Silvaire wrote:
My US base has about 450 based aircraft and 625 operations per day per FAA data
That is massive! That is almost one flight every minute, if there is operations 14h/day. Which airport is it if I may ask?
PM sent.
If you were at the geographic center of the three local airports where I might reasonably base my plane, i.e. within a 20 minute drive of that point. the combined operations are about 1600 per day. 95 or more percent are burning Avgas. Jet-A burning commercial and military operations at two other airports in the same radius add to local traffic.
What interested me recently is to hypothesize that some local pumps supply almost exclusively to planes that could burn lower octane fuel. That doesn’t mean overall production and demand is broken down the same way, but at many physical delivery locations there is little need for 100LL fuel. Notwithstanding the production issue, I could imagine the delivery problem being resolved by some airports selling only 100LL and others selling only lower octane lower fuel, without creating problems for many people.
But we burn 90% less Avgas
I am surprised it is 10:1 and not more, given that most countries in Europe have almost no GA. Is there some reference for that number?
Europe burns 100M liters of avgas a year.
Warter Fuels has stated that the European avgas market is worth 200M/year – I reported that here soon after I heard it, at Aero EDNY. Is the US avgas market really worth only 2BN?
Some numbers for GA activity are here.
boscomantico wrote:
many places in Europe with 8$/gal…
Thats ~1.75Euro/Ltr….
I know Avgas dropped in price last year when the bottom fell out of oil prices, but I think you would be lucky to find Avgas at that price in Europe now…Eg Total price in France is now 1.90Euro/Ltr – nearer $9/gal… In my experience the average price in the US is half the European price.
Maoraigh wrote:
“97% plant-based”
Many of us consider it morally repugnant to kill people who have avgas if we cannot get any.
We may have different views for getting food after a day or so without it.
From a purely energetic and resource depletion perspective it is simply a waste. The mass-production of plant-based fuel makes no sense for multiple reasons:
Land usage
Water usage
Energy consumption (yes, solar, but photosyntehsis is extremely inefficient)
..and others.
Bio-ethanol production in the US alone is thus responsible for the crazy increase in corn price for food: it is more profitable to produce bio-fuel than food. Lots of references on the web.
Energy-wise, and even factoring land-usage, it is much more efficient to use photovoltaic solar energy to produce electricity directly for (road-) vehicles (or perhaps via water-photolysis for future H2 for vehicles)
If you invest the same amount of agricultural resources in feeding people (or in economic terms just the delta vs oil- fuels or even photovoltaic) , hunger in the world would end quickly. A different matter is how to manage it, but in pure terms of economics and resource assignment…it is very clear.
Things have got worse since.
Assigning deaths directly to this issue is one step further, but I share the general idea.
@Mod feel free to move post if this is the wrong thread
Our last UL91 delivery (to SW Scotland) was £1.09 per litre (ex. VAT), but I suspect that the next delivery will be dearer.
100LL is usually a couple of pence cheaper but our various aircraft and automobile engines all prefer unleaded.
GAMI got an STC for their fuel on some Lycoming engines
https://www.avweb.com/ownership/fuel-news/unleaded-avgas-approved/
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that GAMI has won this ‘battle’ and it’s only a matter of time before G100UL dominates the market. Funny how a relatively small outfit managed to beat the big oil companies and the green movement for plant based fuels.
I went looking back and found the video from 2010 where George Brawley calmly states that they had some ideas and just started blending fuels and got something working!
( at 1:44 )
Contrast the million (billions?) spent over the years, and the all PAFI fiasco, with the ‘can do’ attitude of these guys. There’s probably a lesson there…
My bet is that this will go from STC to STC, to more STCs, until a blanket approval as a fleet wide 100LL replacement.
As for me, I’m currently burning JET-A, so I’m only a spectator in this :-)
As I wrote before, I would bet that the slow progress in this area (with all potential players) has been with patent and licensing disputes, not with the fuel itself.
100LL is “open source” and anybody can make it without paying anybody any royalties.
But obviously all the parties, GAMI included, are looking to make money. GAMI especially, since they cannot actually make fuel, they have to do a licensing deal. Until this is resolved, nobody will make and distribute the stuff, STCs or no STCs.
