Coconut Oil Could Make Great Sustainable Jet Fuel, Pioneering Experiments Demonstrate

Coconut oil is a versatile product. It is great for frying, helpful for skin, and hard to replace in a ketogenic diet. In the future, it may also help power passenger aircraft.

Chemists in Japan conducted extensive experiments to see whether coconut oil could be used to create a sustainable aviation fuel. Not only did their experiments succeed, but the fuel they produced outperformed existing biofuels in several ways.

Existing methods for making sustainable aviation fuel from biofuel feedstocks often require high pressures and intense heat. The chemists' co-solvent method, by contrast, created an aviation-compatible fuel at room temperature and lower levels of heat. This reduced the fuel's carbon footprint even before the researchers blended it with kerosene, poured it into a micro jet engine, and set it on fire to observe the results.

The most important tests examined how the mixture performed inside the engine. It generated "thermal efficiency... comparable to that of pure kerosene." One drawback in pure performance was that fuel consumption was slightly higher. This was likely due to coconut oil's lower ignition temperature.

In terms of emissions, the largest improvement over kerosene appeared in the release of unburned hydrocarbons. The industry calls these UHCs, or sometimes VOCs, which stands for volatile organic compounds. They include substances such as butane and result from incomplete fuel combustion and fuel vaporization.

The amount of UHCs released depends heavily on the state of the aircraft. When an aircraft is taxiing or idling, engine temperatures are lower, and these compounds are released in much greater proportions. Yet the coconut fuel reduced UHC emissions by 5 to 40 percent, depending on how much coconut fuel was added. Larger amounts of biofuel led to greater reductions in UHC emissions.