The Development of Ecologically Sound Jet Fuel 210
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers at Princeton University are currently working on two projects to reduce jet travel's role in global warming. The first one, a major project funded by the U.S. Air Force with $7.5 million, is focused on developing computational models that accurately simulate the burning of jet fuel, a complex process not well understood today. The second one, funded by NetJets, a company providing business jets, will help to develop new jet fuels with near-zero net greenhouse gas emissions."
Re:And Totally Illegal to use. (Score:3, Interesting)
By all means lets go ahead and do this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get too excited (Score:4, Interesting)
$7.5 million is nothing to the military, especially the Airforce. They blow $100 of millions on customized database applications, billions on building single aircraft, and trillions on R&D for Airframes. $7.5 million is like some spare change they give to some college students to work on a project for 5 years that will end up being canned.
BMW have probably invested a lot more into research into alternative fuels like hydrogen and still haven't come up with something that has us all dumping our hydrocarbon ways.
What needs to be worked on is a more novel way of taking in air and forcing it out the back, past that you need to work out how to apply external forces to aircraft. We're looking at a lot more than $7.5 mil for that kind of physics lab experimentation.
Re:global dimming (Score:2, Interesting)
This Is Ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
Jesus, people. In our zeal to protect the environment (which I share), let's concentrate on the REAL problems please! And stop all this irrelevant noise which just distracts us from those real problems.
Re:global dimming (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think anybody has nearly as clear a picture of how our planet's weather as we would like. It sure would be nice. I could plan my days at the beach better and we could quit guessing about what is best for the environment and maybe get a little more consensus and action, though I doubt too much more. So are contrails in and of themselves good or bad? I don't think anyone can say.
Re:Ummm.... I have an easy solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Some guys in Japan made a piloted plane that flew on 160 AA batteries: http://www.primidi.com/2006/07/17.html#a1571 [primidi.com]
Still, I'm a little more impressed by what NASA pulled off: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Prototype [wikipedia.org]
Maglev (Score:5, Interesting)
I bet these engines would emit water vapor (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Hopefully this works. (Score:3, Interesting)
So don't expect CO2 sequestration to be the climate change saviour. The use in oil production is still limited to certain field geologies and crude types. Straight sequestration of CO2 in old gas reservoirs will be very expensive. The current use of CO2 injection is to enhance oil production, not purely for the purpose of sequestration - i.e. there's currently a net economic benefit. It's not a technique that's used willy-nilly, just for the heck of it.
There will have to be huge penalties for CO2 emissions before any companies will bother with commercial geosequestration.
One of the ingredients of Russian solid rocket fue (Score:3, Interesting)