> This is a similar reaction to photosynthesis in plants, which produces glucose instead of rocket fuel.
This is silly, but also begs the sillier question why we aren't bioengineering plants to produce rocket fuel
replies(13):
This is silly, but also begs the sillier question why we aren't bioengineering plants to produce rocket fuel
I'm sure the economics don't work out for it: solar panels are already cheap, the land could grow other crops, etc. But photosynthesis being lower-yield than photovoltaic generation isn't enough to rule it out. Perhaps as science fiction, on a future mission to an Earthlike planet that doesn't have the right resources to produce semiconductors at scale.
growing the fuel plant is probably easy.
How do you get it OUT of the plant?
Solar panels just sit there (they do need cleaning i admit) and produce electricity that we can manipulate very cheaply already.
What machine collects diesel from plants? Can you safely dispose of the plant matter?
Methanol is also known as "wood alcohol", and can be made at ~40% yield by cooking down wood ("destructive distillation") in a specific fashion, or made from too-cheap-to-meter natural gas if you've got it. Anything you can do with natural gas can also be done with anaerobically fermented methane. You can also use ethanol (fermented from any carbohydrate crops) instead of methanol, creating a biodiesel with slightly different but still usable properties.
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Sunflower, rapeseed, and soybean oil have very well-established agricultural workflows which require very little labor input.
Palm oil is substantially higher yield, but more labor intensive and is associated with tropical rainforest destruction.
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You don't necessarily even need to react your vegetable oil. The original Diesel Cycle demonstration engines ran on straight peanut oil, and there are some truck engines out there (like the 12 valve Cummins) that will happily run on filtered waste fryer oil all day long. It's just a matter of tuning, viscosity, compression ratios, seal materials, and the like, being slightly different from petrochemical diesel fuel. Reacting vegetable oils into fatty acid esters ("biodiesel") does attain some modest engine benefits, but mostly it's to match compatibility with petrochemical diesel grades so that you don't, eg, need to replace your fuel lines & pumps with different diameter fuel lines & pumps.