mdp2021 3 hours ago

They already grow, they are already harvested, and this process uses discarded parts of the harvest. It is putting in use what we already had but had no use for.

Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi...

Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.

▲

willtemperley 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	Animats an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Ouch. There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1] But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense. This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though. Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle. Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance

▲

brainwad 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

▲

ghostly_s 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

The existing solution is actively wreaking havoc on the environment. I don't know the specifics of this crop but generally agricultural products absorb a substantial amount of carbon when growing, so releasing some of that carbon by later burning has the potential to be close to carbon-neutral. Whilst petroleum fuels are 100% carbon negative.

	▲	brainwad 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There's more to the environment than the greenhouse effect. Coconut plantations would compete with rainforest in much the same way palm oil ones do, since they have more or less identical growing climates. If you want to use biofuels, use a plant that grows in low-value areas like prairies. Something like corn or sugarcane.

▲

clickety_clack 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

	▲	mdp2021 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but nobody said that it would replace kerosene. Especially at this stage.

▲

dylan604 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

▲

fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent [-]

Isn't that simply a matter of cost? It's pretty difficult to complete with pulling an energy dense material out of the ground.

If we were to globally tax oil extraction proportional to the actual cost of equivalent carbon capture I imagine biofuels would begin to look quite reasonable.

That said it seems to me that tying the energy and food supply together economically in such a direct manner is likely to have some deleterious effects on poor countries.

	▲	bluGill 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oil has its own infrastructure. That infrastructure is producing things for airplanes almost as a byproduct. Both of the oil we pump from the ground goes to cars. If cars switch from using oil, that's going to raise the cost for everything else to get the oil they need because they have to pay for the full refinery output. Or in this case if airplanes quit using kerosene for jet fuel that is going to slightly raise the price of refined oil for everyone because the refineries don't have that one small extra part of their income sheet to help pay for the fixed cost of having a refinery. The whole system needs to work together, of course. If only airplanes get off, the difference is merely insignificant. However, if cars and airplanes both get off using oil, suddenly the other uses of oil become unfeasible.