Navy Creates Fuel From Seawater

New submitter lashicd sends news that the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory has announced a successful proof-of-concept demonstration of converting seawater to liquid hydrocarbon fuel. They used seawater to provide fuel for a small replica plan running a two-stroke internal combustion engine. "Using an innovative and proprietary NRL electrolytic cation exchange module (E-CEM), both dissolved and bound CO2 are removed from seawater at 92 percent efficiency by re-equilibrating carbonate and bicarbonate to CO2 and simultaneously producing H2. The gases are then converted to liquid hydrocarbons by a metal catalyst in a reactor system. ... NRL has made significant advances in the development of a gas-to-liquids (GTL) synthesis process to convert CO2 and H2 from seawater to a fuel-like fraction of C9-C16 molecules. In the first patented step, an iron-based catalyst has been developed that can achieve CO2 conversion levels up to 60 percent and decrease unwanted methane production in favor of longer-chain unsaturated hydrocarbons (olefins). These value-added hydrocarbons from this process serve as building blocks for the production of industrial chemicals and designer fuels."

Comments

Cool if you have a nuke.

[Anonymous Coward]

This only makes sense if you have a nuclear reactor or long transmission lines plugged into the grid somewhere and probably belching all kinds of toxic death.
This is essentially making a complex liquid energy battery.

Re:Cool if you have a nuke.

[Lennie]

I'm sure you have heared of Moore's Law ?

Did you know solar panels are on a similar course ?:

https://www.google.com/search?...

Re:Cool if you have a nuke.

[ceoyoyo]

We have lots of options for producing electricity. We don't have very many for fuelling our cars. Hydrocarbons make a great portable energy store that we happen to already have a lot of infrastructure set up to use. Processes like these let you store energy in that portable, high density, already supported "liquid battery."

Yeah, not useful at all.

Re:Cool if you have a nuke.

[interkin3tic]

Is the "belching toxic death" thing specific to this type of nuclear reactor, or are you talking about coal?

Re:Cool if you have a nuke.

[LWATCDR]

You mean like every aircraft carrier in the US Navy?

They do.

[jcr]

All US carriers are nuclear-powered, and being able to synthesize aviation fuel would drastically reduce the logistics cost of operating them.

-jcr

Re:They do.

[CodeBuster]

It's unlikely that this would obviate completely the need for external supplies of fuel. At best it would probably only marginally decrease the depletion rate of on board stocks allowing for a somewhat longer cruise before a resupply is needed. There are probably other downsides to using this system too. For example, there are parts, maintenance and possibly extra wear and tear on the reactor which now not only has to propel the ship but also power an energy intensive conversion process from seawater to jet fuel. Indeed, the initiation energy for some of those chemical reactions is quite high which probably explains why somebody isn't already doing this on a large scale for profit here on land.

Re:They do.

[Demonantis]

Aircraft carriers are like a space limited island villages with a nuclear power plant. The power goes to more than just propulsion so its built into the design plans. Desalination, waste water treatment, and machine shops for sure. There is probably a tiny factory on board for as many products as they can have one for. Manufacturing on demand is highly desirable. Not only is resupply is a massive pain, but it takes up valuable storage space.

Re:They do.

[CodeBuster]

There's no doubt that manufacturing fuel on board is desirable from a logistics standpoint. The question is cost, not just monetary but energy. As you're no doubt aware, hydrocarbon fuels are incredibly energy dense which means that an equal amount (and probably more) energy most go into their creation from scratch using the most basic raw materials, H2, CO2 and CO. The question is how much space is available onboard for production scale versions of these reactors and how much steam and electric power will the reactor have to supply to make this work. I don't know, but I would guess lots. This fuel production sounds like an energy hungry process. How much power and steam can be spared from other onboard needs to power fuel production? Would this stress the reactors, possibly reducing service life or requiring more frequent nuclear refuels? There are trade-offs here, it's not a slam dunk.

Re:They do.

[smash]

Also, its about time we had another look at the LFTR reactors.

Re:They do.

[flyingsquid]

There's no doubt that manufacturing fuel on board is desirable from a logistics standpoint.

Is it, though? If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose. Pretty much any ship will work if it will carry enough- for example in the summer fishing season in Alaska, the canneries hire on the big Bering Sea crab boats to act as tenders, and they provide fuel to the smaller salmon boats. Refueling a destroyer at sea isn't all that different except in scale, and the Navy has logistics ships designed specifically to do this.

The other variable that needs to be considered is time. I'm guessing that not only is this process very energy-intensive, it takes a while. The article shows them fueling a hobby plane with the fuel they've generated, which suggests they're not exactly churning the stuff out by the barrel. Unless you can create a system that can deliver tens of thousands of gallons a day, it's probably going to be far faster to divert a support ship and have it show up with 7 million gallons of the stuff.

