Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Airliners powered by shopping bags?

Regular readers may recall that I have written a couple of columns in the past predicting that our rubbish dumps/tips will one day become a valuable source of plastics that will replace dwinding fossil fuel resources.

My belief is that at some stage, extracting oil from the ground will become so expensive that a cheaper option will be to dig up all those squillions of tonnes of plastic that we have buried in landfills over the years and convert it into fuel.

With the rise of EVs, one could be forgiven for thinking that this is becoming increasingly unlikely. Odds are that in a decade or two, ICE-power will be little more than memory and a page in a history book.

However, there are probably still going to be applications where liquid hydrocarbons are the most effective and cost-efficient way of powering our machines so the demand for fuels such as petrol and diesel will never completely disappear.

The only real question is "when will the cost of turning plastic waste into fuel become lower than the cost of extracting that fuel from the ground?"

Well a recent breakthrough in the required technology has brought forward that cross-over point, perhaps quite significantly.

According to this Science Daily article A new process turns plastic waste into gasoline and diesel fuel in a way that could significantly slash the cost of such conversion.

Using "inexpensive" alumninum salts such as aluminium chloride, the process is claimed to convert polyethylene plastic (recycling types 1, 2 and 4) into petrol and diesel with a yield of around 60 percent.

This means that even if the wells run dry or all the supply-lines are broken, we could theoretically power those parts of our transport fleet and industry which rely on fosil fuels by simply mining the rich veins of plastic that exist within our rubbish tips and converting it to fuel.

Will this happen?

Or should I say *when* will this happen?

I have no bleeding idea but it is nice to know that this option does exist and that it would kill two birds with one stone. While reducing the amount of plastic being buried it would also provide an assurance of supply for industries that remain reliant on fossil fuels.

Imgine if such "re-refineries" were built and used solar energy to provide the energy-input needed to convert waste plastic to fuel. This would effectively be a great way to store the energy of the sun in an incredibly energy-dense form. Given the current state of battery technology, we can still store up to 80 times as much energy in liquid fuels as we can in the equivalent weight of batteries.

This massive advantage (in favour of liquid fuels) is why we won't see electric airliners flying during our lifetimes. Indeed, the production of aviation fuel may be the first application of this "plastic to fuel" technology, given that our private transport fleets are rapidly pivoting to electric power.

I'll certainly be keeping an eye on this technology and will report any further breakthroughs or if trial plants have been proposed.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font