Kalistan

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AeroKal struggles with Challenge of Aircraft Pollution
Veteran company would like "aerotaxies", but jet fuel issue continues to Vex producers
Sulari, Duchy of Suldanor
November 8. 5643


The AK 56-217 turboprop, AeroKal's "greenest" engine rolls off assembly line

As Kalistan has been successful in turning almost all its energy consumption green, with hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal and even tidal energy production powering nearly all sectors of the Kalistani economy, and providing electricity for nearly all homes and businesses in the nation, and biodiesel and biopolymers permitting clean travel, two stubborn applications of fossil fuel continue to elude ecological solutions in Kalistan. These two primary uses are liquid Kerosene used as Jet Fuel and petrocarbon diesel used in many of Kalistan's naval vessels.

"We have not been able to completely eradicate Kalistan's dependence on fossil fuels, despite our best efforts," said AeroKal CEO Walter Peterson. "The commercial airline industries remains the single largest non-military user of petrocarbons in Kalistan. It certainly isn't for lack of attempts to find alternatives, but we just can't switch due to a number of confounding factors that prevent weaning ourselves completely off those polluting commodities for good." Peterson briefly described some of his company's efforts to find sustainable alternatives, none of which were as fuel efficient or cost effective as simply kerosene based jet fuel.

"For what we need, kerosene regrettably remains the best option," said Peterson. "We have stats that demonstrates that commercial aviation contributes anywhere from 2 and a half to 5 percent of the total air pollution annually, and if you add to that noise pollution from these massive turboprops necessary to get our large international flights off the ground, you find our industry, despite years of attempts to clean it up, to be still very destructive to our environment."

Part of the effort that Peterson detailed was mixing available alternative fuel types with Kerosene to reduce the amount of petroleum based hydrocarbons used in a typical flight. "The issue here is not availability of these type of fuel sources, but the costs of producing them. If we were able to produce them at scale, they would still be about two to three times as expensive to produce than standard fossil fuel. We'd have to pass that cost on, and there never seems to be an appetite among the public for dramatic increases in costs of flying, or in the government for more subsidies to a polluting industry like commercial aviation." As a result, mixed fuel, so called Sustainable Aviation Fuel, only accounts for about 10 percent of all jet fuel burned in Kalistani aircraft each year. "It's a start, but its not nearly enough," said Peterson. He says that cost cutting is happening by attempting to increase efficiency of fuel use in existing engines. "Increased efficiency of the engines can help make less fuel go a longer way, but we can only squeeze so much efficiency out of an aircraft engine before it just stops working, so efficiency is also not an acceptable solution."

Neither are electrical engines. "Automobiles, and to some degree, even ships don't have the same challenges that aircrafts do, with something as ordinary as gravity. Cars sit on the ground, and therefore are gravity neutral. Ships, if you can believe it, are gravity negative: Buoyancy makes a ship float, so it is even easier to propel them than it is a car, which moved through leveraging friction. In aircrafts we have generate enough lift to keep us in the sky, and you create lift through velocity: An electric turbofan is not going to be able to generate that sort of velocity, unless we had enough batteries on the plane to get that kind of power, and by our estimates, that number of batteries with existing power constraints would be about 4 times as heavy as the plane itself is."

"The only thing we can do to cut down emissions in the short and medium term is reduce the amount of air travel we use," said Peterson. He said that the Imperial Government currently heavily subsidizes ground transport through the National Railroad. "Daily flights between Kaliburg and Sulari are really the main flights left within Kalistan: Everything else is either Regular train usage has led to a pretty serious decline in the number of domestic flights in Kalistan," said Peterson. "This has, obviously had an affect on the amount of pollution we create." The challenge, of course is international flights.

"Kaliburg is a main east west hub for Seleya, while Sulari is a major hub for north south Flights. Sulari International has overtaken Kaliburg International as the main international airport in Northern Seleya, and connects much of the Southern hemisphere with Keris, Northern Dovani and Makon. All those flights in and out of Sulari generate a ton of pollution for Sulari, and we can try to mitigate that pollution all we like locally, but for all our own efforts to mitigate petrocarbon usage, we can't do much compared to what is brought here by other nations, who burn straight traditional Kerosene based fuel. We can either surrender our place as a center for international commercial transit, or we have to accept that a lot of that pollution is not going away."

For its own part, Kalistan can help mitigate the pollution it makes for itself. "We'd like to see new biofuels based in seaweed and waste products from food and etc be developed. The biggest limiting factors in biofuel production is the amount of arable land and potable fresh water that the State is willing to turn away from agriculture that feeds humans, and toward the production of biodiesel crops. We could resolve a lot of that tension with heavy investment in the cultivation of kelp off our shores which not only kelp keep our continental shelves healthy, but also provide a tremendous return on investment for biofuels. Making more fuel available to mix in with regular jet fuels, at varying amounts will help us reduce the amount of petrocarbons we use ourselves."

Other solutions the CEO suggested was increased subsidies to offset the cost of using mixed sustainable Aircraft fuel. "The cost for us it too high to justify it, but the government could offset a lot of that cost by committing to cleaner skies." A subsidy for aircraft manufacturers may also spur new development of more efficient, or at least more petrocarbon efficient engines and aircraft tech.

Additionally, a lot of the domestic aviation can already switch to electric engines with current technology. "We see a lot of civil aviation still burning fossil fuels," said Peterson. "We currently manufacture a line of small craft that is meant to replace a lot of the petroleum based fuel systems in much of our current privately owned, civil and local aircraft with electric fans. The newer planes can take a max of four people more than 200 miles at this point before needing to be recharged. Public investment in battery technology (especially around weight of batteries,) and power that can be supplied could revolutionize civil aviation in Kalistan, and provide giant steps toward reducing our dependence on fossil fuels even further. Maybe someday, we can see something like aerotaxis that take people between towns not served by the National Rail. We could do it with public funding."

A public private partnership between the Imperial Government and companies like AeroKal and KalMD may be in the cards at any rate already. The Chancellor has said he is looking for new ways to reduce pollution in Kalistan and improve transportation infrastructure in a way that won't too heavily burden Kalistani tax payers. "We welcome any cooperation with Her Majesty's Government," said Peterson. "We take this problem seriously, and absolutely need partners to help us take steps forward."

@TheRepublic