My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive.

International markets and all that...

That infographic says it uses 16-20% more fuel per unit of thrust. That's a significant amount more weight for an aircraft to carry, but because carrying extra fuel also burns fuel, extra fuel use would compound exponentially. This would probably mean significantly more than 20% extra fuel would be required for long-haul flights.

I presume that the market for coconut oil is far smaller than for jet fuel, so this solution can't scale without wreaking havoc on the environment. These sort of clever uses for exisiting byproducts only work when the market for the main product is much bigger than for the byproduct (e.g. down is a byproduct of duck/goose meat, leather is a byproduct of beef).

Apparently (I’m relying on facts from Claude here), aviation uses about 100 billion gallons of oil a year and coconuts yield about 250 gal/acre, so assuming you can approximately replace them 1:1, you would need to plant about 400 million acres under coconut plantation, an area the size of Mexico.

Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).

To what scale though? Doubtful it's going to be enough for a replacement. Just as GP stated, the corn grown for ethanol is nothing more than an additive and it is quite easy to find fuel without it. It's a boondoggle and not any where close to being a fossil fuel replacement

Just use any carbon monoxide source (e.g., pyrolysis of pretty much anything that'd release carbon dioxide when burned works, followed by some cleaning to get rid of some problematic catalyst poisons (notably sulfur compounds)), add hydrogen, and do Fischer-Tropsch. You get your high quality diesel fuel, often higher quality than what you can easily get from crude oil, btw.

If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.

Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.

Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...

How many coconuts are on one tree and how many tons of coconuts would be needed to replace kerosene globally?

I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible.

BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well.

Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less.

I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation.

Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…

I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet. Not just for the carbon impact, but also for the diversity of our species and cultures.

Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?

Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.

The best solution to flying and long distance travel is to reduce it as much as possible. This means no more travelling for hedonistic (touristic) purposes.

I.e. measures like massive taxation (also for private jets of course).

Saw a recent post about an electric plane - was pretty sweet let me dig it up. $5 worth of fuel!

> https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...

"It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population)."

Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.

Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.

That is both true and not quite true at the same time. The notion of the Yeoman farm family supporting itself off its land is mostly a myth.

Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.

> Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?

Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?

Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.

A lot of food cost is due to food waste and convenience (refrigerated shipping, out of season crops, etc). There's already a lot food waste due to logistics and consumer preference.

Is Jet Fuel really the best use of coconut oil? I'd imagine it's far better as a lubricant or ingredient in things more directly adjacent to human rather than mechanical use.