All Nippon Airways made a splash in March when it took delivery of its first giant Airbus A380, which was painted to look like a sea turtle. Now the Japanese carrier plans to test a new biofuel made by mixing chemical emissions captured from industry
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All Nippon Airways, Japan’s largest airline, wants to put a little more “hop” into its operations by adding a bit of bunny poop to its fuel.
Yes, you read that right. Bunny poop, or if you prefer, rabbit excrement.
It’s all part of the growing movement in the global airline community to reduce their engine emissions both to lower the industry’s carbon footprint and to avoid recently enacted emissions taxes imposed by some nations and potential additional environmental taxes being considered around the globe.
But bunny poop? Really?
Yes. Really. Most people never think of it because, well, they just wouldn’t. But it turns out that rabbit dung contains a somewhat unique and particularly useful enzyme that can catalyze certain kinds of chemical emissions captured from industrial facilities like steel plants. The result of the interaction of those chemicals with the rabbit droppings is ethanol. That’s essentially the same stuff that farmers across the U.S. Midwest are distilling from 5.6 billion bushels of corn annually for use in our cars. In fact, about 40% of all corn grown in the U.S. these days gets turned into ethanol, which then is mixed into about 98% of all gasoline sold in this country.
Are these cute little animals a potentially important new source of biofuel for jet airplanes? (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
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Ethanol acts as an oxygenate in gasoline, reducing the amount of carbon monoxide and soot emitted from engines. Critics warn that ethanol, especially in higher concentrations, can damage conventional automobile engines, though ethanol supporters say such claims either are unproven or such damage is so minimal that it’s not a concern.
In effect, the cottontail feces-infused industrial emissions would do the same thing inside giant jet engines that power the world’s roughly 39,000 jet-powered commercial, private and military aircraft. Only that ethanol would be mixed with jet fuel – essentially kerosene – in a 50:50 ratio, compared with the 5%, 10% and 15% ethanol-to-gasoline mixtures used in some cars.
At least that’s the hope. Reports out of Japan say that ANA plans to test the use of bunny poop-catalyzed ethanol sometime this fall. If it works as expect, you could be flying on a rabbit dung-powered flight to or from Japan by 2021, and perhaps on flights operated by carriers other than ANA soon thereafter. It’s not clear yet whether jet engines, which operate at much higher temperatures than car engines, might be damaged or wear out more quickly because of ethanol use.
ANA executive vice president Akihiko Miura said in a statement that “Adopting this advanced fuel will allow us to reduce CO2 emissions and meet the ambitious sustainable development goals that we have set for the airline.”
A number of carriers around the world have been experimenting various types of biofuels for more than a decade now. But none have yet to make biofuel a prominent player in their fueling programs for both technical and supply reasons. Continental Airlines was the first U.S. carrier to operate a passenger jet on a test flight with a 50:50 biofuel-jet fuel mix back in 2009. Since then United, which merged with Continental, has remained out front in the experimentation of fuel mixtures that include ethanol derived from a variety of sources including plants, animal fats, industrial waste, algae, and liquefied carbons and gases. It, and a number of other mostly European carriers, also have operated a relatively small number of flights fueled by such mixtures with paying passengers onboard.
The U.S. Air Force also has been experimenting with similar types of fuels and has as its goal eventually meeting half of its annual fuel needs with biofuels.
ANA’s use of do-do from Lagomorpha Leporidae (that’s the Latin species name for rabbits) though, appears to be a first. It’s not clear that Japan has a large enough population of rabbits to produce the volume of dung that would be needed to meet the yearly needs of one carrier the size of ANA. For that matter it’s not clear that the world’s bunny population could produce enough, um, material to meet the demands of the global jet fleet, or even how many human bunny poop farmers would be required to gather up all that dung.
Nor is it clear exactly how many rabbit pellets are needed to convert some quantity of industrial emissions into a gallon of ethanol. For that matter, it’s also not clear at this point what quantity of industrial emissions will be needed for bunny poop to turn it into a gallon of ethanol, or where ANA and other carriers would acquire the presumably large quantities of such nasty emissions that would have to be catalyzed by all those rabbit pellets.
As odd – and as funny – as this all sounds, it’s actually fairly serious business for airlines.
Their global trade group, the International Air Transport Association, insists that all the airlines in the world combined produce only about 2% of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions. But European, Asian and even some American politicians, under pressure from environmental groups and their supporters, are making noise about slapping hefty new emission taxes and fees on airlines anyway. Some claim that airlines actually aren’t paying their fare share of emission taxes based on the number of passenger miles flown annually around the world vs. the number of passenger miles traveled in automobiles, buses, trains and other ground vehicles powered by polluting engines.
And those worried about airline emissions now also are pointing to the year 2036, when the industry is expected to board more passengers than there are people currently alive on Earth. Thanks largely to booming growth in air travel demand in China and throughout Asia global air travel demand is growing faster than even the most aggressive analysts were projecting just a decade ago.
Airlines, obviously, don’t like the prospect of being subject to more and bigger environmental taxes and fees in the future. So, to varying degrees, many are looking for ways to reduce the amount of conventional jet fuel they burn through greater engine and aerodynamic design efficiencies. Many also are looking for economically viable and practical ways to use biofuels or other sources of energy as partial replacements for conventional jet fuel.
Further, despite its broad perception as an agency that deals only with space flight NASA plays an important role in developing new technologies for use in aircraft. Remember, the first “A” in NASA stands for “Aerospace.” And scientists there have been working new engine and fuel systems that would allow jet engines to be powered by electricity created in flight by mixing hydrogen and oxygen stored in fuel tanks in place of jet fuels.
Many technical and practical challenges remain to be overcome by all of those approaches to reducing the amount of jet fuel burned annually. Batteries large enough to power huge jet aircraft currently would weigh so much that getting big planes off the ground and keeping them in the air for more than a few minutes would make planes too heavy to even get off the ground in the first place. Similarly the amount of hydrogen and oxygen that would have to be carried on board planes to generate electricity would require enormous supply tanks for planes to make long distance flights. And biofuels remain far too expensive, and the supply of biofuel feedstocks too small for such fuels to be affordable and practical alternatives, at least for now.
