alt.hn

8/23/2026 at 3:50:18 PM

Coconut oil jet fuel matches kerosene's efficiency in engine tests

 https://studyfinds.com/coconut-oil-jet-fuel-matches-kerosenes-efficiency-in-engine-tests/

by mdp2021

8/23/2026 at 6:57:07 PM

This isn't proper SAF, it's basically C8/10 biodiesel. No aromatics which is one of the perennial problems with SAF, due not just to volumetric energy density but nitrile seals not swelling enough. Integral wing tank seals usually expect aromatic exposure also. This is why some of the catalytic routes/CHJ are of greater interest, cycloparaffins/napthenes recover some of this vs a more biodiesel-ish blend, but even 50% cycloparaffin doesn't fully recover swell. These are solvable backwards compatibility issues but not in the short or medium term.

More egregiously FAME is a polar solvent that eats your elastomers, even some fluoroelastomers. It will also attack your polysulfide tank sealant. The remark that it's "technically feasible" to decrease oxygen through hydrogenation is not at all sufficient. Now you're into requiring catalyst beds and a hydrogen plant which makes this much less appealing. Plus ester instability when you sink heat into fuel. Plus freeze point. This is literally a tracked contaminant banned above mg/kg levels that doesn't even have very good properties otherwise they want to run as a major constituent of fuels.

by landl0rd

8/23/2026 at 8:55:32 PM

Maybe it's time to develop new sealing materials?

edit: thanks for the downvote. I should've said "Maybe it's time to _invest into developing_ new sealing materials?" ;)

by shrx

8/23/2026 at 9:48:45 PM

Maybe it's time to stop burning food as fuel. What are the jets going to do anyway, bomb Iranian children?

Remember when George W Bush signed into law the corn ethanol bill. Corn tripled in price within 8 years. Fuel didn't get cheaper. In fact it cost more to produce the ethanol.

by panny

8/24/2026 at 12:11:08 AM

Ethanol was always a political thing, and not technical. It was passed because it would triple the price of corn.

by ecshafer

8/24/2026 at 10:31:48 AM

Not just corn. Farmers would grow more corn in place of other plants reducing the supply, and shorter supply generally means higher prices, This is happening in India right now.

by pajko

8/23/2026 at 11:29:58 PM

Fair play, also we need to stop using palm oil in food.

by stuaxo

8/24/2026 at 5:36:20 AM

But how else am I going get orangutan flavour in my ice c̶r̶e̶a̶m̶ confection?

by Walf

8/23/2026 at 9:54:58 PM

All water under the bridge. Ethanol is now a paying proposition. And it uses corn we used to dump.

by JoeAltmaier

8/23/2026 at 9:31:50 PM

Maybe they should have said something like "These are solvable backwards compatibility issues, but not in the short or medium term."

by Brian_K_White

8/24/2026 at 4:59:19 AM

Aviation is notorious for having long product cycles. Look at how long GA pilots have been spraying their communities with lead.

There's simply no economic feasibility to replace every seal on every aircraft.

by stackghost

8/24/2026 at 10:01:09 AM

Why can’t they synthesize aromatics too? they’re usually shorter chain, seems like they should be easier if nothing else?

by lazide

8/23/2026 at 4:32:02 PM

Do coconuts grow particularly efficiently?

Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.

by clickety_clack

8/23/2026 at 6:26:59 PM

> a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities

My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.

Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.

by europoorean

8/23/2026 at 9:20:53 PM

Don't most farmers own their own farms? (or work on a corporate monstrosity farm).

How common is farm landlords?

by bawolff

8/23/2026 at 9:48:17 PM

Depends on the area, but the vast majority are owner operated.

The question begs some other questions though.

One is more about what fraction of the economic production of the farm industry is owner operated; There is a long tail of now-tiny farms that are not economical to actually sow and harvest, which nobody could actually earn a living from. If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?

Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.

The vertically related industries have also seen a lot of consolidation. There are ~four seed companies, only a few pesticide companies, two main tractor companies, only a few slaughterhouse companies, etc. There are long-term contractual arrangements with some of these entities. Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly they may as well be a sharecropper really counted as a farm?

by mapt

8/24/2026 at 2:35:22 AM

> Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together ...

I can't speak to US farm practices but note that 5,000 acres is 2,023 hectares and a bit less than half the average size of farms in our local farming cooperative (CBH, Western Australia). today they are still mostly extended family farms formed from buying up and joining together many smaller post war farms.

> that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.

The "mean farm" of 4,500 Hectares (11,000 acres) here is typically managed by three full time workers and machinery, along with a network of mechanics, seed suppliers, pooled harvest hands etc.

> Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly

Again, I have no comment wrt US practices - here owner operators formed their own cooperatives to build out and co-own their rail, port, silo, seed storage, agronomy, facilities and via bulk production of > 20 million tonnes of grain per annum have leverage to make demands of equipment manufacturers.

> If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?

I know people that own 10 to 15 acres, live in very old farmhouses that have been fully overhauled to current standards and lease their cropable land out to form large thousand acre paddocks which receive back enough money to cover rates and improvements.

They own the land, they often tun AirBnB as a side earner, the land is farmed at a profit.

by defrost

8/24/2026 at 2:06:41 AM

The largest private single owner of farmland in the US is Bill Gates. [1] He owns < 1% of all land, but it's still a telling fact. In total, owners own more than 70% of farms, but only about 35% of farmland. The remaining 65% of farmland is either partial ownership (~55%), or tenant farmers (~10%). [2]

[1] - https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/business/how-bill-gates-quietl...

[2] - https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/AgCensus/2022/Full_Re...

by somenameforme

8/24/2026 at 5:36:06 AM

How does that account for corporate owned farmland though?

by skew-aberration

8/24/2026 at 9:50:12 AM

I don't (or didn't) know the answer to those questions.

Regarding corporate farms, they may actually be some of the most productive farms, and give people actual opportunities to find good jobs in farming (that donmt require that they inherit a farm from mum and dad).

If you manage to tolerate the interviewer, I think the person being interviewed here was very interesting, and made me think about corporate farming in a different way:

https://youtu.be/pgdLYugmkX8

by europoorean

8/24/2026 at 2:10:35 AM

Yeah, it's not like the few remaining small, family-owned Indiana farms (which are either very specialized away from corn or basically lifestyle businesses at this point) are benefitting from this in a meaningful way.

by salynchnew

8/23/2026 at 9:42:56 PM

Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s more of a massive subsidy to enormous agribusiness operations. But yeah I’m sure some of the pork makes its way to some normal farmers too.

by xp84

8/23/2026 at 6:37:16 PM

My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive.

International markets and all that...

by b112

8/23/2026 at 7:03:47 PM

NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.

by stevenwoo

8/23/2026 at 11:52:19 PM

This chart

https://statbase.org/data/mex-prevalence-of-obesity-among-ad...

Says that obesity was shooting up in Mexico before that. The obesity rate doubled in the 15 years before NAFTA. After NAFTA the rate doubled again in about 30 years. I can't really see any obvious change after 1994.

Are these numbers incorrect, or were you meaning some other metric of obesity or obesity epidemic?

by stinkbeetle

8/24/2026 at 7:21:36 PM

Good point. I should have written something like correlated with urbanization and other factors. But ever increasing percentage is a correlation. The USA obesity rate has stabilized for a year iirc, but those of Mexican heritage have some unique vulnerabilities to obesity as well so a multi factorial issue.

by stevenwoo

8/23/2026 at 7:51:52 PM

Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options. People constantly repeat this, but it's flat out wrong.

The best way to apologize for people who, is to say that they don't have enough time to cook between all the jobs they have.

by WarmWash

8/23/2026 at 8:08:17 PM

> cheaper than heather options

Due to spoilage concerns grocery stores price food based on shelf stability not just production costs. Processed foods are generally shelf stable enough for this not to be a major concern.

Similarly economies of scale apply in many situations. Slow cooking beans takes more energy the smaller the batch size due to surface area to volume ratios etc.

Combined with the opportunity costs associated with cooking + cleanup means there’s very few healthy options that can compete with highly processed foods.

by Retric

8/23/2026 at 8:32:28 PM

I bought over a pound of steak the other day for $5. (Yes, it was on sale. But it is frequently on sale.) Along with a potato for 50 cents, that's cheaper than a bag of Doritos.

Oh, and I bought a banana for $.22.

Cooking a steak takes about 10 minutes.

Microwaving a TV dinner ($7.50) takes more time.

by WalterBright

8/23/2026 at 9:07:40 PM

This canard again [0]? You're comparing one piece of beef with a massive bag of Doritos. The banana's irrelevant, but last time you compared it to an enormous block of chocolate [1].

From experience a microwave meal should take about 3 minutes to cook so I don't know how you're taking more than 10 minutes unless, like your food item comparisons, you're cooking enough of them to feed an entire town.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49312807

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49314864

by tolien

8/24/2026 at 4:25:25 AM

This is possibly the craziest goddamn conversation I've ever seen on HN. Michalena's swedish meatballs are like $1.50 for 350 calories[0].

