By DEAN BILLING.
Was it only me, or did anyone else find the press release by the FAA announcing that it has selected four fuels for further testing to replace 100LL this fall to be a bit peculiar? In case you you missed it, the official press release from the FAA is here. Articles also appeared on this site, General Aviation News, and from the EAA.
None of the articles answered any of the obvious questions that came immediately to my mind, for instance:
- Two of the largest fuel producers in the world were selected: Shell and Total. These multinational oil behemoths have had more than three decades to come up with an unleaded 100 octane product, but only now that the federal government is willing to throw taxpayer money at the problem do they claim to have found a solution.
- Swift has been touting its binary 100 octane solution for about five years if my recollection is right. But now it has two solutions, including one that we’ve never heard of. And Swift itself can’t tell if one is better than the other?
- Finally, the most obvious question to ask right now is: What is the estimated cost for these solutions compared to 100LL? These companies are submitting known products for testing. They have to know the cost of the components in comparison to components of 100LL in production today.
Up until now all of these companies have skirted the issue of estimated cost because they claimed it was all R&D, or trade secret or competitive secret, yadda, yadda, yadda, ad infinitum. But now they are submitting a producible product that they know the components of and they ought to be able to project the cost knowing they will be filling a market of perhaps 200 million gallons/year for which demand continues to decline.
If these solutions aren’t competitive with today’s cost to produce 100LL, it will make little difference whether they are technically viable solutions because GA will continue to circle the drain, but at an accelerating rate, decreasing demand even faster.
One more reason to love my Cessna 150 — MY “alternative” fuel is 100LL, my PRIMARY fuel is AUTOGAS.
This is a no-brainer in that the cost of any replacement 100UL fuel will be higher and go even higher as demand decreases. Europe continues to expand into diesel engine technology for airplanes because of $10/gal avgas which will inevitably come to our shores while we persist in muddling along with avgas, a holdover from the days of Orville and Wilbur. We need to transition out of the gasoline rut into Jet-A or diesel fuel which should remain in plentiful supply thus cheaper than avgas for the foreseeable future. That’s applicable for cars and trucks as well, a transition which would likely enable us to forego much of our dependence on foreign crude oil imports.
Appears the folks at GAMI of Ada Oklahoma have already come up with a viable 100UL fuel replacement upon which they’ve done extensive testing validating that it meets the FAA mandate. The FAA has been “evaluating it” for a while now (recent AvWeb story) but because GAMI is a small company they don’t attract the media attention of the Shells and Totals, etc. If approved their unique proprietary fuel mixture would still have to be licensed to one of the major oil refiner companies for mass production which would again result in what will likely be a price increase.
With the advent of more and more home built kitplanes most of which are equipped with engines that run quite well on Mogas, actually prefer it to 100 octane, it is puzzling why Mogas continues to remain so scarce at FBOs around the country. In sum, I don’t see the future of 100UL being a bright one insofar as promoting or helping what at present is a declining GA population due to an economy on life support while the cost to build, buy and/or operate an airplane remains beyond the reach of most aspiring young aviators with little chance of it becoming within their grasp any time soon. To borrow a line from the Clinton campaign era: “It’s the economy stupid.” Thus it’s the older gray heads who for now at least seem to have the means to afford things GA related but their future in the GA ranks is obviously time constrained.
It’s too early to speculate about price. And initial price, at low volumes for early adopters, can be very different from volume prices in a large market.
In my view, it’s better to have a viable alternative, or four, to 100LL, with price to evolve over time, than to have no alternative.
uspto.gov->Swift Fuels->US 8,556,999 B2. Either get an account, or be cheap and quick, do a copy, paste and print on the text. Swift Fuel’s patent details what they want to sell and how they want to make it. In their most recent patent, and in some Utube videos, they describe a 102/131 avgas mixture that is mainly what they are trying to sell. As explained, they can alter the recipe for a full range of octane numbers. That is likely why multiple entries.
Please indulge me going on. If Swift can sell a real 100+ octane, no lead, no alcohol avgas at any reasonable price, this will help more than just GA. So, I will keep watching, pushing and hoping.