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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.'"
There's a practical limit to the CO2 that the oceans can absorb.
I think the point being made above is that if we're sucking the CO2 out of the ocean in the first place, it'll make a buffer to absorb what we've extracted. Or to use an analogy, we're emptying the carbon sink on the one hand and topping it up with the other, hopefully leaving things even.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
And by my Google search estimates a carrier only has enough fuel for about 1,000 flights before exhausting its supply and needing a tanker.
I imagine during combat operations that doesn't last terribly long. And having to pull along side another vessel and safely pumping that fuel has got to provide some pretty serious tactical limitations.
What part of "works with existing cars and existing refueling stations" is confusing you hippes?
There's only recently been an announcement of a standard plug for electric cars. Note that an "announcement" is not manufacturing, or even a commitment to manufacturing. We've still got the inevitable patent wrangles, the embrace-extend debacles, breakaway standards, and the litigation and class action suits to go before we'll have a standard plug, and then we have to build the charging infrastructure, on top of a creaking already over-strained electrical grid.
Sorry, I put far too much thought into that. Try to read it really slowly.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Plenty of energy - not so much to spare once you account for propulsion, hotel loads, steam for the catapults, etc...
Actually, most of the time the plant isn't loaded heavily at all--most of its capacity is there solely for moving at high speed. Since you don't do that very often (you get to wherever you're going and then putt around in little rectangles), there's plenty of power available for doing something like this.
Carriers are big, but they are stuffed full of what they need to fight - and fuel tanks are tucked into odd corners well below the water line. Not much spare room for the major industrial plant required to produce sufficient fuel in a reasonable amount of time.
For what it's worth, the one I was on had several not-too-small empty spaces, certainly enough to install small test plants. I'm sure if this turns out to be viable, newer ships could be designed with plenty of room for fuel generators.
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