And realistically, when is a carrier or other ship likely to be far from supply lines? Current and potential flashpoints would include places like Syria, the Ukraine, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Taiwan, and North Korea. Likely areas of operation for the Navy will be the Mediterranean, Arabian Sea, South China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. None are far from civilization. Not coincidentally, the U.S. already has bases near all of these places. The U.S. Navy did have a tough time in the Pacific theater in WWII, trying to fight the Japanese in Indonesia on the far side of the Pacific, and that was even after they had the good fortune that the Japanese didn't think to bomb the fuel tanks in Hawaii. Part of what they learned from Pearl Harbor is that you don't wait until the fighting starts to establish a supply chain and stockpile fuel.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

former navy machinist mate here - theres more available space than most people realize on a carrier. we were exceptionally good space management, so that wouldnt be an issue. the reactors wouldnt have an issue with producing enough energy - the whole powerplant is built with a ton of production headroom. we would often operate with up to 1/3 of our equipment either off or idling and still be well below the energy demands of the ship, even during flight ops in combat zones. there would be a slight reduction in how long the fuel would last, maybe 20 years instead of 25. but, to have onboard aviation fuel production would be very very worth it. stress to the reactors would be minimal, theyre designed to be operated at high capacity for extended amount of time and the navy doesnt come anywhere near running them at their actual capacity - everything is designed with a LOT of headroom! youre right that it isnt a slam dunk, but it is very doable

Re:They do.

[pupsocket]

Japan, like most of civilization, is not a fuel source, just a fuel depot. A foreign base is an advantage and a disadvantage, an overhead expense, a sore in foreign relations, and a vulnerability requiring additional defense.

As far as supply lines go, this is like taking off the pump-fed diving suit and breathing with gills.

Your point is well taken if this process is just an auxiliary. But if every vessel in an armada can refill from purpose-built reactor-powered saltwater-crackering seaworthy catalytic beds, then it's a much different force, one that can't be stopped at the Solomon Islands.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's unlikely that this would obviate completely the need for external supplies of fuel.

That is the exact mission goal. Obviously this is not TRL-7, but when it is, the nuclear reactor on the aircraft carrier supplies well enough energy to produce fuel for the aircraft it carries.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

F-18 going Mach 0.5 sea level = 163 gallons per minute

F/A-22A typically results in a cruise fuel burn of around 6,000 to 7,000 lb/hr

Re:They do.

[drinkypoo]

There's no doubt that manufacturing fuel on board is desirable from a logistics standpoint.

Is it, though? If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose.

And a supply line for those ships, and all the military vessels that entails. If you don't need the supply line, then you can project force with many fewer vessels.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a quick approximation, I'd guess that the power being used to drive a carrier is much, much greater than that being used to drive the aircraft it carries. So, even if the process of converting nuclear power to aviation fuel is much less efficient than using it directly to drive a turbine, the energy required for this will be small compared to the total output of a carrier's reactor.

This isn't a slam-dunk, but it's a quick this-probably-isn't-a-problem.

Re:They do.

[JoeMerchant]

The onboard nuke can cruise an aircraft carrier at 30+ knots. If this tech can fit inside a fuel bunker ship with a carrier nuke to power it, then you've got a bunker ship that never needs to return to port...

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thorium fuel is highly available, and the fuel is a natural neutron-absorber, so the natural state of the reactor should you need to SCRAM is to shut down the neutron chain reaction and push the molten salt fuel out of the reactor core, where it is cooled. And the fuel byproduct is only dangerously radioactive for a couple hundred years, and after that, it is safer to handle than Uranium ore. And it can't be weaponized.

So, do we have a requisite $40 billion to earmark to this program and get it up and running? I'm sure we could have pocket plants up and down the seaboard, churning out electricity and converting seawater to long chain hydrocarbons for use in industry and as a stored fuel source. I would predict energy independence in under a decade if we were to fund this like another Manhattan Project and recruit the best minds from various industries and share the results with the rest of the world.

Right now, this seems more promising than investing more money into plants that use Uranium-cycle fuel. These plants have proven to be too vulnerable to human error and natural disaster, and the expensive long-term storage of spent fuel that has to be kept away for several thousand years. And this spent fuel can very easily become a weapon in the wrong hands.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sig is the same as your user name, you dolt. Cut that shit. You're not cool.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have two thoughts countering your statement above. The first being that the process described is still in a prototype phase of development. Commenting on what scale it is possible to use the process on seems a bit premature. Second, the military has a long tradition of "hope for the best, prepare for the worst." When places like North Korea and Iran are working to become nuclear powers, it is the duty of military planners to imagine and plan for situations where all the easy logistical solutions become unworkable.

Re:They do.

