[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.