It's been a while since college, but I would guess they are delicious when compared to Walter's shoe-leather brand steak. Mac-n-cheese of various offbrands also cheap, and potato flakes ridiculously cheap.

Marie Callender and Stouffer's are not cheap, they are convenient.

Steak takes me like 45 minutes, gotta season, let it sit. On stovetop need a cast-iron skillet, 5 minutes to heat it, etc.

Also cooking time doesn't really matter a lot, I'd use a toaster oven because the meatballs tasted better, and would be studying or whatever waiting for the timer.

0: https://www.instacart.com/store/products/42133-michelina-s-s...

by qdog

8/24/2026 at 2:39:09 PM

A pound of fresh ground pork is ~$1.25 and it's 1100 calories.

Throw in all the other stuff to make the swedish meatballs and you are coming out way ahead.

The "poor tax" in processed food is that they are paying double to triple the underlying food cost to have someone else make the food for them.

I'm confident that if you meal prepped Swedish meatballs, you would be able to make something 10x healthier for 1/3 the cost. Even at a "rock bottom" $1.50 per meatball package.

by WarmWash

8/23/2026 at 10:37:41 PM

Stouffers Spaghetti & Meatballs:

1. Cut film to vent

2. cook 6 1/2 mins on high

3. Let stand 1 min

A frozen pot pie is 10.5 min.

I don't know any frozen dinners for 3 min.

by WalterBright

8/24/2026 at 12:28:15 AM

You didn't specify frozen - I'm looking at a meal taken out of the fridge, which still has a shelf time of ~a week. You're not comparing to a frozen steak either, which will also need an extended cooking time.

If you're concerned about cooking time then don't buy frozen, or let them defrost, and they take less time to cook. Since you're comparing to preparing a whole piece of steak and a potato, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Also, your example is $3.34 [0] i.e. less than your $5 steak and 50 cent potato.

0: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Stouffer-s-Spaghetti-with-Meatbal...

by tolien

8/23/2026 at 10:46:01 PM

P.S. Hamburger is even cheaper

by WalterBright

8/23/2026 at 10:24:50 PM

Potatoes have a long shelf life and even then it’s not a clear win.

A medium potato is around 110 calories. 15 * 150 calories servings = 5$ that’s 20.45 medium potatoes for 5$ or 24.4c per medium potato. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Doritos-Nacho-Cheese-Tortilla-Sna...

The potato requires prep, 10 minutes in the microwave ~= 1/4 kWh, and presumably a little salt and butter. A microwave meal is a more complete nutrition source and takes less time, making them more complex point of comparison.

by Retric

8/23/2026 at 10:33:52 PM

Potato ------

Prep: 5 seconds under the faucet, 10 seconds to quarter it

Cook: 3 min 40 sec in the microwave

TV Dinner: 10 min in the microwave, $7.69 price

by WalterBright

8/23/2026 at 10:42:25 PM

You’re undercooked your potatoes the goal isn’t simply to warm them, but allow your body to more easily digest them. But this isn’t just a me thing:

https://www.bigbearswife.com/how-to-cook-a-potato-in-the-mic... How long does it take to cook a potato in the microwave? Between 5-10 minutes

https://microwaveshub.com/how-long-to-heat-up-a-potato-in-th... The cooking time to heat a potato in the microwave will largely depend on the size and type of potato. Here’s a general guideline: Medium Red 6-8 oz, 4-5 minutes large Russet 7-8

I’ve literally never seen a microwave meal take 10 minutes, but I’m guessing that’s theoretically possible if it’s got enough mass to heat up.

by Retric

8/23/2026 at 10:48:33 PM

See Marie Calendar pot pies. 10.5 minutes.

by WalterBright

8/23/2026 at 10:59:07 PM

Marie Calendar pot pie, the instructions list 5-6 minutes of time in a microwave. https://contenthandler-raleys.fieldera.com/prod/392493/1/0/0...

They do want you to let them cool, but that’s true of anything you heat to a cooking temperature in a microwave. Potatoes have the same limitations, but most people don’t include the “don’t be an idiot” instructions in recipes just cooking times.

by Retric

8/24/2026 at 12:20:27 AM

The ones I buy say 10.5 min on the box. Shrug.

by WalterBright

8/24/2026 at 1:01:48 AM

If that’s true you should be able to provide actual evidence of a 10 min 30 second cooking time listed on their box art.

However it’s clear that microwave meals are generally designed to have shorter cooking times for simple convenience and the underlying physics involved.

by Retric

8/24/2026 at 5:19:53 AM

Wait why are you guys cutting the potatoes up before putting them in the microwave? Steps:

* Wash in water

* Cut out any bad parts

* Stab the whole potato with the fork a bunch of times

* Nuke until gushy

A few medium sized potatoes will take maybe 8 minutes to cook all at once here. That's not really an issue of course, as you'll cook a small piece of meat in a pan, which takes about the same time. EG, you start the pan heating, while taking 2 min to defrost the meat, and you're prepping the potatoes. Then meat in pan, potatoes in microwave, they're done mostly at the same time.

Note you don't need to completely defrost the meat. It doesn't matter if it's -5C or +5C. A "little" frozen is fine, especially for steak which can be rare inside. Anyhow. Sorry to interject, but the potato thing is weird to me.

The article, I just noticed, does cite the fork.. but talks about exploding? No, it won't explode, the fork instead allows for an evener cook.

by b112

8/23/2026 at 9:12:33 PM

When I was a grad student, I pointed this out to my poor neighbor with lots of health problems (5 pills a day!) who was shocked that I ate such expensive food despite being poorer still.

15 years later she's 50 lb lighter, takes no daily medication, and we have a mortgage and three kids. That's right, I fixed her up and married her.

by rotringlvr

8/24/2026 at 5:23:49 AM

It has been my experience, as a general rule (so it may not apply here), that people who grow up in the city are the worst at this.

People with strong rural roots, or who grew up in rural areas, tend to have lived in houses, have freezers, space for long term storage of items, and may have personal knowledge of canning, and food storage. If one grows up in an apartment, there may not be space for a shelf with canned food and bags of rice and potatoes.

I find that during harvest times, last year's canned foods are marked down. The logic being, I think, clear out their warehouses and get people to take last year's stuff home. And if you have space, you can take advantage of such things, and save, save, save.

For food, poor rural people often have better outcomes than city folk, due to the ability to store when sale items are found.

So when I read stories such as yours, I always wonder. City girl? Country boy? And as I said at the start, this is not a hard fact, just something I've noticed being a common reason why some people just "don't know".

by b112

8/23/2026 at 9:00:15 PM

Microwaving takes less attention and less skill, though. And less cleanup. And you don’t need to own a pan. And you don’t need to own spices (steak is a bad example ofc). And you don’t need to think about the side dishes. And you don’t need to agree on what’s for dinner. And I think it’s worth repeating, you don’t need any skill and can’t really screw it up. And you don’t need to worry about it going bad because you were too lazy to cook it. Etc.

Processed food may not be cheaper, but the flavor:effort ratio is waaaaaay higher.

by asgraham

8/23/2026 at 10:40:21 PM

Throwing a steak in a frying pan is about the same effort as a microwave frozen dinner, and is objectively cheaper.

There's no universe where processed food is cheaper.

by WalterBright

8/24/2026 at 1:08:24 AM

You can microwave a meal by tossing it into the microwave and walking away, you need to actually participate in cooking a steak and then clean up several surfaces. The stake is conservatively 10x as much effort and time is money, plus microwaves use far less energy.

Processed food isn’t a single unified thing, the prices definitely overlap but the minimum and maximum prices for processed foods are lower. That’s why our food supply ended up looking like it does, economies of scale beat home cooking. That’s true even going back thousands of years where communal cooking drastically reduced the fuel needs in warm climates.

by Retric

8/23/2026 at 8:58:35 PM

Wait til you find out what's in a $5 steak!

Our cheapest grass-fed tenderloin is $10 for a half pound cut. One. In a poor northern state.

We had that cow two years and didn't supplement grain. Cheap as you can grow them.

With a $5 steak, it might as well be corn chips.

by nosmokewhereiam

8/23/2026 at 10:42:28 PM

The $5 steak is the steak that's on sale. It doesn't affect the food value or the taste. A pound of steak is good for 4 meals for me.

You can have your corn chips. No thanks.

by WalterBright

8/23/2026 at 9:11:36 PM

> Processed foods are not cheaper than healthier options.

I have bad news for you about flour

by jrflowers

8/23/2026 at 7:54:59 PM

Likely, and then... after Mexican farms went out of business, they added biofuels, the price spiked, and Mexico had no domestic corn people could buy.

It's sort of what they want for Canada. They keep trying to attack our protected agricultural sectors, and no sane country doesn't protect their food supply. Amusingly, they want 10% of our dairy market (as a start), and they already have a few percent.

Yet we're 1/10th the size of them. So they make a massive fuss, over 5 additional percent of our market or so, which for their market size is 0.5% of its overall size. The US economy won't even notice, but the Canadian market will 10x as much. It's just petty.

by b112

8/24/2026 at 10:12:18 AM

Yeah, but our dairy quota system is kinda fucked imo. We've created a market where the quotas are estimated to be worth somewhere between 40-45 billion. This financialization and the fact that banks have leant heavily against the quotas is part of the reason we're unwilling to move on this aspect in negotiation imo.

