Incredible rising airfares: the role of fuel

Airlines are hiking fees for all sorts of things these days, largely to deal with a single issue: the stupendous increases in fuel costs.

(Photo: The author and an Aloha Airlines passenger plane on the carrier's last day of operation. Fuel costs were blamed in part for the firm's demise.)

Our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that a flight from Honolulu to Maui or Kaua'i could burn as little as four gallons per seat. If the plane isn't full, it's more gallons per sold seat. If you're paying $49 for that flight, more than half the money is going to pay for the jet fuel.

Fuel exceeded labor as the largest airline cost in 2006, and that the year when fuel was crossing the $2 milestone.

Clearly, it's a big problem for airlines when fuel goes from $2 to $4 and appears ready to go to $5 a gallon, and there are equivalent hikes in lubrication and of the many materials and services that also have inherent fuel costs.

Jet fuel, much like kerosene and a heavier distillate of crude oil than gasoline, has gone up in some cases faster than the price of crude.

The International Air Transport Association (www.iata.org) reports that jet fuel has risen in cost 90 percent in the past year (effective May 16, 2008) and was costing airlines $3.90 a gallon.

IATA reports that “modern aircraft achieve fuel efficiencies of 3.5 litres per 100 passenger km.”

In U.S. terms, that works out to about 1.5 gallons per 100 passenger miles. But that's for the most modern planes. Some get far worse mileage than that.

Airline companies are designing planes to be dramatically more fuel efficient in response both to the cost of fuel and to the amount of carbon dioxide aircraft add to the global load. IATA says a couple of new aircraft are pushing for 1.3 gallons per 100 passenger miles. A Boeing executive was quoted saying the firm hopes the new Dreamliner 787 will get 1 gallon per 100 passenger miles, although most printed estimates put it closer to 1.3 gallons.

Airlines report how many seat miles they can fly per gallon—meaning how far they fly on a gallon of fuel per seat on the aircraft. Major U.S. airlines report a range of about 40 miles to 76 miles, with an average in the 50s. Hawai'i airlines, flying short routes, use a lot more fuel, due to more takeoffs per mile than most. Some airlines on short hops report numbers in the 20s.

Clearly, Hawaiian's big DC9 aircraft will get different fuel numbers than Mesa/go!'s smaller CRJ200s, but for illustrative purposes we'll go with 25 seat miles per gallon.

That means the 100-mile flight from Honolulu to Līhu'e costs about 4 gallons per seat. If the airline is flying paying customers in only 60 percent of those seats, it means 6.7 gallons per paid seat. (Again, caveats: If you fly less weight, you'll use less fuel, but we're talking broad numbers here.)

With aviation fuel at $4 a gallon, it means the airline is paying about $26 for the jet fuel to fly you to Kaua'i for that Hamura Saimin. And another $26 to fly you home.

If an airline can keep the planes 80 percent full, your seat gets charged 5 gallons or about $20 for the Līhu'e run.

Let's look at it another way. If two of you fly for the weekend to Maui, let's say you're burning 6 gallons for each person per flight, or 24 gallons in all. That would fill up most smaller cars twice. You could stay home and drive six times around O'ahu (assuming a 100-mile circuit) and burn about the same amount of fuel.

A long weekend in Vegas? Even if those planes are getting twice the seat miles per gallon of the interisland jets, think in terms of a couple of 55-gallon drums of fuel to fly your seat there and back.

(5,600-mile round trip at 2 gallons per 100 miles is 112 gallons. If the airline can get 1.5 gallons per 100 miles, it's 84 gallons, or $336 at $4 a gallon.)

It's no wonder you can't find that $300 West Coast flight any more.

Here is the U.S. Department of Transportation's rundown on anticipated efficiency of various forms of transportation: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/eppats/table11.html.

It shows that even in 2020, the government is still only looking at an average of about 60 seat miles per gallon, or 1.66 gallons to 100 miles.

© 2008 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Lingle: Hawai'i electric car network under discussion

A new electric car network that's being adopted in Israel and Denmark could find a place in Hawai'i.

Gov. Linda Lingle said the state is in discussions with an organization called Project Better Place, which in recent months has announced partnerships with Israel and Denmark to establish charging stations and battery swapping networks. (See www.projectbetterplace.com.)

