There’s no fuel that even comes close to replacing kerosene and naphtha as jet fuel. What’s astonishing is that we know that it’s irreplaceable and we know that there’s a quite finite amount of it easily extractable, and yet we continue to use it with utter profligacy. We pave our roads with it. We drink from bottles made out of it.
Will we someday be unable to fly across the country because we couldn’t bring ourselves to stop paving over greenfields with petroleum so that our petroleum-gulping SUVs could park in front of our petroleum-clad houses?
This from the comments:
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I’m no chemistry major Dave but my understanding is that plastic and asphalt production do not decrease the gasoline or kerosene production of crude oil. As I understand it, and I’m open to correction, crude oil separates when refined into different compounds. Gasoline is one of those, kerosene another, the dense muck that makes asphalt yet another and the goo that turns into plastics still another and so on and so forth. So using less plastic or less asphalt is not going to result in more gasoline or naphtha being available.
That said there’s still good reason to not be wasteful with it. Oil truly is a remarkable chemical compound and we’re certainly not making more of it.”
Doesn’t fully diminish his point, that we should conserve jet fuel rather than waste it with such wreckless abandon, but it’s important to point this out.