Cathay Pacific Bets Big on BioFuels
 

Whatever happened to "The Way Ahead" ??
If anyone out there can even come close to telling me how this is "cost effective" at a time where every penny is being pinched - now is the time to make your stand.

If I've ever seen such a pack of "green" PR drivel I surely read it in todays SCMP. They must truly believe that everybody is stupid and can't do simple math and work with percentages.

This is one of the most condescending CX articles I have ever read regarding another BET that CX has made that will NEVER even come close to paying off. They already dumped a stack of money on this in 2014 and now their trying to justify this folly to the world at the same time they crying broke to investors and worldwide staff. They should be ashamed..

Jeff Ovens (CX's BioFuel Tzar) said "and the pricing we have is competitive with traditional fuels.”..... If anyone believes this BS I have land in Florida to sell you.

Another bet gone bad - who gets to pay...

We the workers and customers get to pay!

"Cathay Pacific Airways has pledged an 80 per cent cut in the amount of climate-changing gases some of its longest flights pump into the Earth’s atmosphere, by betting big on biofuels."

I don't see the competitor airlines pledging such a stance and trying to go "green", they are simply doing what CX should be doing, trying to stay profitable in a declining revenue environment!

Standby for another massive mark to market fuel loss in the next few years!

Wonder where your profit share or hkpa increase went? Its called hiding money/profits....

Almost any alternative looks cheap when you're locked in to paying nearly $90/barrel...

This Biofuels deal is a desperate attempt at reducing their fuel hedge f@#k up.

They have locked in a price per barrel which will be significantly less than their current hedge over the next few years.

And not only that, they will receive concessions for reducing their CO2 emissions on flights over certain countries, aka carbon tax.

Going green used to be about saving the planet from global warming, now it's about ways for companies to save money and maximise profits.

Oh PLEASE let the "Hedging Gurus" do the Biofuel deal. I just can't wait………

Kaboy
Sorry to burst your bubble but there is no way in hell this ridiculous folly is going to "save money and maximize profits" that's just pure BS.
The only reason they are doing it is because of the 21st century's liberal need for corporations to "have an appearance of being green" It's just pure corporate PR boilerplate drivel.
Look at the info they gave in the article, do the math.
And just for fun - have this company say in a corporate news letter what the "into wing" cost will be. This is an expensive corporate indiscretion - no more...

You really think they can continue on this path..... I somehow don't think that can continue with these indiscretions

Fulcrum Bioenergy do have an interesting approach to producing biofuel - producing it from organic waste which would normally go to expensive-to-operate landfills.
Fulcrum is rightly bragging about "zero-cost feedstock", which is a big factor in input costs.
Fulcrum is using current-technology waste treatment plant technology to produce their clean feedstock, and utilising heat generated during the treatment process to produce electricity, which again lowers treatment costs.

The clean gas feedstock is then fed into a standard Fischer-Tropsch process plant - the same plant used in a substantial number of gas-to-liquid refineries around the world.
The FT process was commercialised in 1936 and the Nazis used the process to produce a sizeable proportion of their liquid fuels from coal during WW2.

Fulcrum claims to be able to produce jet and diesel biofuel for around US$1.00 gallon. This is the crucial figure, and whether Fulcrum can actually achieve this production cost figure on a consistent basis is the $64 question.
There are very few biofuel producers that can produce biofuels at less cost than crude-oil sourced fuels, but Fulcrum does stand a modest chance of doing so.
One of the biggest unknown factors is whether the feedstock supply is adequate to produce substantial production levels of biofuel.

Biofuels Digest - Fulcrum claims low-cost biofuel

OneTrack
Stop with the patronizing condescending "it can be done" BS. The process has been around forever, we're not stupid.
This is pure unadulterated CX "Green" PR propaganda garbage that is cutting further into CX employees "Non Existent" profit share.
They are blowing CX cash on a pie in the sky scheme when everybody else has been sent to check under the sofa cushions for lost coins. :yuk::yuk:

If it's "TIME TO WIN", according to Tom Owens "There will be an EVOLUTION of the strategy" then here is a good place to start. STOP wasting hard earned cash on Fu***** Pie in the Sky BS "Green" PR bull****.

