Qantas Powers Flight With Cooking Oil In Australian First

Qantas Powers Flight With Cooking Oil In Australian First

www.smh.com.au

Fancy having the oil that fried your hot chips being then used to power your interstate flight? Qantas Airways does. And sooner rather than later.
Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce says finding a sustainably produced biofuel is an important step in confronting the major challenge of high fuel prices.
It also supports the aviation industry's goal of being carbon neutral by 2020.


Mr Joyce says crude oil had risen from $US65 a barrel in 2006/07 to near $US125 a barrel today.

(visit the link for the full news article)

This is some reasonably positive news from our biggest airline however, despite the PR spin, this is much more a financial decision than an environmentally conscious equivalent.

For anybody unaware, Qantas has seen a large loss in profits over the past few years leading to staff and flight reductions.

Should this be successful, I can see Qantas leading the way over here in terms of alternative fuels and who knows, perhaps this will filter down to the automotive industries on a large scale? I doubt it, however atleast there is an element of positivity here.

From the quotes in the article such as,

"It's taken us to get 30 years to get biofuel into road transport. All I can say is we can't wait 30 years for this,"

it is quite apparent that this is a last clutch at prosperity for Qantas.





www.smh.com.au
(visit the link for the full news article)

Where on earth do you get the idea there's enough cooking oil to support a large scale "alternative" fuel revolution? Do you realize how much "cooking oil" you're talking about? Crude oil is all we've got until they find a way to use hydrogen fuel cells in a safe way at a reasonable cost.

reply to post by libertytoall


It's not an area I'm completely familiar with nor have looked in to- that's where the exchange of information between members sees the most benefit (except when members educating others are complete d***s about it).

A simple explanation would have been handy.

Please master, forgive my ignorance.

ETA: Your comment reflects nothing of the article, more my enthusiastic optimism- another trait to leave at the door when coming to ATS.

A CSIRO report published last year said Australia and New Zealand were strongly positioned to produce sustainable aviation fuels that complied with social, environmental and economic criteria.

This included not impacting on food security or the environment.

It also had the potential to create 12,000 jobs and provide Australia with a measure of energy security.

Now THAT'S great news! It's embarrassing that some of my fellow Americans laugh at and make fun of this stuff. Good for Australia and New Zealand!

reply to post by Pirateofpsychonautics


If you want to look at price per gallon, COOKING OIL IS STILL MORE. Now whether a machine uses less or more miles per gallon. IDK. But the price for a gallon of cooking oil is just so much more. IS IT NOT. I could be wrong. I only have my own deepfryer and am probably going to die by 30 of a heart attack or stroke. But what do I know

I fly twice a week with KLM. I read months ago in their in-flight magazine (yeah, i was bored...) that they were introducing it on their flights.

Looked it up and it seems they've been doing it since September last year:

KLM Cooking Oil Powered Flights!!

It's not all about costs (allegedly!), it's about the environment & reducing emissions...

I'd rather my food crops not be replaced by palm oil or canola oil or whatever the hell they plan to make this out of.

If I'm a farmer I will plant whatever gives me the best return - if that is plants for fuel, then goodbye corn, goodbye apples, goodbye potatoes.
Not that we'll all starve, just some of us.

Look what is happening already with palm oil...

hows about recycled cooking oil? heard of companies esp in Cali that go from biz to biz collected oil fried chicken oil, grease etc in their tanker then filter it to provide biodiesel or somethin like that.

pretty coo

reply to post by Pirateofpsychonautics

Originally posted by BiggerPicture
hows about recycled cooking oil? heard of companies esp in Cali that go from biz to biz collected oil fried chicken oil, grease etc in their tanker then filter it to provide biodiesel or somethin like that.

pretty coo

It's a cool idea if you're a hippie living out in the woods as a source for your own car but realistically it could never work on a large scale. Even if the entire worlds population decided to eat deep fried food only, there still wouldn't be enough cooking oil.. It would take more than the entire land mass of Africa to produce enough cooking oil for just the US to consume in their vehicles. Cool idea but completely unpractical.

The worst idea ever was the idea of growing corn to produce biofuel. Why on earth would we give up valuable land, millions of acres that we need to farm in order to fight food shortages, to produce a food product that will not be used as food? How does this make any logical sense to anyone?

I think critical thinking has left the brain capacity of many humans that live on this rock flying through the void of nothingness on a collision course a kin to the fate of a lemming.

I have an old vw camper that runs on diesel, but it also runs on vegetable oil. The only problem is that new vegetable oil costs about the same as diesel these days. Boy those guys must be raking it in. Anyway I'm looking into using used veggie oil and just last night was watching youtube vids on how to clean the old stuff up. This led me on to some new discoveries.

I can run my motor on old engine oil. Just need to run it though a filter first to clean it up. There's plenty of that about.

There are folk making diesel from old plastic now. Just heat the plastic up and distill the diesel. There's plenty of old plastic about.

And finally you can make diesel from old tyres (tires). Yup again you heat the rubber up to a certain temp and you get all sorts of stuff including diesel. And there are mountains of old tyres around the world needing dealt with.

Using a renewable resource to create a non renewable resource? That doesn't sound very green to me..