[swalsh]

The jets are aimed to become available around 2025.

On a some what unrelated note, does anyone here know what the evolution of commercial planes is in terms of fuel sources?

Sources i've seen put non-traditional peak oil at 2030, so it would seem that by the time this technology is developed the fuel could be prohibitively expensive. Will alternative energies provide enough power for super sonic flight?

[ars]

There isn't any difference between plane fuel sources vs cars or power plants.

In other words there is no change you can make to the plane. The only change is to the fuel source and that applies to everything, not just planes.

And don't try to predict peak oil - every single prediction ever made of it has been wrong. And not just a little bit wrong, wildly incorrect.

Every time we seem to run out of oil or natural gas we find more - known oil reserves have never been higher.

[schiffern]

>And don't try to predict peak oil - every single prediction ever made of it has been wrong. And not just a little bit wrong, wildly incorrect.

Leaving aside that that's a terrible reason to stop even trying to predict something, I haven't found this to be the case at all.

Since about 2000 the date that's been put out was 2004-2006. The recession did indeed delay that a couple years, but we've still never extracted more oil than we did in 2008 despite continued high prices (vs. say the 1979 peak, after which oil prices collapsed).

>Every time we seem to run out of oil or natural gas we find more - known oil reserves have never been higher.

Helped in part by the fact that the OPEC nations (which account for ~80% of those reserves) allocates daily production limits in proportion to known reserves. So the more oil you claim to have, the more oil they let you produce! When the rules changed in the 1980 there was a gold rush of "revisions" that increased global oil reserves by 33%.

Peak oil is not "running out of oil," so the fact that that hasn't happened is not a real argument.

If you honestly believe that a global economy in which oil production has been flat for 4 years despite high prices, in which only 14 of the 54 oil-producing nations are growing production, in which another 30 are in active decline–forcing them to import more oil and more every year just to maintain current consumption (let alone fuel growth)–is a global economy in which peak oil isn't taking place, then I honestly don't know what to say.

[mikeash]

There's a huge difference between planes and these others. Power plants can run on a huge variety of other sources, like wind, solar, hydro, or nuclear. Cars can fairly reasonably run on electricity. Airliners as we know them must use some kind of high-density liquid fuel.

[cwmccarthy]

It sounds like ars was trying to suggest that the fuel we currently use is very similar to that aircraft use (ie. if you can synthesize oil you kill two birds with one stone)

The cetane number and the flash point is a little different, but to simplify, diesel is Jet-A with additives, mainly for lubrication. You can put jet fuel in a diesel truck and it'll work fine, the military often mixes it in to avoid two separate fuel supplies. The same thing can be done with piston aircraft (100LL vs auto gas)

Also, I can only imagine the use of a biomass mix will increase. Last year the USAF was saying it was roughly 10x the cost, but that's dropping with production scale while oil obviously is only going up.

[Hoff]

"Biomass fuel" for commercial jet aircraft is seeing some interest:

http://atwonline.com/eco-aviation/news/ten-airlines-agree-pu...

http://motherjones.com/environment/2008/01/virgin-airlines-p...