From The Editor: The End Of Oil

Bio-based alternatives are in the pipeline.

By Jeff Berlin

I first met Max Shauck, a mathematics professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in 1993 at the Paris Air Show, or rather, Le Salon International de L’Aeronautiqe et de L’Espace, Paris Le Bourget. I was living in Paris at the time and just had to see the air show when it came to town.

The day I went to the show, the Paris sky dawned slate gray, swept with clouds textured as though they were applied with an Impressionist’s brush. As I wandered the grounds of Le Bourget airport and perused the abundance of military hardware, I hoped the weather would hold and I’d see some flying. Having been in Paris for months on end, I was starting to crave the United States just a bit. So when I saw a little red Pitts S2B sitting quietly on the flight-line, my heart skipped a beat as I felt a tinge of “home.” A few months before, I had done spin training in a Pitts just like this one with a terrific aerobatic instructor named Randy Gagne, who’s unfortunately no longer with us. This Pitts belonged to Max, I found out, and had “ETHANOL POWERED” emblazoned on its flank and wings in big blue letters. Max was preparing to fly a demonstration, during which he strung together a series of loops, rolls, torque rolls and hammerheads into an aerial, alcohol-fueled dance. (Kind of like me on Saturday nights.)

The next night, over steak frites and vin rouge with Max and his wife Grazia (who’s also a pilot) at a little bistro on the Ile St. Louis in the center of Paris, I learned what ethanol is, and why it was fueling his passion for flight and his little red Pitts. I also learned, for the first time, about how some forward thinkers are researching ways to keep our aircraft flying after 100 low lead stops flowing.

They have a saying in Saudi Arabia: “My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son rides in a jet airplane. His son will ride a camel.”

Ever hear of the Hubbert Peak Theory? This well-accepted concept states that for any geographical area, rates of oil discovery, production and cumulative production will follow a bell-shaped curve, with a point of maximum production, after which, since the amount of oil under the ground is finite, production will decline due to depletion of resources.

In late March of this year, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) released a document called, “Crude Oil—Uncertainty about Future Oil Supply Makes it Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing Peak and Decline in Oil Production,” (GAO-07-283). It states that oil production will peak sometime between now and 2040. That peak will be known as Hubbert’s Peak, and will signal the terminal decline of the world’s oil production. According to David Strahan, author of The Last Oil Shock, “There are currently 98 oil-producing countries in the world, of which 64 are thought to have passed their geologically imposed production peak, and of those, 60 are in terminal production decline.” This kind of makes ethanol, in the long term, seem like an interesting alternative. Nevertheless, for the short term, while we’re still burning petroleum-based 100LL, not only do we have to contend with the toxicity and endangered status of tetraethyl lead (TEL), we have to recognize the fact that, even for the cars or SUVs we drive, the days of dollar-a-gallon, $20 fill-ups, are gone. TEL’s tenuous future has also influenced certain airframe manufacturers to produce turbocharged piston aircraft that can be reverted to nonturbo, which will have an easier time burning an unleaded petrol or alternative bio-based fuel.

So while environmental concerns and global warming are concurrently of paramount import, our voracious appetite for petroleum and petroleum-based products also must be staunched. I don’t expect to see hybrid- or hydrogen-engined aircraft anytime soon, but we as a community do need to start thinking about what we’ll be filling our wings with in the near or not-too-distant future.

In Brazil, there are more planes powered by sugarcane-based hydrous ethanol than anywhere in the world. Brazil is, by far, the world’s largest sugarcane producer, so it’s extraordinarily efficient and practical that an Embraer-built agricultural aircraft, the Ipanema, is thusly powered. And in Brazil, it’s not just the airplanes that are ethanol powered: Brazil is energy independent and has no reliance on oil imports. The sugarcane ethanol they produce is up to seven times more potent than corn ethanol, and 3⁄4 of all new cars in Brazil are Flex Fuel cars. In the states, we produce more corn than anywhere else in the world, though here the market penetration of E85 (85% ethanol and 15% gasoline) is miniscule compared to Brazil, where they offer 100% ethanol and an ethanol/gasoline blend. Indeed, only about 500 of 170,000 U.S. gas stations carry E85, and the number of planes powered by ethanol can probably be counted on fingers and toes. As we discuss in this issue, what I like to call our “Green Issue,” the wider adaptation of renewable, bio-based alternative fuels, right here at home, can yield manifest benefits to the environment, and the larger geopolitical and “petropolitical” sphere. It’s time to break our addiction to oil. If we don’t, I can only imagine what our withdrawal symptoms will be.

You can start to do your part by balancing your carbon output when you fly. Surf over to www.carbonneutralplane.com and get green.