Plane information for a project???

Question

I'm doing a project, and I need to find out approximately how much gas is released into the atmosphere by planes every year. Anyone have an idea?

Answer 1

It depends on what you mean by "gas."  Jet engines release an exhaust that is made up primarily of water vapor and carbon dioxide, with some small amount of noxious combustion products, chiefly carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide.

Of this exhaust, 80 percent is water vapor, and 19.8 percent is carbon dioxide, leaving about two tenths of one percent for all the gunk.

So jet engines and turboprob engines are really pretty clean.  Piston engines nowadays make up a tiny fraction of all engines in flight, and most of them are modern, efficient engines that are about as clean as a small car.

So if the whole aviation industry uses up, say, 16 billion gallons of fuel, then 12.8 billion gallons, or about 3 million tons, comes out as water vapor, and about 600,000 tons as carbon dioxide.

Given that the earth's whole atmosphere weighs about 4 million billion tons, that doesn't seem like very much, does it?

Answer 2

ATL (are you a southern belle?), in 2000,  the airlines domestically, here in the USA, consumed 14.8 billion gallons of jet fuel. This is all turned into gas.

A lot of the by-product of burning kerosene is water vapor which does not effect things, generally speaking.

350 million gallons of jet fuel consumed by aircraft will yield 3,8 million tons of CO2.

I was unable to find any statistics for world-wide jet fuel consumption on the www. Try the American Petroleum Institute and see if they can get it for you.