I'm not saying that there's not value of protecting our food supply. But, in an affordability crisis, kinda feels this should be on the table for discussion given our supply chain management costs the average consumer an extra $250 a year or so.

by snayan

8/24/2026 at 5:57:14 PM

That's quite cheap then.

You see, the Americans are liars, as you may well know. They get upset at supply management, but they do it too. Instead of controlling production, and setting fair prices for producers, they handle it, like a bunch of nitwits, on the backend.

They buy up excess milk, make cheese out of it, to artificially keep the market price high, and then store it for decades as it rots, in large underground limestone caverns.

They buy out herds if production levels are too high. They have bought out large numbers of farms more than once, spending enormous sums, to reduce the supply.

In fact, the American government has cost the American consumer far more than a measly $250 per year, for they force higher pricing too. And to do it? They spend like crazy, they spend tax money like crazy.

But here's the thing. Every single government handles food production in some way. Every one. And the result is upward pricing pressure, almost always.

We act responsibly. Sanely. The Americans just shrug their shoulders, blather on about not interfering, then do it anyhow regardless.

Do not fall for their lies. It's all they do these days. The only goal they have, is to make us far more dependent upon them.

by b112

8/23/2026 at 9:17:58 PM

[flagged]

by ALLTaken

8/23/2026 at 4:35:42 PM

They already grow, they are already harvested, and this process uses discarded parts of the harvest. It is putting in use what we already had but had no use for.

Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi...

Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.

by mdp2021

8/23/2026 at 5:25:31 PM

That infographic says it uses 16-20% more fuel per unit of thrust. That's a significant amount more weight for an aircraft to carry, but because carrying extra fuel also burns fuel, extra fuel use would compound exponentially. This would probably mean significantly more than 20% extra fuel would be required for long-haul flights.

by willtemperley

8/23/2026 at 6:28:25 PM

Ouch.

There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1] But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense.

This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though.

Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle.

Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance

by Animats

8/24/2026 at 12:48:58 AM

Biofuel as a side venture that makes a bit of profit / saves on a bit of fuel outlay has always been a thing in Australia also.

Currently, off the top of recent memory:

* Australia is exploring using canola to produce sustainable aviation and renewable diesel fuels, potentially creating 7,000+ jobs by 2030. - Landline (June 2025) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIwsfxK6jw0

* North Queensland graziers are trialling a 10-hectare pongamia plantation to run alongside livestock. (July 2026) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-19/pongamia-tree-aviatio...

* Agave is climate change resistant and has promise beyond just tequila - (May 2026) - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-23/australia-agave-farmi...

* Adelaide will turn 600,000 tons of forest waste into 140 megaliters of jet fuel per year, enough for 4.5M passenger seats. - (July 2026) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0u91oQ-hjY

The relative perspective on 4.5M passenger seats is that at one point in the recent past (possibly pre COVID) there were ~ 1M passengers in the air globally at any random time.

On the business investment and development side there are several operators, eg: JetZero Australia - https://jetzero.com.au/projects

by defrost

8/23/2026 at 9:46:34 PM

^^^ this

I cringe thinking about more biofuel ideas getting forced through. Sure, let’s all spend a ton of petroleum energy on fertilizing, farm equipment, and processing, and raise food prices by using all the land for producing ethanol-corn, and jet fuel coconuts, just to get a slightly worse petroleum replacement fuel.

by xp84

8/23/2026 at 11:10:56 PM

There's always the air-gasoline route. That's right! With enough chemical engineering and materials science, we can extract jet fuel from air and water. You extract out CO2 from the air, and H2 from water. You turn the CO2 and hydrogen into carbon monoxide, and then Fischer-Tropsch chemistry and some other magic gets you hydrocarbons out the other end! The problem is the economics of that process can't compete with oil from the ground.

by fragmede

8/24/2026 at 12:51:24 AM

> The problem is the economics of that process can't compete with oil from the ground.

Even factoring in emissions?

Given oil from the ground is adding long buried CO2 to and steadily increasing atmospheric insulation whereas fuel-from-air is using what is already there.

Is this another example of discussions about oil not factoring in the negative externalities to make it look good?

by defrost

8/24/2026 at 2:15:00 AM

[dead]

by Animats

8/23/2026 at 4:44:11 PM

I presume that the market for coconut oil is far smaller than for jet fuel, so this solution can't scale without wreaking havoc on the environment. These sort of clever uses for exisiting byproducts only work when the market for the main product is much bigger than for the byproduct (e.g. down is a byproduct of duck/goose meat, leather is a byproduct of beef).

by brainwad

8/23/2026 at 7:02:26 PM

The existing solution is actively wreaking havoc on the environment. I don't know the specifics of this crop but generally agricultural products absorb a substantial amount of carbon when growing, so releasing some of that carbon by later burning has the potential to be close to carbon-neutral. Whilst petroleum fuels are 100% carbon negative.

by ghostly_s

8/23/2026 at 8:04:00 PM

Aviation is a relatively small amount of global carbon dioxide emissions (2.5% or so). However, there is some evidence that their emissions are much worse than they seem on paper due to NOx and water vapour emissions high in the troposphere. Even if coconut oil was a remotely viable alternative it would do nothing to address these other issues.

by VBprogrammer

8/23/2026 at 7:23:45 PM

There's more to the environment than the greenhouse effect. Coconut plantations would compete with rainforest in much the same way palm oil ones do, since they have more or less identical growing climates.

If you want to use biofuels, use a plant that grows in low-value areas like open fields. Something like corn or sugarcane.

by brainwad

8/23/2026 at 9:48:28 PM

Corn ethanol is a scam and consumes as much energy to make as it “produces.” Let’s not do that either.

by xp84

8/24/2026 at 12:32:08 AM

Nobody who had looked at it believes that. Even the well known critics admit it is energy positive. The ratio isn't very good, but it is energy positive.

by bluGill

8/23/2026 at 4:44:43 PM

Apparently (I’m relying on facts from Claude here), aviation uses about 100 billion gallons of oil a year and coconuts yield about 250 gal/acre, so assuming you can approximately replace them 1:1, you would need to plant about 400 million acres under coconut plantation, an area the size of Mexico.

Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).

by clickety_clack

8/23/2026 at 4:52:17 PM

Yes, but nobody said that it would replace kerosene. Especially at this stage.

by mdp2021

8/23/2026 at 4:44:01 PM

To what scale though? Doubtful it's going to be enough for a replacement. Just as GP stated, the corn grown for ethanol is nothing more than an additive and it is quite easy to find fuel without it. It's a boondoggle and not any where close to being a fossil fuel replacement

by dylan604

8/23/2026 at 6:33:08 PM

Isn't that simply a matter of cost? It's pretty difficult to complete with pulling an energy dense material out of the ground.

If we were to globally tax oil extraction proportional to the actual cost of equivalent carbon capture I imagine biofuels would begin to look quite reasonable.

That said it seems to me that tying the energy and food supply together economically in such a direct manner is likely to have some deleterious effects on poor countries.

by fc417fc802

8/23/2026 at 7:23:44 PM

Oil has its own infrastructure. That infrastructure is producing things for airplanes almost as a byproduct. Both of the oil we pump from the ground goes to cars. If cars switch from using oil, that's going to raise the cost for everything else to get the oil they need because they have to pay for the full refinery output. Or in this case if airplanes quit using kerosene for jet fuel that is going to slightly raise the price of refined oil for everyone because the refineries don't have that one small extra part of their income sheet to help pay for the fixed cost of having a refinery. The whole system needs to work together, of course. If only airplanes get off, the difference is merely insignificant. However, if cars and airplanes both get off using oil, suddenly the other uses of oil become unfeasible.

by bluGill

8/23/2026 at 9:57:26 PM

Are there really discarded parts? Usually when people talk about discarded parts, what they really mean is those not used in the first process. The article says "parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste", but just a quick glance seems to show that there are other products that uses those parts of the crop, like biodegradable packaging and animal feed.

Turning it into fuel and burning it would compete with the other uses for those 30%.

by belorn

8/23/2026 at 5:02:41 PM

> it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact.

In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel.

But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel. [0]

Coconuts could be a breakthrough!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel

by 317070

8/23/2026 at 7:08:42 PM

Just use any carbon monoxide source (e.g., pyrolysis of pretty much anything that'd release carbon dioxide when burned works, followed by some cleaning to get rid of some problematic catalyst poisons (notably sulfur compounds)), add hydrogen, and do Fischer-Tropsch. You get your high quality diesel fuel, often higher quality than what you can easily get from crude oil, btw.

If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.

You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.

Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.

Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...

by namibj

8/23/2026 at 5:20:11 PM

I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet. Not just for the carbon impact, but also for the diversity of our species and cultures.

Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?

Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.

by Saline9515

8/24/2026 at 3:18:45 PM

No, we will not get to a post oil society by self flagellating like Europe, but by making sustainable options so cheap and plentiful that they displace unsustainable options. (Of course there’s some market intervention and government investment necessary to get there)

One of these days, electricity will be so cheap that we can carbon capture our way back to 0C net warming and fuel flights for every Indian and Chinese with fuel made from CO2. The developing world will accept nothing less than the abundance route to decarbonization.

by rangestransform

8/23/2026 at 5:35:27 PM

> I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet.

Me neither, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating possible breakthroughs in decarbonisation.

by 317070

8/23/2026 at 6:34:37 PM

Why not stop other Europeans from going as well?

by Larrikin

8/23/2026 at 8:18:54 PM

They live closer by? So less miles travelled, and in many cases travelled by train? Depending on how you generate electricity that works out quite differently.

Went to Venice by night train 15 years ago, would definitely recommend.

Conversely, however, perhaps we should question Europeans massively going to Phuket.

by ArnoVW

8/23/2026 at 5:55:59 PM

> Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane

Who are you to dictate where Chinese and Indians can and cannot visit or enjoy delicious watermelons?

If someone wants to eat a watermelon like a dirty slave that is their business and you are not going to deny them that right. This is pure insanity.

China and India are the biggest domestic aircraft markets in the world. The manufacturers literally cannot keep up with the demand. If trains were more effective they would have built them already. If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.

I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses, it would take a year to respond to them all.

Air travel is not going anywhere and we are not setting society back 100 years on account of dubious climate histrionics.

Want to save the environment?

Ditch smartphones (future e-waste) and all their useless apps (and resource-sucking infra) we could all live without tomorrow.

Turns out we were as effective in moving goods and services and leisure travel in 2008 as we are today.

We just couldn't post to social media about how uncomfortable the airplane seat was and how the onboard Wi-Fi sucked.

by pudgywalsh

8/23/2026 at 6:52:04 PM

> If trains were more effective

Well they're more convenient by virtue of being faster. The well off will inevitably pay for convenience if allowed.

> If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.

The only thing California stands as an example of in that regard is political dysfunction. A hypothetical benevolent dictator could have built out high speed rail there on time and on budget.

> I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses

Has it not occurred to you that maybe that's a red flag that perhaps your own views or emotional state are a bit off?

> on account of dubious climate histrionics.

An empty dismissal of a vague and poorly defined (on your part) concept. How about engaging with a real position instead of name calling a straw man?

> Ditch smartphones (future e-waste)

And what do you suppose the combined total environmental impact is for those globally compared to other categories?

by fc417fc802

8/23/2026 at 9:57:26 PM

You’ve got the answer with CAHSR. The only form of government that can build high-speed rail well is one like the CPC: a dictatorship which doesn’t need the consent of the governed. If we put them in charge of CAHSR they would have the job done in a couple years, but we would have to allow them to nationalize every single property in their way, by force if necessary, and cities, towns, unions, etc. would have no right to negotiate with them on any matter. All the problems they’ve had IRL are a result of them not being able to do whatever they want.

Honestly I respect China a lot and it’s hard not to respect them when it comes to getting infra projects done, be it roads, trains, or whatever. But it’s not a system that has any overlap with the rights in our Constitution. Even Europeans expect more rights from their governments.

by xp84

8/23/2026 at 10:39:34 PM

How US builds new highways in this situations, which are not different from rail in context of land use

by andriy_koval

8/24/2026 at 12:34:18 AM

The US rarely builds new highways anymore though. They expand existing ones a lot, but it is rarely a new build. Where they are built, it's on the edge of town where the entire farm was sold to a developer who specifically reserves some of it because the developers are well aware that people will not buy it in their new subdivision unless there's good roads to get into it.

by bluGill

8/23/2026 at 11:17:59 PM

Billionaires tried to build a new city with California Forever but got shot down. It's politically dysfunctional to the max!

by fragmede

8/23/2026 at 5:05:42 PM

How many coconuts are on one tree and how many tons of coconuts would be needed to replace kerosene globally?

I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible.

BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well.

Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less.

I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation.

Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…

by sixtyj

8/23/2026 at 5:46:58 PM

Vaclav Smil so wildly mispredicted the trajectory of renewables that his worldview should be taken with heavy skepticism.

by pfdietz

8/23/2026 at 7:43:39 PM

That's true of basically all economists' predictions of technology. But he does a lot more than state predictions, his numbers and breakdowns and decompositioba are valuable in themselves.

by chermi

8/23/2026 at 5:10:18 PM

The best solution to flying and long distance travel is to reduce it as much as possible. This means no more travelling for hedonistic (touristic) purposes.

I.e. measures like massive taxation (also for private jets of course).

by steve1977

8/23/2026 at 6:33:22 PM

I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement.

As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?

by openasocket

8/23/2026 at 7:31:59 PM

Oh we can and should absolutely do both. Travel and tourism has other downsides which make it worth reducing it, like the fast spread of diseases for example.

by steve1977

8/23/2026 at 7:34:00 PM

The difference between removing plastic straws and reducing air travel is that reducing air travel would have an impact.

by leni536

8/23/2026 at 8:58:50 PM

Sure, but as I said in my second example, forcing oil and natural gas companies to prevent methane leaks would have much more of an impact than reducing air travel, and requires no sacrifice for the average person. When considering which policies to advance, we should look at both the potential impact AND the democratic support for it.

Climate change deniers and polluters want to paint the environmental movement as a bunch of neo-Puritans that deride anything that isn’t the bare minimum of subsistence as immoral. And I worry they’ve done this for so long that some supporters of the environment are starting to believe the lie.

by openasocket

8/23/2026 at 10:05:26 PM

If people like Steve are advocating for such insanely unpopular policies as ending all travel (or is it just that you need to prove to the government that you have a valid reason for a travel permit?) I don’t think they’re concerned with the ideas’ democratic prospects at all.

Seems like he’s looking forward to a dictatorship that will just tell us all what we’re allowed to do, without the burdensome need for our dumb pleb voices to be heard. Maybe they could call the folks who enforce the policy the “Klimate Governing Board.”

by xp84

8/23/2026 at 10:42:51 PM

The neo Calvinism runs deep. People think fixing problems involves austerity and take aways for the unelect.

It's a real problem because it has really bad political optics. And results in obsessing about 'fixing' inconsequential things or solutions that make things worse.

by Gibbon1

8/23/2026 at 10:01:09 PM

Degrowth, and “everyone should just do without X” is such an easy solution. Too bad for you we don’t live in a political system where you guys can pass such unpopular policy and force the majority (who wants improving living standards) to just ‘own nothing and be happy,’ trading all the things they like for promises that the climate will be fixed.

And other countries will also choose to keep their privileges and climate change will not be reduced anyway.

by xp84

8/23/2026 at 5:21:50 PM

So no tourist travel for the poor or middle class, just the elite rich? And no tourist income for the poor and middle class? This is a policy only the top .1% will enjoy.

by WillPostForFood

8/23/2026 at 5:26:22 PM

But the purpose of money is exactly to be a currency to be spent on choices. And, I must unfortunately repeat myself with regards to what I wrote nearby, externalities can be charged as a cost - and it is probably the way to handle it. "You pollute, you pay" - then, you acquire money to invest it, especially in activities with downsides.

by mdp2021

8/23/2026 at 7:00:22 PM

I don't support the idea as described, but playing devil's advocate presumably it would shift demand towards train and boat travel. That would push tourism closer to home and largely eliminate visiting other continents for those who couldn't either afford the air travel tax or to take several months off of work if going by boat. But it wouldn't eliminate tourism by any means. Even the poor could still easily travel the better part of a given continent.

by fc417fc802

8/23/2026 at 10:07:22 PM

Exactly. The travel permits will still be easy to get for the elites and their friends. In fact I bet even the climate change academics, and their friends and anyone they went to school with, will be able to get their travel permits just fine. You and me though? F your family, you’ll never see them again. The climate simply can’t spare it.

These people are so out of touch it’s bananas.

by xp84

8/23/2026 at 5:37:00 PM

I didn't say tax everyone the same amount. Make it hurt. Tax the elite a million per flight.

And yes, no tourist income. It's dirty money.

by steve1977

8/23/2026 at 8:17:42 PM

Do you really think that traveling somewhere to experience a natural or historical or cultural landmark is intrinsically immoral? Do you think less of me for traveling to South Africa to go on a Safari? For visiting the Louvre? Why?

by openasocket

8/23/2026 at 5:18:27 PM

Electrified high speed rail solves this, with flying reserved for transoceanic needs. Private jets should not exist outside of scientific, medical, or other non luxury/personal use cases. Travel and tourism will always be with us, and should be imho. Carbon taxes, laws, whatever is needed to accomplish it.

by toomuchtodo

8/23/2026 at 5:22:21 PM

> should not exist outside of

Externalities can be made to bear a cost.

by mdp2021

8/23/2026 at 5:23:13 PM

Currently, there is no effective way to put carbon back in the ground, and therefore no way to make the externality bear the cost. This is an excuse to justify high emission, low efficiency use cases. It’s capitalism cope meets buying a Catholic indulgence. “I am wealthy and deserve this and so I will pay a token amount that is meaningless to continue to justify this excessive, unnecessary consumption.”

