Another year has come and gone, and I still don’t own a flying car. So I will have to write about pork fat, instead.
During the “news doldrums” that typically arrive during the winter holidays, reporters — coming out of a year full of politics, public health mandates, and other types of criminal activity — often find themselves facing a shortage of meaningful stories to cover.
United Airlines, to the rescue!
Earlier this month, United Airlines modified a Boeing 373 MAX so that one of its two jet engines was running on rendered pork fat, and then flew it on a 600-mile trip from Chicago to Washington DC with a payload of (non-paying) passengers, presumably to catch the attention of politicians. (In the interests of safety, the other engine used regular jet fuel.)
Actually, the special fuel was a mixture of used cooking oil, plus rendered fat from pigs, cows, and chickens, and various other bio-waste products. The airline claims that this type of fuel generates only 20% of the carbon emissions produced by normal jet fuel. You don’t want to know how much carbon pollution a normal jey plane produces, so I won’t tell you.
Unfortunately, the cost to produce this unique liquid propellant is four times the cost of petroleum-based fuel. According to Jan Brueckner, an economics professor at the University of California-Irvine, “For biofuels to get their foot in the door, you need [petroleum oil] to be a lot more expensive than it is now…”
Now, there’s a good solution to the pricing quandary: jack up the price of gas to $15 a gallon. (We’ll get there eventually, I suppose.)
We can understand the motivation of United Airlines and others, to seek ways to cut back on our dangerous carbon pollution habit. (Telling everyone to just stay home is a less attractive solution, if you are an airline company.) We can also bet money that the Biden administration is helping to fund these pork fat experiments.
We don’t have to hedge our bets, either. In September, the Biden administration and the FAA launched a initiative to boost ‘sustainable aviation fuel’ to 3 billion gallons a year by 2030. Billion, with a ‘B’. The FAA is giving five universities $1.4 million to research alternative aviation fuels, and to retrofit existing refineries to make the fuel at Washington State University.
“These funds will help build regional supply chains so that communities across our country — many of them rural — feel the economic benefits of producing sustainable aviation fuel,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a news release. That’s a good start, but a bit shy of the $250 billion United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby estimates it will cost to ramp up production of sustainable aviation fuel. (We’ll get there eventually, I suppose.)
When I was a kid, my mom cooked bacon for breakfast, nearly every morning, and saved the rendered fat in a large can next to the stove. She would then use the salvaged bacon grease to flavor hash browns and various other tasty, sautéed treats. Little did we know, back then, that she was feeding us jet fuel.
I’ve passed this information on to my mom, even though she switched to a low-fat diet after Dad’s heart attack. We can probably expect the FDA to release new research, next year, telling us that bacon is now healthy.
Many of our Daily Post readers are probably imagining, right about now, that if a jet plane can run on rendered pork fat, then our automobiles ought to be able to do the same. We can probably imagine, as well, what it would smell like, to get caught in rush-hour traffic on a Los Angeles freeway. If only we could — also — make a vehicle fuel out of coffee beans.
But I can’t settle for breakfast on the freeway. (We have no freeways in Pagosa Springs, but bear with me here.) I still want a flying car.
Over the past decade, American men have fallen in love with drones. And I do mean, ‘fallen in love’. We now have 1.7 million drones registered with the FAA. (Shall we compare that with 2.0 million marriage licenses issued in 2019?)
Video-enabled drones have been shooting spectacular footage since about 2006. And the rate of marriages has been declining since about the same time.
I personally have not purchased a drone, yet. But I think my first drone will look something like this.
Just a fancy, slightly oversized drone… like the 1.7 million little drones that have been handling everyone’s aerial photography duties for the past decade. Except this one, you can sit inside.
This might be the flying car I’ve been dreaming about since I was a kid. Unfortunately, this particular passenger-enabled drone is made in China.
I want an American-made passenger drone, that runs on American pork fat.