If necessity is the mother of invention, perhaps money is the father of necessity. Or more accurately, the desire to make money or save money can often spark innovation more rapidly than other concerns, like the environment. Thus GE announces that it is partnering with NASA to develop a jet engine that will reduce fuel consumption by up to 26% and nitrous oxide emissions by up to 60%.

Fueling breakthrough: GE and NASA will partner to design a new jet engine that can reduce fuel consumption by up to 30 percent as compared to current engine designs. The engine leverages an open rotor fan design that helps with today’s fuel crisis.  Photo courtesy of GE.

GE's development of this engine, anticipated to be commercially available by 2018, puts them in direct competition with European company, Rolls Royce, which is also looking to cash in on the need for airlines to lower fuel costs. Both companies are gambling on open rotor technology as the solution.

In fact, this is not so much new technology as a bit of back to the future:

[GE] said rising fuel prices had led it to return to the development of open rotor technology, which had been under investigation in the 1980s but had been shelved, when oil prices fell and there had not been the same drive to cut emissions of climate change gases. - Financial Times

The project requires some serious engineering acumen, time and money. In fact, Chet Fuller, chief marketing officer for GE Aviation, expects the price tag to exceed $1 billion.  

Many obstacles remain before the envisioned open-rotor engines will be in wide use. They include finding ways to reduce the noise two rows of eight fan blades would produce as they spin through the atmosphere, connecting these huge propulsion systems solidly to what aircraft designers call the "air frame" and actually designing a flying machine that could operate safely in a busy airport while twirling the huge propellers. - The Plain Dealer

It is interesting to note the 20 years of development lost since James Hansen (pdf) first warned Congress about the dangers to our climate of continuing to emit greenhouse gases in 1988, sometime after GE shelved the original project in response to falling oil prices. Without the economic impetus, the public and private will was simply not there.

This would not be the first old technology to be resurrected in response to oil prices. Electric cars were all the rage in 1900, until Henry Ford decided to go with gas. And in the 1960's, GM had an electric Corvair that never really caught on. But today, in response to oil prices, electric cars are coming back in a big way. But will we miss another opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as oil prices continue to fall again? Will we put technology innovations that reduce fossil fuel consumption on ice when that consumption doesn't effect our pocket books quite as much? Will we mortgage the future of the environment for another 20 years?

Photo courtesy of GE

GE's partnership with NASA indicates that we won't. NASA has been out front on the urgent need to address climate change. And regardless of any temporary fall in oil prices, there is no denying that we have reached peak oil and must find ways to increase efficiency and reduce consumption. And in those 20 years since Dr. hansen first testified, the environmental community, and brave public figures like Al Gore, have worked hard to develop the public will for clean, renewable energy and greater energy efficiency.

The reality is that the price we pay for gas is not really reflected at the pump or in our airline tickets. It is a cost that we are paying right now that takes the form of poor health, compromised national security and environmental disasters and that we will pay for generations to come in the form of a planet sucked dry and warmed beyond repair.