The California-based firm has also made a deal with Nissan-Renault to design a car that will work with its network. (www.renault.com/renault_com/en/main/30_DEVELOPPEMENT_DURABLE/40_Performances/20_Environnement/_Vehicule_electrique/index.aspx)

(Photo: Renault-Nissan could build its electric car on the platform of its Megane Sedan. Renault-Nissan photo.)

Lingle, on her April 19 radio show with host Mike Buck on KHVH, said the concept—at least the one proposed for Israel—does not require any government funding. She said Israel is committed to switching entirely to electric cars within five years.

“We are also in discussions with the same organization. It's to create a society where you don't need to use oil or gasoline,” Lingle said.

One economic benefit: A significant portion of the $5 billion Hawaii sends out of state for oil each year would stay at home.

According to a Hawaiian Electric report, nearly 20 percent of Hawai'i's oil imports are for ground transportation. The 2000 oil use breakdown, available at www.heco.com/vcmcontent/FileScan/PDFConvert/FuelOil.pdf, was 36.9 percent for air transportation, 29.8 percent for electricity, 18.8 percent for ground transportation, 7.4 percent for marine transpotation and 7.2 percent for other uses.

Project Better Place's web site says it will be able to deliver folks an efficient, convenient transportation that is cheaper than one using fossil fuels.

“We have crossed a historic threshold where electricity and batteries provide a cheaper alternative for consumers. Existing technology, coupled with the right business model and a scaleable infrastructure can provide an immediate solution and significantly decrease carbon emissions,” said Shai Agassi, Project Better Place executive, at the firm's rollout last year.

Among the benefits of electric cars is that they can more easily take advantage of intermittent forms of carbon-free electrical generation—like wind plants and solar arrays—than utility grids can. Much of the charging can take place when the wind is blowing and when the sun is shining.

Here's what Project Better Place says about its system:

“The business model for the electric cars will be similar to that used by mobile phone operators. In the same way that wireless operators deploy a network of cell towers to provide an area of mobile phone coverage, Project Better Place will establish a network of charging spots and battery exchange stations to provide ubiquitous access to electricity to power electric vehicles.

“The company will partner with car makers and source batteries so that consumers who subscribe to the network can get subsidized vehicles which are cheaper to buy and operate than today’s fuel-based cars. Consumers will still own their cars and will have multiple car models to choose from.

“Project Better Place will deploy and test this framework over the next 24 months in a variety of launch markets, after which it plans to deploy hundreds of thousands of vehicles annually, across multiple markets. The company anticipates achieving tipping-point saturation in early markets within 10 years of rollout.”

© 2008 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Hawai'i bird extinction: size matters, but also habitat, predators

Each time a new class of humans appeared in Hawai'i, the native birds suffered.

New research shows that native Hawaiian birdlife underwent two massive extinction events, coinciding with the first arrival of Polynesians in the Islands, and then with the arrival of Europeans. Half of all native bird species were killed off in these extinctions.

(Photo: Barren landscape on Rapa Nui. Rats are now implicated in the deforestation of that island, and are believed to have played a major role in Hawaiian landscape changes, which may have led to some Hawaiian bird extinctions.)

Alison Boyer, a biologist and Ph.D. Candidate at the University of New Mexico, studied fossil finds in the Islands and found that the timing is inescapable.

“Through the continuing accumulation of fossil evidence, it is clear that the avifauna of the Hawaiian Islands underwent a large-scale extinction event around the time of Polynesian arrival. A second wave of extinctions since European colonization has further altered this unique avifauna,” she wrote in a paper in the journal, “Diversity and Distributions.” (Avifauna means birdlife.)

But the question that intrigued Boyer was which kinds of birds—which classes of birds—disappeared.

She classified the Hawaiian birdlife by what they ate, what they looked like, how they behaved and how they were related to each other and other birds.

“Extinction of the unique Hawaiian birds began when people first colonized the islands over 1000 years ago,” Boyer said in an email. “During that time, I found that larger and flightless or ground-nesting species had a higher rate of extinction than other groups. Of course, many small species also disappeared, implicating a wide suite of human impacts including destruction of dry forest habitat.”