If the use case does not require fossil fuels, certainly, carry on. Same if your biofuel isn’t going to cause the Amazon to be clear cut and can be economically produced at scale. But until then, have to aggressively impair the consumption of fossil fuels, because it’s only going to keep getting hotter, year after year, long after we reach net zero (which is still a decade or two away). Maybe one day we’ll have a mechanism to sequester carbon, and enough low carbon energy to suck all of the CO2 emitted since the industrial revolution started out of the atmosphere for long term, stable storage to mitigate climate change. But not today, and therefore, these are the facts that must drive policy until the facts change.

Climeworks' capture fails to cover its own emissions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44017317 - May 2025

> Al Gore gave a TED talk in 2023 where he discussed the carbon capture and disposal industry and specifically mentioned Climeworks. He made fun of the company, calling the capture industry nothing more than a cover for oil and gas companies to keep their businesses afloat.

Even if you don’t like Al Gore, the math remains the math.

by toomuchtodo

8/23/2026 at 5:43:20 PM

> there is no effective way to put carbon back in the ground, and therefore no way to make the externality bear the cost

The cost applied to externalities can be spent to amend the specific damage, which is sometimes impossible, or can be commensurate to the estimate damage in order to create different benefit.

> indulgence

I concour with the analysis, but not necessarily with the moral evaluation. I have already mentioned nearby that money is a token to be spent on freedom in a framework of choice in allocation: Economics, science of Optimization, is the science of the management of Scarcity to some authors - and that scarcity is structural, existential (as evident in the case of Time). The purpose of resources is to invest them according to preference - some choices more loaded, but the computation compares the values of said "load" with the "preference" and the "resource (money etc.)".

The actual rebuttal: if you had to go "black vs white" in preferences, vs the continuous framework I proposed, than heating for example would be a problem - an externality bearing investment that we could not compensate with a reversal of the damage. But should we do without heating? You yourself defend touristic travel. Where can we put a threshold? At that point, it is best to quantify damages and charge the externalities.

by mdp2021

8/23/2026 at 5:45:09 PM

Mental model:

Electricity->Batteries, renewables, geothermal, hydro, transmission, cross country interconnectors

HVAC->Heat pumps, low carbon district heating, insulation, sand heat batteries

Mobility->Electric vehicles, bikes, scooters, light rail, heavy duty electric vehicles

Marine traffic->Low carbon produced methanol or ammonia

For air travel that must remain and cannot be replaced with an electrified or low carbon alternative (until low carbon solutions exist), the component that must remain be made as efficient as possible. Regardless of wealth, you fly commercial, just like everyone takes the subway, regardless of wealth or status, in cities with high quality mass transit. Your need is met, just within our collective societal tolerance for the harm incurred for the travel desired (Point A->B).

We may disagree, and that’s fine. I believe the climate data is clear as an input to this decisioning. Whether you’re wealthy should not be a factor in outsized carbon emissions (private jet travel, specifically) simply because the socioeconomic system is defective on this. I assume the appetite for this goes up as climate change consequences become more dire, compelling more appetite for extreme actions to course correct.

by toomuchtodo

8/23/2026 at 7:04:19 PM

Just because there are currently (economically motivated) shams doesn't mean the concept is impossible or the tech not understood. As I see it the primary issue is cost. There's the price tag put forward by the PR shams and then there's the real price tag which at present remains entirely unpalatable.

There's nothing except the political preventing the governments of the world imposing the unpalatable price on the market and policing the capture operations for net effectiveness.

by fc417fc802

8/23/2026 at 5:46:08 PM

> Electrified high speed rail solves this

Curious -- what speed are you assuming for such a high speed rail?

by runako

8/23/2026 at 5:49:16 PM

The last high speed rail I was on was Fuxing Hao series in China, ~200mph. If we can go faster, go faster. Shanghai Maglev can do ~260mph. Japan’s Shinkansen tops out at ~199mph, a bit higher than the TGV in France (~186mph during commercial operations, but has achieved speed records as high as ~360mph).

Within the scope of land travel, it’s clear it can be built. If it isn’t built, of course, that’s a choice. But it’s a lie to say it cannot be done.

by toomuchtodo

8/23/2026 at 7:08:26 PM

Obviously a choice, but also at 200mph it's obviously a vastly slower experience in a lot of way for many of the most-trafficked US domestic routes.

Even at 300mph, which IIRC is much faster than normal operations on existing system, transcontinental travel becomes "too slow." The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.

Effectively would split the continent in a way that it hasn't been for generations. Rountes like NYC<->Chicago would get annoyingly slower, but long routes like DC<->Seattle would become an "almost never" trip by train @ 200mph (even assuming direct, as-the-crow-flies). Practically, you're talking "east coast to Asia" durations to cross the continent. Non-starter.

Disclaimer: I love trains. I want high speed trains deployed widely in the US.

by runako

8/23/2026 at 10:10:34 PM

First, 300 mph (480 kmh) is not on the cards. It's feasible technically but the energy usage rises exponentially, so it's quickly less attractive. (Obviously planes are even more inefficient for exactly the same reason, but wind resistance is at least reduced at altitude.) This is why speeds tend to top out at around 300 kmh, with only a very few prestige services (in China mainly) going marginally faster.

The good news is that 300 kmh is really fast, and rail is usually much more time-efficient at the endpoints (i.e. stations are more central and there's less waiting). In China, Shanghai-Beijing (approximately LA to San Francisco) is now possible in 4h30. Given the endpoint advantage, that is more than competitive with plane travel, and much more pleasant.

As of this year, China also has a high-speed capsule sleeper that gets you from Beijing to Guangzhou (CORRECTION: 1875 km) in 12 hours at an average speed of 180 kmh. It's still night travel, not every American would be interested. But it shows what's possible.

by bluebarbet

8/23/2026 at 10:43:02 PM

> Beijing to Guangzhou (same as NY to LA!) in 12 hours at an average speed of 180 kmh

I don't understand. It looks like the Chinese route is ~1200 miles and the US route is about 2500 miles. At the same 180kmh, wouldn't that imply a full 24 hours on a train?

re: LA-SF, I do think HSR could make a big dent on each side of the continent. But the reality is Americans are accustomed to crossing the entire continent quickly, and HSR is not yet a substitute for that.

by runako

8/23/2026 at 11:03:14 PM

You're right, it's nothing like LA-NYC - corrected.

(Tangential - the source of my faulty research was Claude Haiku 4.5, which I will quote verbatim: "Two major US cities separated by approximately 2230 km are New York City, New York and Los Angeles, California." I know that figure is too low but believed it anyway. I've just asked for better figures and it's completely unable to answer accurately. Well well.)

The other figures were from memory and pretty correct.

by bluebarbet

8/23/2026 at 7:20:42 PM

> The opposition would be insurmountable to making it take 12+ hours to travel from NYC to LA, for example.

It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours. Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.

Compared to that an overnight train with a bed sounds delightful. People could do almost-day-trips, coast-to-coast, with no ill effects. Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.

by triceratops

8/23/2026 at 10:36:15 PM

> It already takes 6 hours to fly. Add in security, checked bags, getting to and from the airport and it's close to 10 hours.

10 hours is still significantly faster than a hypothetical HSR. Remember that it would also have to stop along the way. Secon, not everyone lives/is traveling to a place that is near a hypothetical train station; you have to keep in mind that American cities tend toward sprawl. HSR leaving from e.g. downtown LA would still be less convenient for e.g. the folks who live in the Valley. It's definitely not a 10-hour excursion for many people to transit the country (source: I did this for years for work).

> Also you waste a day or ruin a night's sleep on the redeye.

Highly dependent on the individual & service class. But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.

> Leave LA tonight, shop/sightsee/eat all day in NYC, take in a show, hop on the late train back to LA the following day. This is pretty near impossible today unless you have a private jet.

You're going to get a lot of pushback from people who have been to weddings on the other side of the continent, since they will have done this. Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.

by runako

8/23/2026 at 11:29:45 PM

> Remember that it would also have to stop along the way

Why?

> Highly dependent on the individual & service class.

There are flights that offer lie-flat seats for most of the passengers on board? I have to confess I haven't ever seen any domestic flights in North America that have lie-flat seats. But maybe I'm just poor.

> But the point of this is you're actually physically there in less time.

And more tired when you get there. I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.

> Most of them do not have private jets, it's just a common thing Americans do.

I'm sure there are individuals who do the redeye consecutive nights. I'm pointing out that doing it instead on a train, sleeping in a bed, will leave you way more well-rested. You might fly out Friday night and return Sunday morning. But you're going to need all of Sunday to recover from those flights.

by triceratops

8/24/2026 at 12:41:26 AM

A large advantage of the train is all the places on the way. I don't actually want to get from New York to Los Angeles. However, I live in the middle of the country between the two cities and by stopping near me, I could get on that train and I could travel, probably not to either New York or LA, but to some other city also in the middle of the country.

