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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.'"
You *are* aware that most naval vessels are nuclear powered right?
I must have missed the memo. I would have thought that the number of recreational yachts, rowboats and power boats would vastly outnumber the nuclear-powered ships.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Yah, but that's cuz she can see Russia from her house. We'd have to get the oil away from the Russians.
Just to be clear...you calculated the efficiency of the whole process from fission in the carrier's reactor to fuel in the aircraft's tank and multiplied that by the energy content of the reactor fuel and divided it by the energy content of a tank of kerosene? Really?
That doesn't quite sound like something you look up on google.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Ah, yes, sorry, hydrogen is so hard to store and so dangerous, I forgot... Whereas nuclear reactors and bombs are so safe... http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/lapcat.html Oh yeah, and the Russians made this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu-155 The major problem is usually the sourcing of hydrogen - but that has been solved in this case. BTW are you two in some sort of anti-hydrogen lobby group or something? just curious...
I respectfully disagree. I don't think that you can say that it was necessarily God's will that a church be destroyed in Minneapolis. In Luke 13, Jesus touches on a disaster story of the day, which could parallel your story of the church being struck in Minneapolis. Jesus mentions a disaster story in which the Tower of Siloam fell killing 18 Jewish people. His commentary on this, was not that these people had done something wrong and deserved judgment more than the rest. But unless they had a change of mind, they too would pass away.
One of the tragedies of the Christian Church today is the lack of understanding regarding the power of God. One powerful scripture on faith and the power of God is in Matthew 17:20, Jesus states "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you." I believe that if one were educated in the power of God that this disaster could have been averted.