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US Navy Tries To Turn Seawater Into Jet Fuel
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that, faced with global warming and potential oil shortages, the US Navy is experimenting with making jet fuel from seawater by processing seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel. The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen — obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity — to make a hydrocarbon fuel, a variant of a chemical reaction called the Fischer-Tropsch process, which is used commercially to produce a gasoline-like hydrocarbon fuel from syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen often derived from coal. The Navy team have been experimenting to find out how to steer the CO2-producing process away from producing unwanted methane by finding a different catalyst than the usual one based on cobalt. 'The idea of using CO2 as a carbon source is appealing,' says Philip Jessop, a chemist at Queen's University adding that to make a jet fuel that is properly 'green,' the energy-intensive electrolysis that produces the hydrogen will need to use a carbon-neutral energy source; and the complex multi-step process will always consume significantly more energy than the fuel it produces could yield. 'It's a lot more complicated than it at first looks.'"
Mod parent funny at least. (no mod points for me, it's been a long drought)
There's a big ELCA meeting where they voted to acknowledge "chaste" same-sex relationships, paving the way for openly gay clergy.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
and this is why DotyEnergy, who the navy appears to be stealing this technology from, planned on using off-peak wind energy in their economic model to produce fuel theour WRGS/RFTS processing...
Read about what the navy is pirating from dotyenergy.com. Specifically, chheck oout the following articles http://dotyenergy.com/Home/WhatsNew.htm. Doty has over 60 world patents on the technology involved in this process and has been working on refinements for decades...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Well, it;s not as nice as DotyEnergy's nearly identical solution, backed by over 60 patents, that I think the Navy is trying to usurp... basically, the idea is this CO2 is not from FOSSIL sources, and would return to the ocean over decades, not to the ground over millions of years.
In doty's case, they're using sequestered CO2 from coal output, so they're reusing CO2 that would already be released, and therefore can be 100% CO2 nuetral, the navy's solution is not as green. it's also FAR more complicated (filtering water, dealing with sea water waste contaminants, and more).
http://dotyenergy.com/Home/WhatsNew.htm
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.