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Comment by throwawayboise | Hacker News Reader

If it works as jet fuel it should also work as diesel fuel, as jet fuel is bascially high-grade diesel. That could be a benefit to railroads and long-haul trucking where batteries are not practical, as well as passenger cars, since the fuel delivery infrastructure is already well established.

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On railroads, it seems batteries may well be practical, making news over here as they are expected to be operating in about 12 months hauling iron ore: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/fmg-purcha...

As a diesel replacement, I expect that price will be the blocker. If they can get the cost down to battery levels, great. Otherwise I think long-haul electric trucking will be practical enough where charging networks are practical enough, which is where most of the people are. Dog-sleds and camels may remain the best green alternative for some areas though :)

I thought that was kerosene, not diesel. Same process should work for though.

They're quite similar, and, in fact, there are plenty of engines that can run interchangeably on either (though possibly with a shorter lifespan on pure kerosene - it doesn't have much of the lubricity of diesel, so is really hard on fuel pumps, injectors, etc).

But, yes, if you can make one, you can almost certainly make a good simulation of the other.

Jet and diesel are both kerosenes (particular range of problem distillate) with different additives, as is the stuff that goes in kerosene heaters.

It's unlikely that a process that needs biomass as input scales to all the applications you listed.

It depends. Small organisms can potentially scale really well. If yeast, bacteria or algae can do what you want, you have at least some hope of scaling that up arbitrarily.

There's a problem with microorganisms that can live in diesel. That is, they can live and grow in diesel.

https://www.google.com/search?q=diesel+bug

I think the idea is the microorganism you output some precursor(s) that you'd then process. If not, I guess you could pasteurize whatever it is, after filtering and such. Doesn't seem like it should be too much of a problem.

This is the problem algae farms all run headlong into: sunlight density. The energy output you get from doing anything with the biomass can't exceed the received sunlight energy times the photosynthetic efficiency of your microorganisms. And that efficiency might not be as good as solar cells.

The way this process does an end-run round that with added hydrogen is interesting, though.

I think algae farms are actually CO2 limited. Even a corn field, in calm air and bright sunlight, runs out of CO2 in about five minutes. And plants like corn have all those leaves above the ground for lots of mass transfer.

(Transfer of turbulence to ground level may be a way wind turbines can increase agricultural yield, I think.)

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