Aviation-fuel and generating capacity
I wrote in my last piece on aviation fuel that I thought that electrolysing the amount of hydrogen needed to fuel the world's jetliner fleet would use more electricity than the world's entire generating capacity, but that I would have to run the numbers.
Well, now I have. It wouldn't. I was wrong. It would use just 19.25% of our entire current electricity production. Electrolysing and subsequently burning hydrogen is pretty inefficient, however; the round trip efficiency is only about 60%. Lithium ion batteries have much better round trip efficiency at around 95% (declining slightly over the life of the battery, but not much). So powering all our commercial air fleet with electricity from batteries would, at a first estimate, use only 12.3% of our current electricity production.
Continue reading →Lies, damned lies, and aviation fuel
Since my last post about aviation fuel last week, the commentariat, inspired by Rachel Reeves' gibberish about a third runway at Heathrow, has been engaging in a paean of magical thinking.
Wouldn't it be nice, say The Rest is Politics today, from Syria, to which they've flown, because of course they have, if we could make aviation fuel from waste? After all, the aviation industry say we can, so it must be true, mustn't it? Specifically, for example, GE Aerospace say
Continue reading →The potato famine and aviation fuel
I was listening to my friend Lesley Riddoch's podcast this morning, and she spoke, inter alia, of plans to produce 'green' aviation fuel at Grangemouth.
Lesley doesn't need me to teach her lessons about the potato famine. She knows as well as I do that the problem was not lack of food. She know as well as I do that in each successive year of the famine, Ireland exported record amounts of wheat.
Continue reading →When does the charge start?
I've been skeptical about whether the replacement of all the world's motor vehicle fleet with equally heavy, equally powerful, electric vehicles in time to make any meaningful difference to climate change was practical for a while now. I don't think we've the resources to do it: I wrote Where's the steel? four years ago.
But just at present I'm working on preparing a 'Local Place Plan' for Auchencairn, and the grim absurdity of the idea is striking me even more forcefully.
Continue reading →Documenting a fictitious building
Yesterday, I posted to Mastodon in response to the question 'Do you write or imagine a backstory for your secondary characters?' that 'I spent 2,000 words last night writing detailed backstory of a significant BUILDING that I also have sketch plans of (which is also something I usually do – you cannot consistently write about a building without knowing where everything is'.
I thought it would be interesting to post that documentation as a blog post.