[macpacheco]

At sea refueling trivially easy ?
Yes, it's done often, and it works, but the important aspect isn't if it's a safe/common operation, but rather cost.
It's fairly well documented that the cost to deliver jet fuel to a destroyer/cruiser/carrier in the middle of an Ocean is anything but cheap. "trivially easy" utterly disregards the cost of the task at hand, which is high.
Just operating oilers to transport fuel is a high enough cost.
In the long run, this technology could be perfected to cost less to produce jet fuel onboard a carrier than it would cost to purchase jet fuel on land.
Specially if Oil spikes to US$ 200 and above.
Energy independence is particularly important to the Armed Forces.
Solar energy for the Marines and the Army. Nuclear producing jet fuel for the navy, the kinds of solutions a modern army needs to avoid having your enemy artificially increasing the price to fight a war, by cutting oil supplies.

Re:They do.

[dbitter1]

then you've got a bunker ship that never needs to return to port...

If only you didn't have to power (feed) the people running it...

(Ex Navy Nuke here)

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slight issue is that there has never been a working thorium plant in existence. Might as well talk about how efficient a flux capacitor or a Klingon warp drive is in comparison if we are going balls-out fantasy here.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

everything is designed with a LOT of headroom!

Except the bunks

Re:They do.

[suutar]

There has not been a working commercial plant, but there has been a working thorium reactor. Oak Ridge had one running for 15 thousand hours. But the folks running the AEC wanted plutonium, so they shut down thorium research in 1973. wikipedia has more detail.

Re:They do.

[JoeMerchant]

then you've got a bunker ship that never needs to return to port...

If only you didn't have to power (feed) the people running it...

(Ex Navy Nuke here)

True enough, but isn't food a little more compact and easy to procure than jet fuel for carrier flight ops?

I was thinking more along the lines of the "fuel ship" staying on station in-theater, and swapping crew as needed, forgot about the food, but I suppose that would happen at the same time that people rotate back to shore.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

SO... the engines, they CAN take more. Good to know. Thanks for the update, Scotty.

Re:They do.

[luckymutt]

The obvious solution, then, would be to have the carrier pull double duty as a fishing trawler! Mmmm...seafood.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't know, but I would guess lots.

It's not hard to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation with high-school chemistry. Let's say we're making isooctane from carbon dioxide and hydrogen. That's

8CO2 + 25H2 -> C8H18 + 16H2O

Heat of formation (kJ/mol) is about
Isooctane -260
Carbon Dioxide -390
Water: -285
Hydrogen: 0

-3120 kJ -> -4845 kJ

Forming hydrocarbons from hydrogen tends to be exothermic, 1.7 MJ per mole of isooctane in this case. That's about one third of the isooctane's fuel value.

Homework: repeat the analysis with Gibb's free energy. At what temperatures is the reaction spontaneous?

Re:They do.

[rahvin112]

And the new carriers being designed with energy weapons in mind have TWO reactors. They have twice the energy capacity of the current carriers.

Re:They do.

[denis-The-menace]

And since then, the existing Nuke industry have made puppeticians create laws to PREVENT new nuclear tech from being developed.

Only the military can get around such laws against progress.

This is why this is geared towards military needs.

Re:They do.

[dbIII]

I thought they all did so that if one reactor had to be shut down the thing wouldn't just bob about in the current.

Re:They do.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Navy creates fuel from seawater

"In an unrelated story, the USS John C. Stennis drove off the side of a road and crashed last night in mysterious corcumstances, while driving home from work along a mountain pass in Virginia. Police are investigating but there is no immediate evidence of foul play."

Re:They do.

[LWATCDR]

All current carriers also have two reactors. The first carrier the USS Enterprise had 8 reactors. The Ford's new reactors do make more power but the amount is not publicly available. We do know they make 3 times as much electrical power but that does not include the propulsion power.

Re:They do.

[Amtrak]

Why have a crew at all... we have self flying plains why not supply ships.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reactor on a Nimitz class carrier is rated at 550MWth, they have two, and they put out at least 200MW of electrical power. Since 30% seems to be a normal-ish conversion ratio, it's fair to say that the reactors could fairly easily get access to 100MW of spare power, and up to 500MWth of additional steam if that's useful. That's a lot of power.

The ship carries 90 planes, an F-18 holds about 11,000lbs of fuel, so for every plane to fly twice in a day you'd need about 2 million pounds of fuel per day. Jet fuel is about 43MJ/kg, so at 100% efficency you'd need about 500MW of power to have enough fuel to fill every plane twice for the day. Only things are not 100% efficient, at 50% efficiency you'd need 1GW of power.

That sounds like a LOT of power, but if your process could run off steam alone, it actually might be possible, or at least it could provide a significant fraction of fuel and prove to be a reliable emergancy backup.

As for when does the military need it? ALWAYS, right now it isn't an issue, but our military does not have ships for right now, they have ships for the worst war ever, where our refinaries are under attack, as are our resupply lines, and supplies are very often a prime target in war. A ship that can't be starved of supplies has a huge military advantage, even if it's not enough to run full operations, it looks like it probably is enough to ensure that they can always fly a few planes of fuel produced onboard.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose.

