Comment by clickety_clack
6 hours ago
Do coconuts grow particularly efficiently?
Edit: The US created biofuel subsidies a few years ago and it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact. It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there’re probably more effective ways to do that intentionally.
> a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities
My immediate reaction to this is: it's probably a wewlth transfer to the few landlords owning the land and probably charging higher rent, not to the communities.
Of course I haven't analysed the data. If I am wrong, hopefully someone will feel compelled to correct me.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s more of a massive subsidy to enormous agribusiness operations. But yeah I’m sure some of the pork makes its way to some normal farmers too.
Don't most farmers own their own farms? (or work on a corporate monstrosity farm).
How common is farm landlords?
Depends on the area, but the vast majority are owner operated.
The question begs some other questions though.
One is more about what fraction of the economic production of the farm industry is owner operated; There is a long tail of now-tiny farms that are not economical to actually sow and harvest, which nobody could actually earn a living from. If it's 10 acres and somebody bales hay at almost breakeven, is it really a farm?
Conversely, there are a lot of very productive 5000+ acre farms comprised of many older properties combined together that are "owner operated" in one sense, but demand many farmhands and a lot of machinery to manage.
The vertically related industries have also seen a lot of consolidation. There are ~four seed companies, only a few pesticide companies, two main tractor companies, only a few slaughterhouse companies, etc. There are long-term contractual arrangements with some of these entities. Is an owner-operator farmer who controls so little of the business directly they may as well be a sharecropper really counted as a farm?
>Don't most farmers own their own farms? (or work on a corporate monstrosity farm).
Why not both: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargill
My understanding is that it caused the price of corn to go way up, meaning the poor in Mexico found food far more expensive.
International markets and all that...
NAFTA and successive treaties forced Mexico to allow much cheaper corn from the USA to displace many smaller corn farms in Mexico, only larger farms could survive that and farming of corn is declining in Mexico. Also inexpensive processed food displaced traditional diet goods at the same time for the same reasons, probably contributing to obesity epidemic that only started in Mexico after those treaties.
11 replies →
[flagged]
They already grow, they are already harvested, and this process uses discarded parts of the harvest. It is putting in use what we already had but had no use for.
Edit: the article speaks about possibilities that open. It also clearly notices that the a number of problems are unsolved. The infographic is direct: https://studyfinds.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Coconut-Bi...
Note that if some product available in limited amount, say "coconut oil", becomes an asset to improve any context, say "aviation", it does not follow that one should maximize that amount psychotically without a cost-risk-benefit. You can just exploit the available yield through planning.
That infographic says it uses 16-20% more fuel per unit of thrust. That's a significant amount more weight for an aircraft to carry, but because carrying extra fuel also burns fuel, extra fuel use would compound exponentially. This would probably mean significantly more than 20% extra fuel would be required for long-haul flights.
Ouch.
There's one plantation of under 1000 hectares in Papua New Guinea that makes biodiesel from coconut oil to power their own operation and vehicles on the island.[1] But they don't export. On an island with few energy sources, the process makes sense.
This is more like an industrial process that self-powers from its own waste. Sewerage treatment plants do that - the process produces methane, often enough to power the plant. Not enough to put them into the gas business, though.
Amusingly, corn to ethanol plants in the US do not generally self-power. They consume natural gas to produce ethanol.[2] Net energy gain is maybe 1.3. Only subsidies keep this going. About 40% of US corn production goes into this boondoggle.
Sugar cane, though - that's a win for biomass.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/10/png-co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_energy_balance
1 reply →
I presume that the market for coconut oil is far smaller than for jet fuel, so this solution can't scale without wreaking havoc on the environment. These sort of clever uses for exisiting byproducts only work when the market for the main product is much bigger than for the byproduct (e.g. down is a byproduct of duck/goose meat, leather is a byproduct of beef).
The existing solution is actively wreaking havoc on the environment. I don't know the specifics of this crop but generally agricultural products absorb a substantial amount of carbon when growing, so releasing some of that carbon by later burning has the potential to be close to carbon-neutral. Whilst petroleum fuels are 100% carbon negative.
3 replies →
Are there really discarded parts? Usually when people talk about discarded parts, what they really mean is those not used in the first process. The article says "parts of the crop that would otherwise go to waste", but just a quick glance seems to show that there are other products that uses those parts of the crop, like biodegradable packaging and animal feed.
Turning it into fuel and burning it would compete with the other uses for those 30%.
Apparently (I’m relying on facts from Claude here), aviation uses about 100 billion gallons of oil a year and coconuts yield about 250 gal/acre, so assuming you can approximately replace them 1:1, you would need to plant about 400 million acres under coconut plantation, an area the size of Mexico.
Edit: you don’t have to plant all of Mexico, every percent of fuel you replace is the equivalent of a percentage of a country under a single crop, displacing what would have been there before (presumably some kind of food).
Yes, but nobody said that it would replace kerosene. Especially at this stage.