Night trains sound like a good thing, but in reality they're not. They work well only in the cases where a city is just far enough that it's an overnight trip, but not much more. Which is to say you get on the train, you brush your teeth, you go to sleep, you wake up in the morning, and you have just enough time to get practice before you get off the train. If your train instead arrives at 4 a.m., that's way too early and so you're gonna be sleeping on the train or they're gonna have to wake you up early in the morning. The other one is particularly a great option. The other way is even worse though if you're on the train go to sleep and you get wake up in the morning and there's still several more hours to do while you're sitting on a train doing basically nothing - except thinking the whole time, you know what? I could have just flown. This would have been an hour to the airport, another hour in line, three hours of flight, and they'd be there. And then they could sleep in a hotel, the cheapest economy hotel room is still much larger than the best luxury train sleeper car.

by bluGill

8/24/2026 at 12:53:44 AM

> Why?

Because (ignoring the middle of the continent for a moment) "LA" is actually a very large area where having a single stop erases many of the advantages cited for trains. LA does not really have the sort of city center of most train-centric cities, and LA has poor public transit. On the other end, "NYC" has the same property, mostly because you would want to include people from other parts of the densely-populated region around NYC and not just make everyone schlep into Manhattan.

The Shanghai<->Beijing HSR has 24 stops over 819 miles, for example. Similarly, it would only make sense for a US HSR to stop in e.g. Dallas or Chicago or other cities in between.

> I'd rather sleep during my travel and enjoy the destination than waste time recovering in my hotel room. The alternative is to waste your day flying out so you don't lose sleep.

Yeah, like I said individual preference. I don't normally want to do back-to-back redeye flights, but I have done it and am glad it was an option.

by runako

8/24/2026 at 2:26:04 PM

If we're talking about a replacement or alternative for flying between NY and LA, a non-stop train makes perfect sense. Planes don't stop. A high-speed train can carry more passengers than a 737.

by triceratops

8/24/2026 at 4:42:40 PM

This would make sense if the US only had two major coastal cities, but that's not the case.

From another of my comments:

A realistic HSR network in the US will also involve changing trains in the midwest because there are too many pairs of big cities involved. Miami<->SF, Atlanta<->LA, DC<->SF, Philadelphia<->Phoenix, etc.

by runako

8/23/2026 at 10:37:34 PM

You still need all those things for a high speed train. The only reason it’s a little less today is that almost nobody takes passenger rail.

Keep in mind these old downtown stations built in 1900 won’t be able to handle the kind of passenger counts that would “need” to be shifted from the airports, so don’t delude yourself into thinking you wouldn’t need big train stations built in the outskirts, crowded and irritating to get to, like we have with modern airports.

Your day trip thing sounds even more confusing. That itinerary that’s “near impossible” with fast flight becomes more impossible with trains that take 2-3x longer. Also, sleeper train tickets are incredibly expensive compared to coach, because of how much space they take up and the cost of upkeep for these little suites. They’re always going to be expensive, like the redeye flight on a lie-flat bed. So again, no different than what we have today, just much, much slower and less accessible to the masses.

by xp84

8/24/2026 at 12:44:58 AM

But your high-speed train enables a lot of things that are not really feasible to do on an airplane. speed train enables a lot of things that are not really feasible to do on an airplane. You should be thinking about a train for things where I could drive my own car but it'd be a little bit annoying to spend an hour on the road.

I happened to be in Des Moines a few years ago and waiting for my airplane an announcement came on that the plane to Chicago was delayed. And I overheard someone near me say, why would you fly to Chicago? You can just drive. Realistically, if Chicago is your destination from Des Moines, depending on where you go, it is quite possible that you can drive your car and get there faster than flying. However, a high-speed train could likely get you there faster than the airplane. Chicago was of course a large city. There's a very big difference between I want to go into the loop versus my destination is an outer suburb. I would expect your high speed train makes two or even three stops in the city of Chicago plus, some stops in other cities that happen to be along the way.

by bluGill

8/24/2026 at 1:05:45 AM

Exactly all of this. HSR in the US makes a lot more sense if you look at it as a regional phenomenon. Atlanta<->Miami, DC<->NYC, NYC<->Chicago, Houston<->Dallas, Chicago<->Nashville. Those all fit the prescription of being around the same time as driving.

Miami<->Seattle is not going to fit neatly in HSR. The distance is too great. A realistic HSR network in the US will also involve changing trains in the midwest because there are too many pairs of big cities involved. Miami<->SF, Atlanta<->LA, DC<->SF, Philadelphia<->Phoenix, etc.

The other hindrance for HSR in the US is our family sizes. "It's about the same time to drive" is a solid argument for 1 traveler, it's less so for 4 travelers with 4 HSR tickets. Many people will keep driving shorter distances for this reason alone.

by runako

8/24/2026 at 1:13:16 AM

I have regularly taken two-day trips in the US because the cost of an airplane for 5 is much more than the cost of my car even including hotel rooms. Lately I've been taking Amtrak, which is a little bit cheaper, but it's still annoying enough that I would only do it because I hate driving.

It also helps the economics to realize that there are very few places in the US that anyone would go that not having a personal car is a reasonable thing and so you have to have the cost of a rental car to anything other than grabbing your own.

by bluGill

8/23/2026 at 11:35:14 PM

> That itinerary that’s “near impossible” with fast flight becomes more impossible with trains that take 2-3x longer.

No because you can actually sleep on the train and be well-rested. Even non sleeper seats are wider and can recline better on a train.

On planes your sleeping neighbor drools on your shoulder and your seat reclines 5 degrees if you're lucky. Sure technically you could take a redeye two nights in a row. If you don't mind being a zombie for the next 2 days.

by triceratops

8/23/2026 at 10:13:07 PM

What’s creepy is how little the people arguing for this kind of thing seem to care that the policy would be hated by a majority, and experienced as cruel oppression. They just say “this is the right thing to do.” Climate/degrowth people seem to be the most anti-democratic politically. It seems they NEED to install a monarchy to get their way, because any system of government that allows the people to have any say will never accept the massive sacrifices that they religiously believe are necessary.

by xp84

8/23/2026 at 7:13:42 PM

Is ~400 million to ~4 billions excess deaths over the next ~50 years worth it? How many excess deaths is it worth? Everything is about trade offs. How much mortgaging of the future with are we comfortable with for today’s luxuries? Because this is a debt that will need to be paid back, potentially by someone not even yet born, through no fault of their own.

At least the future can default on sovereign debt, it cannot default on the energy and resources required to repair physical systems required for survival, that debt is the ultimate recourse debt. There is nowhere to run from it.

https://climatechangetracker.org/climate-change-progress/cur...

https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... (page 32 risk impact matrix)

(day job is risk assessment and management, and the lens through which I see and model this entire system)

by toomuchtodo

8/23/2026 at 8:56:45 PM

I hear what you're saying, but it is also true that re-splitting the population would probably be more difficult politically than e.g. switching off all the fossil fuel generation plants east of the Mississippi or gently transitioning the US fleet to all-EV. As you said, everything is tradeoffs.

Which sucks, because I really would go for a US high-speed rail network.

by runako

8/23/2026 at 5:01:33 PM

Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?

It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.

by qeternity

8/23/2026 at 5:26:53 PM

"It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population)."

Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.

Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.

by giantg2

8/24/2026 at 12:50:23 AM

What do you mean by farmers? Of the rich farmers, yes, most do have a second job, but the farming does pay most of their income. It's not just a hobby. The second job is something that they can do in between the farm work. The other thing about farming is it's very much investment heavy. And so for a young farmer just getting started out, you're going to be working at farming and all of your income is going right back to paying things off. And so you're going to need a second job to put the food on the table for a few years. After 10 years, because of inflation, you would hope that your income has gone up while the payment you're making on existing land is kept the same, and so you don't have some left over, and so you can start only being a farmer. After, say, 30 years, most of your land is now paid off, and now you can take all that money that was going into paying off millions of farmlands, and you're making enough income that you could pay off of millions of dollars a loan, and you have no loans, and you are very well off. Of course after 30 years you're also getting close to retirement age and you're probably thinking well I'm gonna sell that farm off and now you have a lot of money that you can put into regular retirement acounts and enjoy a really nice retirement. But that means you're not a farmer and so the farmers themselves really have to live like the poor but they're on track to be very wealthy.

by bluGill

8/23/2026 at 7:02:08 PM

The economic landscape of farming is very bimodal. “Most farmers” (by headcount) are subsistence farmers who live in impoverished countries and don’t produce very much food because they are feeding themselves and their immediate community.

The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.

by kube-system

8/23/2026 at 5:29:16 PM

> Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?

Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?

Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.

by pudgywalsh

8/23/2026 at 5:21:51 PM

That is both true and not quite true at the same time. The notion of the Yeoman farm family supporting itself off its land is mostly a myth.

Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.

by Spooky23

8/23/2026 at 4:55:29 PM

All subsidies are wealth transfers. That's the whole point- to incentivize something that wouldn't otherwise happen at a scale the government deems to be of benefit or necessary.

Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification.

The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on.

I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive.