What are logistics, for whatever you're retarded yet outspoken ass is worth, Trubeck.

Re:They do.

[leonardluen]

F-18 going Mach 0.5 sea level = 163 gallons per minute

about 2.3 miles per gallon? not bad, much better than i thought it would do.

better than some super cars

Re:They do.

[leonardluen]

oops sorry i guess i was mixing miles per hour and gallons per minute in my units

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

nuclear really isn't much more advanced than steam engines. that is all they really are, just using uranium to make the steam instead of burning wood.

we have a long way to go before figuring out how to power an airplane with it

Re:They do.

[Sardaukar86]

[snip] ..then it's a much different force, one that can't be stopped at the Solomon Islands.

Great point - that's exactly what this is all about: military war-fighting capability. The potential (positive) impact this technology might have on naval logistics is just icing on the cake for them.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

The USS Enterprise had eight reactors because they took a traditional oil-fueled carrier design and replaced the eight boilers with eight submarine reactors. Subsequent nuclear carriers were designed from scratch and had fewer, larger reactors.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are several working thorium plants in India. There are no working LFTR plants, though the one at Oak Ridge National Labs did work and run net-positive energy.

Re:They do.

[LWATCDR]

Yes they used a sub reactor because they had them.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Witness the sheer intelligence (not) of Sardaukar86 (foaming @ the mouth) http://news.slashdot.org/comme... + http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Re:They do.

[redlemming]

At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose.

If you study the history of naval operations in the 20th Century, you'll find that navy vessels have had to operate under a wide variety of weather conditions. You can find lots of descriptions of warships experiencing brutal conditions, and some great pictures.

Becoming a bit more informed about the reality of naval operations may cause you to rethink your ideas concerning the difficulty of seemingly simple tasks.

For example, it is impossible to look at some of the awe-inspiring pictures of the icebound ships involved in the Arctic convoys to Russia during WW2, and continue to keep the mental impression that on-deck or ship-to-ship operations are always going to be "trivially easy".

Suppose we ignore the complicated issues of getting the fuel to the right location on earth at the right time, during wartime.

At sea refuelling is still a dangerous and tricky operation.

A certain amount of risk is inherent to moving flammable material from one moving object with lots of metal parts (and high voltage electrical machinery) to a nearby moving object, both subject to wind and wave action. Sea and wind conditions can easily be such that merely going on deck is extremely dangerous.

A high level of skill and professionalism on the part of Navy crews is required to make this difficult operation look easy and be somewhat routine.

Even with all this experience, there will be times when it simply isn't practical to transfer fuel. Further, people still get injured doing this (for example, four sailors were injured 16 Oct 2012 aboard the Harry S. Truman during exactly such a transfer, when a line parted).

Look up "underway replenishment" for more detail on the issues that can complicate the process.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

APK rapes children.

Re:They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/comments.p... -- I heard that he found a bunch of porn on APK's hard drive, too--you'll never guess what kind (ha).

Just like Nuclear Fusion

[scum-e-bag]

Just like Nuclear Fusion it will be commercially viable in 7-10 years...

From the Article:

The predicted cost of jet fuel using these technologies is in the range of $3-$6 per gallon, and with sufficient funding and partnerships, this approach could be commercially viable within the next seven to ten years. Pursuing remote land-based options would be the first step towards a future sea-based solution.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[popo]

No. Nothing like nuclear fusion. This is not an energy source. It is a fuel source.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Firethorn]

Interesting. $3/gallon would be commercially viable right now.

It's just another data point that causes me to thing that our transition away from liquid fossil fuels is likely to be rather precipitous, faster than the transition away from leaded gasoline(which is barely within my memory).

All it takes is the first commercial project producing bio-fuel to start making money, then development work will drop the price of biofuel even as the cost of extracting fossil fuel will continue to rise.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[edibobb]

It takes more energy to make hydrocarbons from water and CO2 than you get when you burn the hydrocarbons. It's the law. Without a LOT if energy input, you'll never create the fuel.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[rossdee]

But you can use a fission reactor. And the Navy has fission reactors at sea (and underneath it)

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[blackicye]

No. Nothing like nuclear fusion. This is not an energy source. It is a fuel source.

I think the parent was referring to the power that would need to be input into these processes. Without nuclear power of some sort, this would be kinda pointless for the Navy's purposes.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Chrisq]

Just like Nuclear Fusion it will be commercially viable in 7-10 years...

Nuclear fusion is commercially available already, you just can't have your own reactor.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[wonkey_monkey]

I think that's sort of what the GP is getting at. It's a fuel source, not an energy source.

It takes more energy to make hydrocarbons from water and CO2 than you get when you burn the hydrocarbons.

What about the energy currently required to keep ships stocked up on aviation fuel, though?

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Captain Hook]

Without a LOT if energy input, you'll never create the fuel.