To what scale though? Doubtful it's going to be enough for a replacement. Just as GP stated, the corn grown for ethanol is nothing more than an additive and it is quite easy to find fuel without it. It's a boondoggle and not any where close to being a fossil fuel replacement
Isn't that simply a matter of cost? It's pretty difficult to complete with pulling an energy dense material out of the ground.
If we were to globally tax oil extraction proportional to the actual cost of equivalent carbon capture I imagine biofuels would begin to look quite reasonable.
That said it seems to me that tying the energy and food supply together economically in such a direct manner is likely to have some deleterious effects on poor countries.
1 reply →
> it’s led to poor use of land with questionable climate impact.
In the short term, yes, because they were unnecessarily using carbon energy to grow the fuel.
But if we want to de-fossilise society in the long run, we need solutions for flying and long distance travel. Electric flying seems infeasible at the moment, and people are looking for suitable bio-fuels to make flying carbon neutral. Afaik the maximum planes were allowed to handle up to now, was a 50-50 mix kerosene-biofuel. [0]
Coconuts could be a breakthrough!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_biofuel
Just use any carbon monoxide source (e.g., pyrolysis of pretty much anything that'd release carbon dioxide when burned works, followed by some cleaning to get rid of some problematic catalyst poisons (notably sulfur compounds)), add hydrogen, and do Fischer-Tropsch. You get your high quality diesel fuel, often higher quality than what you can easily get from crude oil, btw.
If you don't have anything to pyrolyse, use a sodium or potassium hydroxide wet scrubber to extract it from ambient air and recover it from the solution with burnt lime; it preferentially bonds to the carbonate, becomes nearly insoluble; you take the lime stone powder, heat it with a high temperature blow dryer until the carbon dioxide cooks out (you can use pure carbon dioxide atmosphere for that! Just let out excess buildup of CO2 pressure to your output cooler/storage.), have regenerated the burnt lime, take the resulting CO2 and hydrogen to perform water gas shift to turn the mix into CO and H2O, condense out the H2O, then use the CO + H2 mix for your Fischer-Tropsch synthesis.
You can use incineration facilities to tap off concentrated CO2 and mine landfills until they are empty to keep the incinerators fed to get the CO2 possibly-cheaper than from the direct air capture units.
Start by using more solar cell glass laminate for exterior surfaces of new construction and as roofs over whatever parking lots you do want to keep around longer-term.
Synthetic non-fossil fuel is going to need plenty of electricity and probably much of that "just" to electrolyze water into hydrogen which is reasonable for seasonal energy "storage" (run them during the high-solar 25~50% of the year, use underground caverns (former natural gas wells) or liquify it to store for the winter, run the synthesis plant that consumes it year-round. Don't just burn the hydrogen in power plants, though you can keep existing fossil fuel plants around for a while to run them during the worst week or two of an average winter. But expect the power to be as expensive as each kWh you get today from a small gasoline generator fueled with fully-taxed highway gasoline...
I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet. Not just for the carbon impact, but also for the diversity of our species and cultures.
Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane?
Of course, the market wills it so some may think that it must happen, yet I feel that the globalisation and massification of everything made the world a less diverse and interesting place overall.
> I'm not sure that mass air transit has a place in a post-oil society were we try to leave at peace with the planet.
Me neither, but that doesn't stop me from celebrating possible breakthroughs in decarbonisation.
Why not stop other Europeans from going as well?
1 reply →
> Should every Chinese and Indian visit Venice, even though it destroys the city little by little? Should we send things as futile as watermelons by plane
Who are you to dictate where Chinese and Indians can and cannot visit or enjoy delicious watermelons?
If someone wants to eat a watermelon like a dirty slave that is their business and you are not going to deny them that right. This is pure insanity.
China and India are the biggest domestic aircraft markets in the world. The manufacturers literally cannot keep up with the demand. If trains were more effective they would have built them already. If California has taught us anything it's that implementation of high speed rail is a joke.
I am appalled at the level of delusion and craziness in these responses, it would take a year to respond to them all.
Air travel is not going anywhere and we are not setting society back 100 years on account of dubious climate histrionics.
Want to save the environment?
Ditch smartphones (future e-waste) and all their useless apps (and resource-sucking infra) we could all live without tomorrow.
Turns out we were as effective in moving goods and services and leisure travel in 2008 as we are today.
We just couldn't post to social media about how uncomfortable the airplane seat was and how the onboard Wi-Fi sucked.
3 replies →
How many coconuts are on one tree and how many tons of coconuts would be needed to replace kerosene globally?
I am 100% for decarbonization as fast as possible.
BTW Law of Conservation of Energy will be applied to coconut-based energy as well.
Vaclav Smil mentions in his book that we should consume less.
I see so many cheap weekender air tickets… it’s almost impossible to resist the temptation.
Annually 5 billions people travel by plane…
Vaclav Smil so wildly mispredicted the trajectory of renewables that his worldview should be taken with heavy skepticism.