It is an amazing extinction record. Fossil discoveries show that at least 56 species of birds had become extinct during the Polynesian period before European arrival.

It is not clear to what extent direct hunting and eating resulted in the loss of larger birds.

“The relative importance of direct and indirect human impacts in the prehistoric extinction remains controversial,” she said in the paper.

But it's clear it had an effect.

“Direct hunting of native birds was widespread prehistorically. Charred bones of extinct birds are often found in prehistoric human middens in the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere providing plentiful evidence that the ancient Polynesians used birds for food,” Boyer wrote, citing findings by numerous research teams.

That sort of activity tended to target larger birds. But smaller birds were a Polynesian target as well, in large part for their colorful feathers.

Still, that is not to say that humans were the primary cause. Habitat destruction for agriculture, and the arrival of rats, pigs and dogs could have played a role.

Rats are increasingly being recognized as an exceedingly important player in the loss of habitat. On Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for instance, while humans have traditionally been blamed for the loss of the native forest, new research is finding that loss of the dominant tree in the Rapa Nui forests may have been driven by rats eating virtually every seed—so the trees could not reproduce.

In Hawai'i as well, rats were key players, even when humans weren't even there.

“Much of the lowland forest of the ‘Ewa Plain region of Oahu appears to have been destroyed by rats even before human settlement in the area,” Boyer wrote, citing work by archaeologist Steve Athens and others.

Of all the flightless known Hawaiian birds, only one species survived to be seen by humans. It was a rail, Porzana sandwichensis, and it went extinct not long after European contact, with the arrival of new threats like roof rats, mongooses, cats and other species.

When Europeans arrived, a new wave of extinctions occurred, and it impacted a different group than the earlier wave. Among the factors implicated in the modern extinctions are further habitat loss, new predators, and the arrival of new diseases—generally ones carried by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes had not been present in prehistoric Hawai'i.

The loss of birds on the arrival of humans in a landscape is not unique to Hawai'i. Nor is the early disappearance of the large, flightless birds.

“Human colonization of the Hawaiian Islands initiated sweeping changes in the island environment including the extinction of more than 50% of native bird species. On every other island and continent examined so far, similar size-selective extinctions have followed human colonization,” Boyer wrote in her paper.

© 2008 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Conservancy fellowship seeds marine resource conservation

The Nature Conservancy of Hawai'i will help train the next generation of Hawai'i leaders in marine conservation with its new marine fellowship program.

(Photo: New Nature Conservancy marine fellows Marion Ano and Russell Amimoto inspect a beaker of zooplankton with fisheries technical Wally Ito at the state Division of Aquatic Resources' Anuenue Fisheries Research Center. Photo © Manuel Mejia/TNC.)

The program is the wet equivalent of the Conservancy's land-based program for training natural resource managers. It is supported in part by the Atherton Family Foundateion and NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program.

The organization selected from among 100 applicants to pick Russell Amimoto and Marion Ano as its first Marine Fellows.

Amimoto is a captain of the Polynesian Voyaging Society canoe Hōkūle‘a and is a canoe builder. Ano works with students at the Paepae o He‘eia and Ka Honua Momona fishponds.

The new fellows will undergo a two-year training program, led by Conservancy experts as well as scientists, conservation authorities and kūpuna, in which they will learn about monitoring and management of marine resources, as well as planning for the stewardship of Hawaiian coastal areas.

The goal of the fellowships is not to create employees for the Conservancy itself, but to seed the state with trained experts in protecting marine resources.

After two years in this program, Russell and Marion will have the necessary skills and knowledge to be highly competitive in Hawaii’s conservation job market for positions not just at the Conservancy, but at state and federal partner agencies, other NGOs, and private sector marine-based businesses. Our hope is that they will stay in the islands and help guide the future of ocean resource management in Hawai‘i,” said Kim Hum, the Conservancy's director of marine programs on the Islands.

© 2008 Jan W. TenBruggencate

Hot new car class--the extended range electric

Plug-in hybrids are all the rage, but pure electric cars are making a surge, with the announcement by several major car companies of new manufacturing plans for electrics.

And hot off the design tables is a new class of vehicle—not a gas or diesel, not a pure electric, not a hybrid. It's the “extended range electric vehicle.” More on that later.