I can't work out if you are agreeing with the GP or failing to understand his point.

His

This is not an energy source. It is a fuel source.

sentence is saying it's just a way of producing fuel, it's not a source of energy.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[CodeBuster]

You do realize that what they're producing here is artificial jet fuel, right? It's not "biofuel" because it isn't produced by bacteria or algae or other direct biological process. No, what they're talking about here is essentially the water gas shift reaction whereby dissolved CO2 in the seawater is combined with water vapor (aka steam) and carbon monoxide (produced via this "bicarbonate" reactant?) to yield carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen which more heat and pressure (steam) in the presence of an iron catalyst converts these products into short chain hydrocarbons (alkenes), probably ethanes (CH3) and propanes (CH4), and from there longer chain hydrocarbons with more heat and pressure until the desired blend is cooked up, jet fuels of CH9 to CH16. However, these processes don't really transition us away from fossil fuels or at least not into something besides a hydrocarbon fuel, whether produced artificially as in this case or refined from naturally occurring crude oil that we've pumped out of the ground.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[ShieldW0lf]

No. Nothing like nuclear fusion. This is not an energy source. It is a fuel source.

I think the parent was referring to the power that would need to be input into these processes. Without nuclear power of some sort, this would be kinda pointless for the Navy's purposes.

I think the guy was intending to express his skepticism that we will ever see this happen. Nuclear fusion is the new Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[smash]

You mean like this?

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[smash]

You realise that doesn't make it a FOSSIL fuel right?

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[virtualXTC]

Nuclear Fission =! Nuclear FUsion

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[virtualXTC]

NO! You cannot buy the sun. Solar power != commercially available nuclear fusion Moreover, just because Victorians could purchase steam turbines, doesn't mean nuclear fission was commercially available to them either.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize he addressed that in his final sentence right?

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[PRMan]

Dissolved ocean fossils don't count?

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Talderas]

I don't think this would be viable on a submarine. They don't carry planes and space on submarines is typically hard to come by. Now it might be interesting to engineer a submarine purpose built to create fuel but that seems needlessly complicated when all the recipients of said fuel are surface vessels.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Talderas]

It shows up 20 years later and is a huge disappointment?

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Talderas]

If it was widespread and viable it means the fuel is coming out of the ocean rather from underground. So the carbon being released into the air would be the very sort of carbon that is being trapped in the oceans rather than stuff that's been locked underground for millions of years.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Martin Blank]

It's worth a thought experiment. A submarine fuel facility has the advantage of not being affected much by the surface seas. Perhaps it wouldn't go deep, but instead remain about 60 feet or so underwater. A float mechanism could be used to hoist the hoses to the surface, and then the hoses could be connected for fueling. This would keep the fueling platform itself stable and reduce the risks involved in a collision. It would probably require a significant re-engineering of the coupling mechanism, and I'm not sure how refueling underway would be accomplished, but maybe someone else has an idea.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Ol Olsoc]

What about the energy currently required to keep ships stocked up on aviation fuel, though?

Bingo. You mean the ships using some of that fuel, the staffing, the construction of fuel depots, the logistics chain of figuring out who gets the fuel, then the refuelers heading back empty to get more fuel to start all over again? The energy costs must be staggering.

Only in slashdot world would the brains that be, assume that the supply chain costs nothing.

When the supply chain is taken into account, that "made on board" fuel would have to be very expensive indeed before supply ship fuel would be cheaper.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[cold fjord]

Nuclear fusion is the new Duke Nukem Forever.

Duke Nukem Forever stole the time schedule for nuclear fusion and tried to implement it in code. Unfortunately they were not able to successfully implement that schedule and so they ended up actually shipping the game.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Firethorn]

You do realize that what they're producing here is artificial jet fuel, right?

Yes. I mistyped. I've seen lots of estimates for the cost of artificial/biologically sourced fuels where the low end is competitive with current fossil fuels. I also know that the last time the Navy sourced biofuel for testing purposes it worked out to around $30/gallon, but that was for a relatively small scale test.

It's all about the economics of scale at this point - I figure that the moment a biofuel producer(or non-fossil artificial creator) can *beat* fossil fuels it'll be a gold rush to produce enough facilities.

However, these processes don't really transition us away from fossil fuels or at least not into something besides a hydrocarbon fuel, whether produced artificially as in this case or refined from naturally occurring crude oil that we've pumped out of the ground.

As long as we get away from fossil fuels to something renewable or at least able to last more than a couple centuries without screwing up our environment I'm good.

This process doesn't, which is why I ended up putting 'biofuel' in there, because this wouldn't scale up short of building a few hundred nuclear plants, or a ridiculous number of solar panels/wind turbines and such.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[dbIII]

Fusion was shipped by Teller in 1956. Packing it into smaller boxes has been the problem since then.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[leonardluen]

This is being developed for the millitary, it doesn't every really have to be commercially viable. it just has to be viable enough to allow extended operations while reducing need for resupply to be be considered viable.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Sardaukar86]

You are quite correct of course. For some reason that use of fusion fell out of favour though, so we need a family-friendly variety. Lockheed-Martin to the rescue?

