US startup turns cow manure into jet fuel in a move to reshape renewable energy at 1% of the conventional cost.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/cow-manure-into-jet-fuel?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reddit_share
US startup turns cow manure into jet fuel in a move to reshape renewable energy at 1% of the conventional cost.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/cow-manure-into-jet-fuel?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reddit_share
19 Comments
California-based startup, Circularity Fuels, hopes to accelerate the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) using its compact, electric-powered reactor unit.
The Ouro Reactor converts biogas from dairy farm waste into syngas, a precursor to jet fuel.
On August 19, the company announced that the technology successfully converted biogas from a California Central Valley dairy farm.
This new electric reforming system could create jet fuel right on the farm.
This is nonsense.
I’m sorry but only a fool would believe 1% of cost.
Only shift the problems, that manure was used before for something else, if you use it for jet fuel, someone will need to buy something to compensate.
The pitch appears to be this is a small scale low capital Investment solution, so it can be decentralized and installed at individual farms.
The problem is that this produces synthesis gas, which is a gaseous intermediate that is very expensive and impractical to store. This is not new technology, just nobody has bothered to miniaturize it because there is no point.
I would be impressed if they could miniaturize the Fischer-tropsch process and produce on-spec SAF with minimal waste products. As long as you need a large scale chemical plant for that this is pointless
Will be fun to see every american having 100 cows to fuel their F50.
1 percent of the capital cost. It doesn’t really tell us the total cost to produce jet fuel. Who knows how much electricity is involved. And the end product here is just a precursor for jet fuel not jet fuel itself.
Theirs a guy on insta who was making plastic waste into desel
A guy who worked for nasa said he made a fule cell
In the 70’s there was a guy who made car that ran on water
A guy who worked for Edison said he could harness the planets n and south poles
Same cycle repeats
Damn now I gotta fly spirit air, which already smells like cow shit, while they burn cow shit making it smell more like cow shit?
Turning cow shot into jet fuel…
Fallout 4’s drug market has prepared me for this eventuality, I’m gonna be rich.
Isn’t a significant portion of our green house gas from cattle methane? So we need more manure from cows to make this fuel? How does this help humanity?
Yep after the robot overlords exterminate us they will take mercy on the cows and give them tools to be self reliant in space.
1% of the conventional cost sounds almost too good to be true. I wonder what the hidden challenges are
Methane Wanzers?! My goodness, Front Mission 3 predicted the future!
So what’s the efficiency like from manure to fuel?
How is this profitable at scale?
I may be wrong but I know farmers use manure to fertilize their fields, without that manure wouldn’t they need more fertilizer created from oil?
It’ll soon be bought out by one of the Trump tech squad and we’ll never be able to use this tech commercially. Yay capitalism
There are quite a few pitfalls with this process, a major one being that they must still capture the methane produced from the lagoons with massive caps over the lagoon (what a euphemism). That is expensive in and of itself. If they don’t use the biomethane to produce the electricity for the process, that’s a plus for the system because combusting biomethane for electricity is a highly polluting process (I’m talking about NOx and SOx, not GHGs).
But in the end, they should not be producing methane from anaerobic digestion, because methane has on the order of 86-fold higher global warming potential.
Make the process aerobic by bubbling air through the lagoon, now the materials are converted to CO2 that, while still not great, is 86-fold better than methane. It also gets rid of noxious odors that torment people around these lagoons.
In the end, dairies should be regulated such that they no longer use anaerobic lagoons. Instead, if they do absolutely nothing, they can pump as much methane into the air as they like, because no one is regulating them or forcing them to find a less polluting process – and they do exist.
Milk is sacrosanct, apparently. The milk may be good for you, but the methane sure is not.
I can see the ad campaign for the airlines already: “Let’s Mooooove!”
Why not turn it into a gas that can be used on the farm for heating, electricity or running gas powered machines?