The hottest electric vehicle out there may be the sleek Tesla Roadster (blue car above), which is promised out next year (2009). It will cost well north of $100,000, for or five times the price of a
Prius.

Nissan is the latest in the electric car field, with a proposed zero emission car that will be available in limited numbers within two years and in mass production by 2012. That's what Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn told National Public Radio.

He told the New York Times that what's driving Nissan's interest is that consumers appear to be ready for them, finally—even if government agencies haven't mandated the shift to cleaner, more efficient vehicles.

“What we are seeing is that the shifts coming from the markets are more powerful than what regulators are doing,” Ghosn told the Times.

This isn't new ground for Nissan, which put out an electric car as early as 1947. In 2000, it developed the Hypermini Urban Electric Vehicle (green Hypermini at right), which was

tested in the U.S. but never developed into a commercial model. The Hypermini was a two-seater, with batteries down low under the floor for stability. It could reach 60 miles an hour, had a 60-mile range. It was a tiny thing, eight feet long.

But it was different from the doorless golf-cart-looking vehicles that some associate with electric vehicles. The U.S. Department of Energy refers to those as NEVs, for neighborhood electric vehicles. The Hypermini fell into the class of UEVs or urban electric vehicles.

The new Nissan electric may be the same car announced in January 2008 by Renault. (Renault and Nissan are partners.) That electric car was to be built in Europe and initially sold in Israel. Some reports indicated it would be built along the lines of Renault's Megane Sport Saloon.

(Megane Sport Saloon at right)

That's a standard-looking family car, and is likely to be far more acceptable to many consumers than something looking like the Hypermini.

Hybrids, and something new

Virtually every car company is now producing or working on a hybrid car, which can run off petroleum fuel or electrical power, or a combination. They get substantially better fuel mileage than standard fuel engine cars.

What many don't know is that a couple of new classes of cars have snuck in between the hybrid and the pure electric.

One is the plug-in hybrid. Simply, it's a hybrid car that also lets you charge its batteries from the grid. The plug-in Prius, to be available next year (2009) will be the first internationally marketed plug-in hybrid.

But that's not all. There is now also the the extended range electric car.

Nissan's Ghosn said his firm could produce Renault's electric Megane in an extended range model. That car would have a gasoline engine on board—but it would only recharge batteries. It would not directly drive the car. It would be something like carrying a little generator along.

In the Wall Street Journal Thursday (May 15, 2008), Ghosn said the range extender could push the 100-mile range of a pure electric to 400 miles.

Chevrolet's Volt car, to be out in 2010, will also be an electric with a range extender. Chevy says it could have a range of 640 miles.

What this all suggests is that we're going to have to develop a new automotive lexicon.

It used to be you had the car, the truck, and later the SUV.

There's the gasoline fuel vehicle, and the diesel, and the natural gas-powered car.

And the one that can use up to 85 percent ethanol, the E85.

The straight electric vehicle (EV, plus of course modifications like the NEV and the UEV above). This one you just plug into the wall when the batteries are discharged.

The hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) of which there are now more than a dozen models on the market. Generally, this is a car whose wheels can be powered either directly from the battery bank, or directly from a fuel engine, or in various sorts of combinations—as an example, the car runs off battery until there's a demand for extra acceleration, and then the fuel engine kicks in.

The plug-in hybrid (PHEV)--the promised 2009 Prius model has gotten the most notice. With it, you can minimize the use of liquid fuel, but still have the security of being able to fuel up for long trips away from electric grids.

And the finally there is the extended range electric vehicle (EREV). As we understand it, the difference between an HEV and an EREV is primarily that the engine on the EREV cannot be used to directly power the wheels—it only generates power to the batteries.

This month's (May-June 2008) Technology Review, in an article by Kevin Bullis, makes the distinction:

"'Extended-Range Electric' vehicles represent a radical departure from conventional hybrids. Whereas in conventional hybrids, the wheels are turned by an electric motor, a gasoline engine, or both, the wheels in these new cars will be turned only by a large electric motor. For short trips, the motor will run on battery power alone. For longer trips, a gasoline-powered generator kicks in to supply electricity.”

© 2008 Jan W. TenBruggencate