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[scum-e-bag]

Yes. That was my intention. Well done.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Witness the sheer intelligence (not) of Sardaukar86 (foaming @ the mouth) http://news.slashdot.org/comme... + http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Rato Ruter]

All it takes is the first commercial project producing bio-fuel to start making money, then development work will drop the price of biofuel even as the cost of extracting fossil fuel will continue to rise.

Did you know that since the 1970's around half the cars in Brazil are fueled by ethanol produced from sugar cane? You would think that a demonstration this wide was convincing enough, but here we are still gargling oil.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Firethorn]

I knew that about half of them were capable of it, the actual amounts of ethanol has varied over the years depending on how the supplies worked out.

Unfortunately the capability to produce ethanol from sugar cane is limited due to the climate it needs to grow. Which is why the USA tried corn.

Personally, I hold higher long-term hopes for algae and biodiesel.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[Rato Ruter]

Since the 1970's, cars have been run on ethanol; but until recently (post 2000 or so), you had to choose either gasoline or ethanol and buy a car based on this choice. Nowaday most (if not all) new cars produced there are capable of using both in any proportion. And where would the biodiesel come from? Algae for fuel is something I hadn't heard before, I'll look into it. One promissing source of fuel is the digestion of celulose, this is what I'm hoping for.

Re:Just like Nuclear Fusion

[smash]

Nuclear fusion = not required.

Both worlds, oh ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks like you get both worlds: nuclear and solar fuel.

You need a nuclear plant to power the converter, and you use the sea as a solar panel to get the H2 in it.

The only nice point would be: CO2 sink. The world has too much CO2, that could consume a few part of it to make back long hydrocarbon.

The new plane are to be electric... the new electricity storage is to be done in fuel. Forget NiCd and other Nickel based product.

Re: Both worlds, oh ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that you're extracting the locked up CO2 in the seawater in order to release it into the atmosphere. The oceans are the world's largest CO2 sinks. The last thing we need is a way to release that CO2.

Re: Both worlds, oh ironic

[Joce640k]

At least it's part of a CO2 cycle, not some new CO2 we dug out of the ground.

Re: Both worlds, oh ironic

[smash]

If only we could extract CO2 from the atmosphere

Re: Both Worlds, oh ironic

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right - and it links two of the biggest "fighting words" for the environmental community: nuclear power and hydrocarbon fuels. Though since it would substitute carbon removed from short-term storage for carbon removed from geological-term storage, the result might be slightly "better" though not so the atmosphere would notice. Military would be happy, though - if scaled it would greatly reduce logistical problems. Military operations have never been, and cannot be, very energy-efficient.

Re: Both worlds, oh ironic

[dbIII]

If only we could extract CO2 from the atmosphere

Bloody hard (or expensive) to do without creating more CO2 than we get out of it. Most of the stuff we can make carbonates out of had a carbonate precursor and the "obvious" solution of just cooling air down requires a fair bit of energy which is going to come at least partly from fossil fuels.

Re: Both worlds, oh ironic

[penguinoid]

And it would also work with solar, wind, geothermal, and whatever other source of energy people like to call renewable. (Not necessarily with the same efficiency)

Re: Both worlds, oh ironic

[smash]

Not if you run nuclear, solar, wind, etc.

You know you fucked up the water...

[YoungManKlaus]

when you can already burn it as fuel ;)

Re:You know you fucked up the water...

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Yeah, yeah. For best results they should use the tapwater from areas with fracking wells!

Re:You know you fucked up the water...

[CreatureComfort]

Yeah, I'm kind of surprised this wasn't an article about an advanced filtering technology that just separated out all the spilled hydrocarbons floating around the ocean for refining.

Any chemists want to weigh in??

[noobermin]

I just can't understand how Hydrogen gas can be produced from sea water. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[jcr]

When you electrolyze water, it divides into hydrogen and oxygen, as any 4th-grader should know.

-jcr

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[omglolbah]

This article is linked in the story article. It has a lot more info on the process.

http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/...

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Brett Buck]

Water is hydrogen and oxygen. It can be very simple and you can do it yourself in about 10 minutes. Get two pieces of wire, strip the insulation off of it, connect one to the + terminal of a 9V transistor battery, the other to the - terminal. Pour a drinking glass full of water, put in about a TBSP of salt, stir it up. Then stick the wires, separately, into the glass so they don't touch. Bubbles will appear on each wire, the negative side is hydrogen and the positive side is oxygen.

      This is impractical on the scale that TFA talks about but its already there, all you have to is break it up.

      BTW, putting it back together generates a lot of energy , and water. That's the principle of a hydrogen fuel cell.