Good luck with that. Despite hundreds of billions in subsidies over the years, biofuels remain at best five times the cost of regular fuels at any meaningful production level.

I can come up with optimistic business models too. All kinds of them if you pay me :)

Out of concern over supplies, the US military has tried this experiment already on several occasions over several decades (cost being a secondary issue because it's taxpayer money after all). Result was the same; costs at least 5 times over what they could otherwise get under best conditions and sometimes orders of magnitude more. And the US has been continuing this boondoggle as well on a smaller scale with the ethanol mandate (a fraction of gasoline being spiked with ethanol--usually 10 percent or so); horrendously inefficient conversion cycle, higher crop prices (meaning higher food and feed prices), increased long term wear on fuel systems (many bios are hygroscopic and readily absorb water), no benefit whatsoever.

And for what ? We've repeatedly debunked the 'green' scam (where CO2 is somehow thought to be a pollutant which is isn't and somehow increases our planet's temperature--which it doesn't) on this very site. The '97' percenters being carefully chosen to be a small sample of 'scientists' who agree with the 'theory' (and NO scientist uses words like 'incontrovertable' or 'irrefutable' to try to shut others with different opinions and conclusions up).

When you can measure something with limited precision only to 1.1 , arguing whether it's 1.050069 or 1.050070 is meaningless. And ol' sol is just a big hydrogen campfire of sorts whose output does vary from time to time; any variation in that or orbital factors of the earth dwarf what anything manmade can do.

But Rutan says it better than I can

http://burtrutan.com/downloads/EngrCritiqueCAGW-v4o3.pdf

His charts are prettier too...

So the 'green' scam has simply been to line folks' pockets and make up a tax scheme to tax energy (no matter how clean you burn a hydrocarbon you ALWAYS get CO2 and water--it's tough for a rabid green to argue against more fresh water so they target carbon which has the added psychological effect of people thinking 'dirty' rather than 'diamonds.'). And there's no shortage of cases of models that don't work or even faking data so they kinda work--for a while. When you tie in funding with making 'scientific' conclusions and an ability of governments to get more money through taxes on the seemingly well off you get a very unholy alliance.

The planet do what she do. We can make it locally junky for a time period (with REAL pollutants--which is the place that efforts to fix things should be targeted toward) but even these wash away in a relatively short time by terrestrial standards.

Any form of energy has externalities. I just hope folks aren't spending too much money making themselves feel good about themselves for no scientific rational reason. But maybe if they feel good that's good enough (just don't spend MY money as a part of it).

I do hope this works; most of history so far says it won't. Will the human race run out of fossils some day ? Sure. But we've never run out of energy sources. Best to spend the money on making our own little suns rather than something based on a myth I think.

But best of luck !

Let me guess: Guns don't kill people, people kill people...

Now your figuring out👍

Knives kill people too, or hadn't you noticed (UK). Should we outlaw "assault" knives too? What about about the Viking axes then? Those things are lethal. A pencil to the eye can be dangerous as well. Maybe we should all just stay home indefinitely until the government legislates cradle to grave "safety", to include those pesky CO2 molecules. Or maybe, we can decide for ourselves what's safe or unsafe and the rest of y'all can drink a big cup of Shut the Fxxx Up!

I don't know , there is so much gutter oil floating around HK from restaurants.
if CX was driving bowsers around to collect it for free or levying a small charge they could convert that to bio jet fuel as well .Win Win for everyone.

Are we really surrounded by global warming (aka climate change) deniers? There is no scientific controversy about this. As with evolution, whether you believe it or not, it's still true. Or is the layman's understanding of the evidence only based on the random political, religious, national and other affiliations?