The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.

by zdragnar

8/23/2026 at 5:25:17 PM

A lot of food cost is due to food waste and convenience (refrigerated shipping, out of season crops, etc). There's already a lot food waste due to logistics and consumer preference.

by giantg2

8/23/2026 at 4:49:44 PM

Middle of the road, comparable to Sunflower oil. But they want to utilize waste products and a low energy conversion process.

by zweifuss

8/23/2026 at 4:56:40 PM

Is Jet Fuel really the best use of coconut oil? I'd imagine it's far better as a lubricant or ingredient in things more directly adjacent to human rather than mechanical use.

by mjevans

8/24/2026 at 3:40:53 AM

I think with waste products there is more of a last-mile (first-mile?) collection issue. Regardless we're definitely seeing some processed bio-oil waste coming in to the diesel lab for analysis in the recent year or two.

Looks to me like someone who is prospering based on coconut plantations would be the beneficiary from tapping a new market from a jet fuel process, and it probably could be made into a cleaner fuel than the waste-based bio-fuel.

by fuzzfactor

8/23/2026 at 5:22:35 PM

"It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities"

I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.

by giantg2

8/23/2026 at 4:59:50 PM

Are the people against bioengineered produce also be against us working towards super efficient coconuts or some other plant we designed to fill the same role?

by mortoc

8/24/2026 at 1:19:24 AM

> The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago

A few years ago? Corn ethanol subsidies have been a thing for my entire life.

It's a net-negative fuel. Costs more fuel to produce than it provides. It's literally just a way to waste water, farmland, huge quantities of diesel (burned by engines exempt from any sort of emissions), labor, etc.

What changed is that ethanol has been forced by regulations into more and more use over time. That has driven up demand for corn, and one of the worse side effects is that a major food staple for Mexico has gone up dramatically in price.

> effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities,

If you think that's bad, stop and think for a moment about what purpose the US military serves for rural America, both directly through personnel but also indirectly through all the incredibly wasteful equipment, service, and supply contracts.

The US military's primary reason for existence is force projection, but its secondary is keeping rural American's uneployment from skyrocketing.

by KennyBlanken

8/23/2026 at 9:51:16 PM

They literally grow on trees

by Razengan

8/23/2026 at 9:42:27 PM

Same rural communities raise pitchforks upon mention of any other demographic receiving wealth transfers.

by kylehotchkiss

8/23/2026 at 9:39:48 PM

Just through this out again, biofuels are dumb. Per acre a solar farm produces 30 times the energy per year as corn without most of the environmental concerns that growing corn has.

You don't have pesticide or fertilizer runoff from solar farms. You don't plow the soil resulting in soil loss.

Biofuels, dumb.

by Gibbon1

8/23/2026 at 5:50:26 PM

You want a fuel that's chemically identical to current jet fuel, not one burdened with extra oxygen. Yes, this would require more energy, but it would be used more effectively in jets.

A drop-in compatible jet fuel can be made by hydrodeoxygenation of biomass, using Virent's process. The waste cellulose in current US waste streams would be more than enough to displace all current US jet fuel consumption. An extra source of hydrogen would be needed to do this, but hydrogen can be made renewably (and, indeed, that's a good way to provide dispatchable demand to help deal with renewable intermittency, and will have to be done anyway to displace the use of natural gas to make hydrogen.)

by pfdietz

8/23/2026 at 7:12:04 PM

I agree, I wish more work was being done on building a hydrogen economy. Hydrogen can be generated sustainably, is a great way to store excess energy from renewable sources, can be transported, and as a bonus can be mixed with hydrocarbon fuels to be used directly as a heating source.

As an example, a house in NH can generate a lot of excess solar power in the summer months when it uses hardly any electricity. If all that energy could be stored as hydrogen, in the winter (when solar power is less due to the far northern latitude and snow covering the panels) it could draw down on the hydrogen to generate electricity and also use it for a backup heat fuel.

by spaceywilly

8/23/2026 at 8:32:34 PM

I'm in Northern Europe and am in that situation. I have an electric heat pump, so would need around 3 MWh over the winter period. Apparently that would need a tank around 4m3 at 700 bar (typical pressure of hydrogen vehicle tanks). Plus the fuel cell actually generate heat, so that could be used for heating too. Doesn't seem terribly unrealistic.

by fy20

8/23/2026 at 10:06:40 PM

I'm skeptical of any application for hydrogen where electricity could be used directly. In your case, I think hydrogen would better be used in a more centralized power plant as a backup for renewable sources (perhaps with the waste heat then used for district heating), and the power used to drive your heat pump.

by pfdietz

8/23/2026 at 10:31:04 PM

The issue is long term, high capacity storage. To store enough energy to last an entire winter using batteries just isn’t practical today. I think you’d need around 100 power walls at today’s capacity to make a house completely off grid, meaning you store excess solar from the summer and draw it down in the winter. With hydrogen stored in pressurized tanks, a 20 m3 tank could be enough to last the whole winter, which seems much more practical than 100 powerwalls.

I think this could be a solution if you wanted a fully off grid, solar powered house, or perhaps if we collectively decide to generate more electricity at home and not rely so much on the grid.

by spaceywilly

8/24/2026 at 2:04:01 AM

Storing hydrogen in big underground salt caverns at reasonable pressures and converting it back into electricity in a big power plant is probably more efficient and safer than storing it in millions of tanks in cellars at 700 bar and using small fuel cells to turn it back into electricity.

by adrianN

8/23/2026 at 11:31:00 PM

Oh sure, batteries are completely inappropriate for seasonal storage. But for a home I think a synthetic liquid fuel would be better than hydrogen. Seasonal storage at grid scale is rather different; there I suspect thermal storage will win, if it is brutally cost optimized (so-called sand batteries don't qualify; their capex is too high.) Unfortunately thermal seasonal storage for an individual home isn't very practical; it could be for a village.

by pfdietz

8/24/2026 at 5:07:46 AM

Part time coconut farmer here.

Adding some numbers for a base line. (Note all of these numbers are almost the upper limit of a well managed farm with very good cultivars)

Best yielding palms yield ~300 nuts per pals at 70 palms/acre.

at 750g a dehusked nut with 20% oil yield

You get ~2.3 tonnes oil/acre.

For reference an a321neo burns around 2,300 kg of fuel per hour when cruising

by parimm

8/24/2026 at 5:45:13 AM

Top comment is a chemist explaining aromatics and seal compatibility. Fourth comment starts with "part time coconut farmer here".

I <3 you HN, never change.

by jeffrallen

8/24/2026 at 1:53:32 AM

Around one million coconuts required to fly from Tokyo to Los Angeles.

Around 40 million flights per year.

40 trillion coconuts required for all flights, or 1000x current production.

To scale up coconut production we need 12 billion hectares, or 80% of the Earth's surface for coconut trees.

We need 100k cubic km of water per year, or twice the renewable fresh water on this planet.

Ok cool. We will need to terraform Mars before we can fly by coconut.

Finally I understand the mad billionaire's plan.

by chr15m

8/24/2026 at 11:41:57 AM

Hey Alexa, change all paperclip production to coconut production.

by euroderf

8/24/2026 at 5:46:49 AM

The O in "occupy mars" is actually a coconut.

by jeffrallen

8/24/2026 at 3:01:05 AM

We shouldn't be burning agricultural products for fuels. We should be electrifying and using synthetic fuels made from CO2 and renewable energy where we can't.

by breakyerself

8/24/2026 at 4:28:18 PM

> using synthetic fuels made from CO2 and renewable energy where we can't.

Guess what plants are made of.

by jjk166

8/23/2026 at 7:14:53 PM

If it burns more fuel, how is it "about as efficient"? That doesn't seem to make much sense to me.

> New research found that aviation biofuel made from coconut oil can power a small jet engine about as efficiently as traditional jet fuel, with lower unburned hydrocarbon emissions, though the blends burn more fuel and emit slightly more carbon monoxide.

by splittydev

8/23/2026 at 4:27:24 PM

blended with standard jet fuel, in a small-scale micro jet engine

by SoftTalker

8/23/2026 at 4:39:01 PM

I think this is awesome. Anything we can do to get away from burning fossil fuel is a win in my book. I don’t know about this particular effort, but it seems to me that aviation could really need some big wins in this direction. Last I looked we still run smaller planes on leaded fuel. Crazy.

by wronex

8/23/2026 at 4:49:09 PM

This isn’t awesome, it doesn’t work at scale and it only lets idiots ignore what should be done: leave fossil fuels in the ground, and only then do what we can with the energy that’s still available. Aviation is mostly incompatible with a sane global environmental policy.

by abyssin

8/24/2026 at 12:53:22 AM

Very few people are willing to accept a, "sane global environmental policy" if it means changing their lifestyle. Thus, anything that allows people to keep (or better yet, improve) their current lifestyle while making the environment sane, that is the one we need to be searching for.

by bluGill

8/23/2026 at 4:55:28 PM

Leaded is slowly going away, but regulation means these changes take many, many years and dollars to implement and test.