       

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

4th grader in what country? Your USA-centrism is showing.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not from the USA, yet I understood his point perfectly well. But then, I'm not a total douchebag like you.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[fnj]

Bubbles will appear on each wire, the negative side is hydrogen and the positive side is oxygen

Using NaCl as you describe to make the water conductive also results in the evolution of Cl - chlorine gas - more than oxygen. If your wires are bare copper, the metal also migrates from the positive wire to the negative wire, turning the solution nasty blue-green in the process.

Some caution is advised. Chlorine gas is toxic. It was used in shells to poison troops in WW1. Of course the amount is quite slight in the experiment.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[CodeBuster]

I was under the impression that electrolysis isn't a fast process but the article does mention some kind of patented "electrolytic cation exchange module", perhaps combined with some kind of "bicarbonate" reactant? In any case, it seems clear that they've found a way to substantially speed up H2 and CO2 production from seawater. From there it's not much of a stretch to produce CO and then hydrocarbon fuels, jet fuels in this case, via the well understood Fischer-Tropsch process or similar.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Hognoxious]

I was under the impression that electrolysis isn't a fast process

Depends on how much current you use.

20 years ago, I'd have been able to tell you how many litres per second an amp will produce.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Joce640k]

I don't even know what "4th grade" is.

How old is a "4th grader"?

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[therealkevinkretz]

How is assuming a 4th grader knows that "USA-centric"?

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[itsdapead]

Chlorine gas is toxic. It was used in shells to poison troops in WW1.

Whereas both hydrogen and oxygen are perfectly safe and have never been known to case any sort of problem whatsoever... well, ok, there was the Hindenburg, and Apollo 1, and...

So if you do the described experiment while locked in a badly-ventilated room, leave it running for long enough to increase Ever Ready's share price by 1%, ignore the eye-watering stink that even a whiff of chlorine will produce and then light a cigarette, you could be in real trouble. If only from all the crap in the cigarette smoke...

However, all this pales into insignificance alongside the experiment's reckless use of the liquid death that is Dihydrogen Monoxide!

Seriously, guys, when everything is described as dangerous, nothing gets treated as dangerous. If you're not sure what it is, don't wait for someone on the internet to tell you not to snort it.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

Where I come from a 4th grader is 9 years old.

Perhaps the use of a non ambiguous term is in fact warranted sometime.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[mysidia]

4th grader in what country? Your USA-centrism is showing.

In other first world countries; any 2nd grader should know this.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[mysidia]

Using NaCl as you describe to make the water conductive also results in the evolution of Cl - chlorine gas - more than oxygen.

Use Sulphuric acid, or Sodium Hydroxide instead of NaCl.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is your friend.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

An amp of current produces about a half a litre per hour of hydrogen gas. A 9V batter with 0.5-1 Ahr is not going to produce less than a litre of hydrogen gas, which wouldn't be a problem even in a small closet. Unless you use some electrolyte or dirty vessel combination that results in a foamy surface trapping the hydrogen and oxygen gas close together, you won't have a problem with using just small household batteries. Chlorine on the other hand can cause coughing and vomiting at a thousandth of the concentration of where hydrogen can be a problem.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[interkin3tic]

So your point is DON'T be cautious when doing hydrolysis experiments at home?

when everything is described as dangerous, nothing gets treated as dangerous.

We're already there. Table salt has warnings on it.

8. EMERGENCY AND FIRST AID PROCEDURE Inhalation: Remove from exposure. If breathing is difficult or has stopped, administer artificial respiration or oxygen as indicated. Immediately seek medical aid. Skin Contact: Wash thoroughly with soap and water. Seed medical aid. Eye Contact: Flush immediately with large amounts of water, lifting the lower and upper lids occasionally. Seed medical help. Ingestion: Give 1 -2 large glasses of water or milk. Induce vomiting. Immediately seek medical aid. Never give liquids to an unconscious person.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

Please. The American education system isn't that good. First grade. Maybe kindergarten.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[itsdapead]

An amp of current produces about a half a litre per hour of hydrogen gas. A 9V batter with 0.5-1 Ahr is not going to produce less than a litre of hydrogen gas, which wouldn't be a problem even in a small closet.

A litre? OK, you get to stick the burning splint into the collection bottle to test that it's hydrogen. I'm quite attached to my eyebrows. A few ccs in a test tube is enough for a satisfying 'pop'.

Half a litre of pure O2 is more than enough to do something inadvisable with, too. Pass the wire wool and the blowtorch please...