We are surrounded by people whose livelihoods are 100% based on scientific theory (aka the theory of flight - or is it god holding up the planes? Prove it isn't!) who do not understand and/or refute the evolving conclusions from scientific observations and experimentation, such as the greenhouse effect, ice core data, etc.? It's all just, "Wrong! Wrong...wrong..." based on preferred spin and junk science as promoted by lobbyists?

Will biofuel actually accomplish anything positive for the world or for CX? To be determined, kind of like the CMP, huh?

As for the little gem of a tangent - come on, man...really, still, in 2017? Amongst relatively educated and informed colleagues, too? Ugh. Besides the general red herrings:

:ugh:
"Anecdotal" logical fallacy: using examples to extrapolate without a statistically significant number of cases that could form scientifically compelling evidence, e.g. knives are lethal in the right hands, but they can only kill one person at a time and have no ability to kill at a distance.

:ugh:
"Slippery slope" logical fallacy: If we let A happen, then B through to Z will consequently happen too, therefore A should not happen. In combination with the "nanny state" assertion, it's an "appeal to emotion" logical fallacy: manipulation of emotions rather than the use of valid reasoning. :=

Etc. - but I know it would take days of deprogramming to sort out even just one entrenched person. :sad:

Pounding the table, saying 'settled science' , parroting, or chanting does not truth make. No model can effectively extrapolate data beyond the tolerances of the measured inputs. And when your possible effects of ALL sources of CO2 are two orders of magnitude less than your ability to measure heat in at best you have a theory and a guess.

FWIW, one can make a decent living with bullsh!t-- although the real stuff has more value than that propagated by the environwacko crowd. Who a few decades ago were predicting a catastrophic ice age rather than the flooding of coastal cities. A good scientist always realizes the limitations of his studies. Rather than trying to shut people up. Finding 97 percent of 22 folks who kind of agree with you, or cherry picking data sources that make the data conform to your model (rather than vice versa and considering all sources ) isn't exactly something to brag about.

But the liberals love their sound bytes and chanting. Sure a lot better than having to do the work to look at the facts yourself and actually run the numbers.

The CO2 myth is junk 'science' st its worst. Not a great deal different than a modern day Salem witch trial with a tux.

Not surprising, of course...

:ugh:

Sure...

The correlation between the rise in CO2 levels and the global temperature rise is widely acknowledged by an overwhelming majority of the scientific community.

Now, you can entrench yourself behind the disagreement that some have over the magnitude and consequences of said warming, or the exaggerations of those who tell fifth hand accounts of scientific reports for the advancement of their own agendas, but if you cut through the crap from both sides of the argument and listen to what basically all of those who follow scientific reasoning and who have spent a significant proportion of their career studying the subject have to say, then the only debate is what to do about it...

On your side, those of the 'Trump' cult who'd rather disregard every fact that doesn't suit them and keep doing what we do since it keeps snowing in January anyway so how bad can it be?..

On the other extreme, there's the eco-freaks who say we should go back and live as cavemen so as to stop any further harm to mother Gaia.

And in the middle, there's all the rational people who are trying to debate how to best deal with it and find compromises between reducing the pace of the warming, weathering its effects and still accommodating global population and economic growth amid the already evident signs of increased weather-related macroeconomic and humanitarian hardship.

But it's easier to just stick your head in the sand, right?

Now, I don't believe for a second that CX or any other airline are dipping their toes in the alternative fuel pool for the sake of the planet. They couldn't give a damn about that.
They're after a source of sustainable fuel in a time when oil is falling out of favor and, more importantly, one which is not dependent on wild market fluctuations. CX have shown us how inept they are at dealing with that.

It's not the stupidest thing they've done (which isn't saying much) but don't believe for a second that they're any sort of pioneers in the field. This is pure PR.
CX, as usual, will only properly venture into using bio fuels when every other airline has cleared the way and proven it to be a viable solution, and then they'll still find a way to mess it up.