…and how can all the planes and airlines survive? (The fuel question)

If ISIS aerotaxi jet should once have the pleasure to take off, it will for sure happen in the era of a more complicated availability of fuels, so lets have a look how can we possibly solve the problem.

As we very well know the air-ticket prices are predominantly influenced by the oil prices.

One thing is certain, that decreasing expanses that won’t be implied on the prices of air-tickets can’t last forever (we can push that day into a slightly more distant future, but we can’t stop it from coming). Because oil reserves will continue to shrink and they will shrink even faster than predicted, because new big airline markets such as China and India are just waking up. These two countries will dramatically increase oil prices (as the new high demand will exceed the supply) and our air-tickets will become even more expensive. So what will we do?

First of all we have to ask ourselves, how much time have we got left? Contemporary oil reserves are estimated to last for 30 years (true, but this estimate did not take into account the newly growing Chinese and Indian airline markets). Therefore we are talking about approx. 15, maximum 20 years of time left for thinking. In the first initial phase we have to replace the contemporary kerosene for light natural gas (LNG), because our available technology enables us to fly airplanes powered by LNG, e.g. Russians have already conducted a successful research on their Tupolev Tu-156 prototype (LNG version of the well-known Tu-154) in the 1980s.

There are huge reserves of Light Natural Gas; nevertheless even these reserves will be depleted. But their importance rests in the fact that they will give us more time to think about a new alternative of powering our airplanes and reducing air-ticket prices.

Some say that hydrogen is an alternative, e.g. the CRYOPLANE project (see: http://ec.europa.eu/research/growth/gcc/projects/in-action-cryoplane.html ) which plans to use hydrogen from Quebec’s reservoirs. Such an airplane can take off, but the difficult process of processing hydrogen fuel (electrolysis + cooling) are financially intensive, because they require constructing extra electrical power plants facilities. Not mentioning that this technology would form only a small proportion of the future air-traffic transport.

A good alternative might be a nuclear powered airplane, such as Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk Unmanned Air Vehicle (see: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3406 ). Such an airplane would be perhaps a technological and cost-effective solution, enabling airplanes of all sizes to fly for unlimited time as long as food and drink for passengers will last on board. But nuclear powered aircraft bring the question of safety. We can limit the radiation to a safe amount, but what if such an airplane crashed or was shot down mistakenly? Or such an airplane could not afford to fly over controversial countries. Nevertheless nuclear powered airplanes are an option worth considering.

We may also talk about using alcohol powered planes which already exist, e.g. in World War 2 Czechoslovak and French pilots were using a mixture of kerosene and alcohol. Such airplanes could use contemporary engine technology, but their proportion within the air-traffic transport would be limited by the amount of sugar cane plantations (which need to be constantly expanding and thus erode the soil).

As we can see the fuel alternatives are many. In my opinion, in terms of fuel the world airline industry will become decentralised into zones according to each regions access for individual technology or fuel. North America may remain happy with the hydrogen while EU, Russia and China could follow the nuclear pathway and Latin America (especially Brazil) might prefer the good-old sugar cane. It will make the air travel from one zone to another more complicated, but since there will be no common fuel like oil in now days, it is the only possibility how to keep so many airplanes of the future global air-traffic giant flying.

In the end, all the airlines should start immediately reacting by establishing financial funds that will help finance the development of any of these alternatives, so that they help the scientist research teams and also to some extent pre-subsidise the new fuel (power) technologies, so that these technologies would be easily accessible for airlines at a lower price that could help them to sell air-tickets to a wide number of customers for an acceptable price.