1 reply →
The best solution to flying and long distance travel is to reduce it as much as possible. This means no more travelling for hedonistic (touristic) purposes.
I.e. measures like massive taxation (also for private jets of course).
I think that's a bad frame of mind in general. One of the primary ways industry tries to prevent regulation is by putting the burden on the individual. People think the only way we can have a healthy environment is by sacrificing things for the average person. And one of the worst things environmentalists can do is play along with that. In the US there's a push to ban plastic straws, which is annoying to the average consumer, while basically every item you can purchase comes wrapped in tons of plastic packaging. Industry LOVES things like this because it does little to actually reduce plastic consumption, and pits the average person against the environmental movement.
As another example, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from airplanes is several times less than the amount of methane that leaks out of natural gas pipelines every year (here I'm weighting emissions by their global warming impact). The overwhelming majority of those leaks can be prevented with minimal effort, but industry hasn't been incentivized to do so. Maybe before we start banning tourism, we have some inspectors checking pipelines for pinhole leaks?
4 replies →
Degrowth, and “everyone should just do without X” is such an easy solution. Too bad for you we don’t live in a political system where you guys can pass such unpopular policy and force the majority (who wants improving living standards) to just ‘own nothing and be happy,’ trading all the things they like for promises that the climate will be fixed.
And other countries will also choose to keep their privileges and climate change will not be reduced anyway.
So no tourist travel for the poor or middle class, just the elite rich? And no tourist income for the poor and middle class? This is a policy only the top .1% will enjoy.
5 replies →
Electrified high speed rail solves this, with flying reserved for transoceanic needs. Private jets should not exist outside of scientific, medical, or other non luxury/personal use cases. Travel and tourism will always be with us, and should be imho. Carbon taxes, laws, whatever is needed to accomplish it.
14 replies →
Saw a recent post about an electric plane - was pretty sweet let me dig it up. $5 worth of fuel!
> https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-comp...
Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?
It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population). This mindset is like a century old.
"It's also very not true that farmers are poor in the US (median household income about 30% greater than general population)."
Most farmers work a "real" job in addition to the farm work.
Then you also have farm workers, who do not own the farm, and they tend to be poor.
The economic landscape of farming is very bimodal. “Most farmers” (by headcount) are subsistence farmers who live in impoverished countries and don’t produce very much food because they are feeding themselves and their immediate community.
The food that people buy at the grocery store in developed countries is primarily produced a relatively small number of industrialized farming operations which are high dollar businesses.
That is both true and not quite true at the same time. The notion of the Yeoman farm family supporting itself off its land is mostly a myth.
Like everything else. it’s been capitalized and farms have consolidated over time. There were lots and lots and lots of farm workers. who are pretty poor and now lack the assets that their grandparents had.
> Is it not a bad thing to encourage poor people to continue doing the thing that has apparently made them poor?
Right, we should tell the farmers to "learn to code"?
Too bad you can't ask Claude to grow potatoes. Though it probably uses the same amount of water and fuel to tell you it can't.
All subsidies are wealth transfers. That's the whole point- to incentivize something that wouldn't otherwise happen at a scale the government deems to be of benefit or necessary.
Biofuels are part of the all-in-one story of renewable energy, especially the transition phase of reducing carbon emissions before we can get to full electrification.
The question of whether or not they are effective in doing so- and whether or not the money for those subsidies would better benefit society elsewhere- is the very same one that skeptics of solar and wind hammer on.
I would much rather see those subsidies go to farmers growing human consumer food, and sending the excess to bioreactors to produce fertilizer and/or methane for power generation. Cheaper groceries make it easier for people to eat more whole foods, after all. Just last week, I found napa cabbage at $3/lb- meaning one head would have been $24. Fresh broccoli and other good veg are also expensive.
The reduction of harm from reduced CO2 by bio-jet-fuel would pale in significance compared to, say, subsidies in regenerative farming practices, or even simply healthy crops.
A lot of food cost is due to food waste and convenience (refrigerated shipping, out of season crops, etc). There's already a lot food waste due to logistics and consumer preference.
Middle of the road, comparable to Sunflower oil. But they want to utilize waste products and a low energy conversion process.
Is Jet Fuel really the best use of coconut oil? I'd imagine it's far better as a lubricant or ingredient in things more directly adjacent to human rather than mechanical use.
"It’s effectively become a wealth transfer to support poor rural American communities"
I'm skeptical that rural community are the primary beneficiaries. Seems more likely that it's benefiting people who own the patents/companies.
They literally grow on trees
Are the people against bioengineered produce also be against us working towards super efficient coconuts or some other plant we designed to fill the same role?
Same rural communities raise pitchforks upon mention of any other demographic receiving wealth transfers.
Just through this out again, biofuels are dumb. Per acre a solar farm produces 30 times the energy per year as corn without most of the environmental concerns that growing corn has.
You don't have pesticide or fertilizer runoff from solar farms. You don't plow the soil resulting in soil loss.
Biofuels, dumb.