It will be similar (worse?) implementing a new type of fuel for commercial jets, especially when it comes to wide adoption across a majority of countries around the world. Basically you need something which is as least as reliable, clean (I.e., won’t clog/solidify), non corrosive, etc. and remain that way after being mixed with standard jet fuel.

I too want to see alternatives but expect to see more failures than success at this stage.

by tass

8/23/2026 at 5:22:32 PM

Replacing fossil fuel with biofuel only works if we starve half the planet and use their food for fuel.

by padjo

8/23/2026 at 4:34:07 PM

How is the viscosity at -60?

by yread

8/23/2026 at 7:41:35 PM

But why? I don't know of a case where biofuels aren't a disaster against the stated environmental purpose. Bailouts for farmers? Sure. A good way to generate green energy? I think engineered algae comes kind of close to making sense as an oil source, but as a fuel would still seem silly to me. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

by chermi

8/23/2026 at 9:21:34 PM

So we can't have the dark chocolate Bounty bar anymore but we can use coconuts to fuel planes?

This isn't the future I want.

by dofm

8/24/2026 at 1:10:25 AM

They've already got coconut content down to 20% but I'm sure the food scientists are working on the next iteration; A new low calorie environmentally friendly 'fun size', '3-for-1' bounty containing bleached cellulose flakes, synthetic coconut flavor and hydrogenated seed oil.

by brikym

8/24/2026 at 12:06:04 PM

I will not be trying that though. Dark chocolate or bust.

In the post-apocalyptic future I will be the guy roaming the wastelands, armed to the teeth, seeking out rumoured stashes of Jamesons Raspberry Ruffles and those Roobar things.

by dofm

8/23/2026 at 9:56:51 PM

50 MTons of coconut oil are produced per year (approximately). Is this a significant amount, compared to oil derived from crude (where gas currently comes from).

by JoeAltmaier

8/24/2026 at 1:55:49 AM

No.

Around 3.5 million tonnes of coconut oil per year.

Around 4.5 billion tonnes of fossil fuel oil per year.

by chr15m

8/24/2026 at 12:14:23 PM

Thanks - I was using the wrong table, total coconut or something.

by JoeAltmaier

8/23/2026 at 9:56:39 PM

How many coconuts do we need to support current aviation needs? I’m guessing it’s not likely this will work economically?

by andy_ppp

8/24/2026 at 1:56:35 AM

40 trillion coconuts per year.

by chr15m

8/23/2026 at 4:45:49 PM

Long life to coconut revolution, in Bougainville island!

by souenzzo

8/24/2026 at 2:10:21 PM

Using food as fuel is not a good idea.

by jmorenoamor

8/23/2026 at 7:43:47 PM

> This study used oil from material the researchers describe as discarded and non-edible, including the large seeds and leftover flesh, so the fuel draws on parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste.

This statement seems disingenuous. Surely they did not invent a novel way to extract coconut oil as part of this study and not choose to publish it. Surely this is just existing byproduct that already has plenty of commercial use.

If you look at how many coconut plantations you would need to make even a measurable dent in jet fuel demand, this would be an unmitigated environmental disaster.

I want to solve climate change as much as the next guy, but chopping down all our tropical rainforests to make it happen sacrifices exactly what we're trying to save.

by legitster

8/23/2026 at 7:48:00 PM

Yep, we've seen this sobering reality ignored in previously-hyped "biofuel" aviation stories.

Not to mention another glaring omission here: "By adding acetone to a mixture of alcohol and coconut oil"

How much energy is needed to produce those two ingredients, and the things THEY are made from?

If I were a junior-high teacher, I'd probably give this paper a C.

by VerifiedReports

8/23/2026 at 6:42:02 PM

Cue defense industrial base funded influencer campaign to promote the "dangers" of medium chain triglycerides.

by evanjrowley

8/23/2026 at 10:40:15 PM

Sorry, orangutans, rockets go more up

by cwmoore

8/24/2026 at 6:27:16 AM

Where is there an ocean of coconut oil to match the Gharar?

by pseingatl

8/23/2026 at 6:07:47 PM

Will this produce better smells?

by amelius

8/23/2026 at 8:03:15 PM

either wait for bigger batteries, hydrogen or some super efficient material to create the fuselage.

biofuels won't work. they take too much land and are inefficient in terms of producing.

by dzonga

8/23/2026 at 4:34:17 PM

Aviation uses around a million metric tons of jet fuel per day.

If you thought habitat destruction from palm oil was bad, that would be nothing compared to coconut oil making up any significant fraction of jet fuel.

by RcouF1uZ4gsC

8/23/2026 at 4:46:36 PM

The question is which habitat destruction is worse? That which is already happening at scale for oil, versus what would happen if we lean into this in any meaningful way.

I don't think the answer is obvious. And I think many of us are blind or numb to environmental harms of oil outside of carbon exhaust and the occasional spill, simply because we've accepted it as status quo.

by not_a_bot_4sho

8/23/2026 at 7:00:39 PM

An oil well is quite small Area wise compared to the amount of acreage you would need for a coconut plantations to replace the same amount of energy output.

The issue with oil is CO2 and other green house gases and then the occasional oil spill or leak. Land area wise they don’t take up much space

by anfilt

8/23/2026 at 8:30:56 PM

Ah, the modern debacle, shall we choose this kind of shit or that?

by wartywhoa23

8/23/2026 at 6:34:34 PM

we've been working on biofuel to replace fossils forever, hopefully it leads to something if not jet fuel specifically.

by hingedeveloper

8/24/2026 at 4:23:16 AM

Dammit, I like coconut oil.

by cryptonector

8/24/2026 at 1:14:58 AM

please dont use bio fuels that encourage the growing of plants for fuel.

we have a food shortage issue already globally..

waste products, yeah fine. but cutting down large area of forrest/food producing land for the growing of non food plants for fuel is just self destructive corp greed.

by senectus1

8/23/2026 at 5:59:53 PM

So we just cut down some ancient rainforests to grow them right? Works for Palm oil! Goooo Planet!

by teekert

8/23/2026 at 9:01:48 PM

The issue with bio fuel is the following: Due to climate change the overall area for food production in the world is shrinking. Bio fuel is directly competing with food.

The solution: Ditch carbon based fuels as much as possible and replace it with electric transport.

I know that it's currently unviable to use electric aircraft in almost all use cases except short range drones. But then the solution to that problem is to rely less on air travel and transport and use land based alternatives.

This is about vectors and incentives. Investing in bio fuels to get a 100% replacement for fossil fuels is not going to work and it only stalls what actually needs to happen which is a radical transport system change.

by emsign

8/24/2026 at 12:54:21 AM

The world is producing far, far more food than we need, though, so your worry is not realistic.

by bluGill

8/24/2026 at 1:04:57 AM

Wonderful. Now a jet flight can consume enough calories to feed a town for a day.

by brikym

8/24/2026 at 12:15:04 AM

it's the first time I have heard that bulldozing and burning tropical forests to put in palm oil plantations is "efficient" perhaps profitable , but that is generaly a function of subsidies and regulatory entitlement, in this case "green" that somehow overlook the bulldozers and the brown stained rivers from errosion, running all the way out into oceans where the silt smothers more life,the resulting products stamped with an improbable number of eco certifications, little wreaths and such. So after all that green washing success, why not jet fuel! Gold medal in the cynicism games for sure.

by metalman

8/23/2026 at 5:18:07 PM

Maybe those cargo cult guys were onto something

by jameshart

8/23/2026 at 4:25:08 PM

Yeah, but until it matches kerosene in price and availability (how many coconuts per aeronautical mile?) it won't actually be an alternative

by allears

8/23/2026 at 4:29:08 PM

Just intuitively I doubt there's nearly enough coconut oil produced to replace any meaningful amount of jet fuel. I scanned the article and didn't see this addressed, but may have missed it.

Various other bio-fuel and synthesized replacements for petroleum-based jet fuel have been tried and are in development. The aviation industry is very slow to approve and adopt changes.

by SoftTalker

8/23/2026 at 4:44:54 PM

The point isn't to make cheap jet fuel. The point is that to the coconut processor (someone who makes food or whatever) your "coconut tailings" pile is a big liability. The environmentalists could start screeching any day without warning, that's a big risk to your business. Waste that costs you nothing could cost a lot. You might be able to sell it as loam or fertilizer or whatever. But then they'll screech that you need to buy somme compliance solution. Just shipping the damn thing off to the next guy who'll squeeze some jet fuel out of it is real attractive because then the rest of the tailings become his problem. Maybe he's in a better jurisdiction. Maybe it's more inert at that point. In any case it's a liability off your books. The jet fuel just needs to be cheap enough to make this whole process cheaper than whatever way you were dealing with it before. It's like this the world over. Whether you're selling coconut scraps to the people who'll squeeze the oil out of them or strawberry waste to the people who'll make dyes and fragrances it's all the same.

by cucumber3732842

8/23/2026 at 4:28:53 PM

[dead]

by montroser

8/23/2026 at 11:19:31 PM

[dead]

by effnorwood

8/23/2026 at 4:49:21 PM

This is absolutely nuts!

by tornikeo

8/23/2026 at 5:01:59 PM

[dead]

by lovelybunch