stake, and where there is big money there is big influence.

I happen to know a few research scientists (and I have a degree in the subject myself). I can assure you, for a pure research scientist, their reputation is their only asset. The peer review process exposes pretenders for who they are quite rapidly, and an offender will never gain a research grant again. As a result, research scientists go to extreme lengths to ensure that any published research from their desk is as water-tight as possible. We fly aircraft - we are accustomed to the amount of engineering and testing and certification involved in producing a simple aircraft part or instrument. It's not dissimilar. So I find it fascinating that so many in our industry become climate science deniers, after all, we are the benefactors of extremely rigorous science and engineering.

So 97% of global climate scientists are either pursuing poor science, or they are all in the pocket of some Chinese solar panel company. I don't find either prospect easy to believe, but I do note the power of the dollar and it's influence. Seems you have fallen for it.

[cee cee]

I see a parallel between the "proof" demanded of climate scientist today and the "proof" demanded by tobacco companies a few decades ago. Do you know that we currently have not yet "proven", by the standards demanded by the tobacco companies then, that smoking causes any of the diseases we accept today?

Look at this paragraph from http://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf and see how similar the claims sound to those used against climate change today: Publicly the companies’ overriding policy has been to argue that they are not qualified to comment on the health consequences of smoking, but when they do so to create confusion and “keep the controversy open”. This has been done by, on the one hand denying the existing evidence, whilst on the other demanding absolute proof of causation and calling for more research. This research, much of which has been covertly funded by the tobacco industry, is designed to look at other causes of cancer and to water down the evidence linking smoking and disease. For example, the industry statements are peppered by fudging comments such as “no clinical evidence”, “no substantial evidence”, “no laboratory proof”, “unresolved”, and “still open”. Nothing has been “statistically proven”, “scientifically proven”, “or “scientifically established”. There is no “scientific causality”, “conclusive proof”, or “scientific proof”.
In fact this statement pretty well sums it all up:

“The industry has retreated behind impossible demands for ‘scientific proof’ whereas such proof has never been required as a basis for action in the legal and political fields ... It may therefore be concluded that for certain groups of people smoking causes the incidence of certain diseases to be higher than it would otherwise be ... A demand for scientific proof is always a formula for inaction and delay and usually the first reaction of the guilty.”

from a scientist at the tobacco company BAT

[le Pingouin]

I think you'll find they aren't just borrowing the techniques. Heartland Institute anyone?

[chuboy]

Binghi never forgoes an opportunity to inject some climate change denialism into any thread no matter how irrelevant.

The price of oil fluctuates depending on the mood of the ruler of Saudi Arabia. Having access to a fuel which can be produced without needing to drill expensive exploration wells all over the world is great if you are in airline business. I can't think of a CEO who wouldn't love to learn that the price of their fuel is now practically fixed or at least has a hard ceiling. Previously hedging was required to manage that uncertainty and many airlines got it spectacularly wrong.

Would be comforting to know in times of high oil price that you can always fire up the biofuel farm.

[le Pingouin]

No, I'm not obsessive like you and don't frequent echo chambers that don't like being called deniers and seek to link it with Holocaust denial to stop people using it. You deny the cause of climate change has a major anthropogenic component so you're a denier. It's plain English. You're not a sceptic as that would imply a degree of open mindedness and willingness to look at evidence.

If you don't think you're obsessive then why do you mention climate change denial at every conceivable opportunity here on PPRune?

I source my information from mainstream sources. I don't read the endless pages of waffle you post as "evidence" trying to work out what the hell you're talking about. It doesn't make sense unless you're a fellow denier.

Eugenics has exactly nothing to do with modern science, and even less to do with climate change. You're just trying to muddy the waters.

The cigarette companies have trained you well.

[Traffic_Is_Er_Was]

Seems to have been some PPRuNing here lately.