However, I wasn't suggesting that the hydrogen and oxygen were more of a deadly peril than the chlorine - just that its silly to single out one chemical because its been used in warfare and ignore the other potential risks. G.P. forgot to tell people not to drink the electrolyte, swallow the battery or get strands of copper wire stuck in their fingers.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the post you are replying to more closely. It was in response to the idea that doing this in a badly ventilated room would be a problem. A liter of hydrogen in a small closet or meter cube box is not a problem. If you are purposely collecting it and keeping it concentrated, that is a different story (even then, a fraction of a liter is not a big deal, I have held the burning splint for demonstrations of that), just as the comment warns that foam trapping the gas can cause a problem (even then only if you stick your face in it while lighting it). If you are just showing that bubbles are created or using it for other purposes like demonstrating electrochemistry or rust removal, then there is no reason to collect the hydrogen and even a small room is safe until you break out a decent amperage power supply. And if you are collecting the hydrogen, then just don't use too large of a container, and even if it overfills it won't be a problem.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[mpe]

When you electrolyze water, it divides into hydrogen and oxygen, as any 4th-grader should know.

It's actually easier using sea water. All the disolved salt means that the water is quite a good conductor. With freshwater you tend to need to add either a salt or an acid...

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

And then forget it by the 4th grade? Your logic optional thinking is showing.

BTW, no 1st world country teaches 2nd grade students chemistry at that level.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[dbIII]

Whereas both hydrogen and oxygen are perfectly safe

I met a guy that was right in the middle of a fairly big hydrogen explosion in a pyrometallurgy lab. He was fine and barely lost his eyebrows. Some distance away from the ignition source however the wave front built up enough energy to blow bricks out of the wall.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Xoltri]

I just demonstrated this to my 5 year old literally yesterday, and he's in kindergarten!

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Xoltri]

My favorite is the MSDS for sand. Like at the park. Imagine this warning at the playground, haha!

Personal Protection: Safety glasses. Lab coat. Dust respirator. Be sure to use an approved/certified respirator or equivalent. Gloves.

Personal Protection in Case of a Large Spill: Splash goggles. Full suit. Dust respirator. Boots. Gloves. A self contained breathing apparatus should be used to avoid inhalation of the product. Suggested protective clothing might not be sufficient; consult a specialist BEFORE handling this product.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

In other first world countries; any 2nd grader should know this.

I doubt that .. I didn't know what electrolysis is when I was in 2nd year of school (8 years old). Perhaps 5-6th grade.
7th grade - definitely.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[Anonymous Coward]

When you make a post logged in, it shows your name already so typing a sig after isn't needed...as any 4th grader should know.

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[noobermin]

Well, that's why what I was confused about. AFAIK, electrolyzing takes more energy than you get in the output. How is this a net gain?

Re:Any chemists want to weigh in??

[jcr]

I sign my posts because I feel like doing so. Your approval is neither sought nor required, newb.

-jcr

Next step for profit

[cripkd]

Next step is to find a country where they have too little democracy but a lot of this "seawater" they mention.

Re:Next step for profit

[Anonymous Coward]

They've already found that country, and they're testing it right now.

Re:Next step for profit

[CodeBuster]

Next step is to find a country where they have too little democracy but a lot of this "seawater" they mention.

California?

Re:Next step for profit

[Anonymous Coward]

To be completely honest, I'd like to make sure the water they used didn't come from the gulf of Mexico. We all know that one is full of oil.

Re:Next step for profit

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear Canada has 202,080km of coastline. Russia also has a pretty good amount: 37,653km.

Re:Next step for profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia is a democratic country, what do you mean? It even exports the democracy it can spare!

Re:Next step for profit

[mark-t]

It depends how small a ruler you use to measure it. Using a ruler with the precision of a Planck length, Canada's coastline to would actually be measured at over a quadrillion (1x10^15) km long, which is over 100 light years (if space were infinitely divisible, theoretically smaller rulers yet would give ever larger amounts without ever approaching any particular limit at all). There doesn't seem to be any practical point to using arbitrarily small ruler to measure things like coastline, however, since the length explodes towards infinity really without giving any more practically useful information. It's still true, however...

Just goes to show, I think, that knowing more information about something doesn't necessarily mean that information will have any practical use.

Re:Next step for profit

[tomhath]

make sure the water they used didn't come from the gulf of Mexico. We all know that one is full of oil.

Nope, the bacteria ate most of it.

Re:Next step for profit

[Rinikusu]

If anything, California has too much democracy.

Reading between the lines

[Michael Woodhams]

TFA was points to a 2012 press release, but it contains not much more information. They must need to supply energy to this reaction, but whether this energy is as heat, electricity or something else is unclear.

I see two uses from the point of view of the U.S. navy. One is to put one of these chemical plants in an aircraft carrier, power it with the carrier's reactor, and generate fuel for the aircraft on board. The other is to put the chemical plant on a nuclear powered supply ship, which will then transfer the fuel to non-nuclear surface ships.

From a world energy point of view, this is a way to turn non-fossil fuel power (nuclear, hydro, wind) into hydrocarbon fuel, with the overall process being carbon neutral. Burning fossil fuels to provide the energy for this process would certainly be counter productive in terms of CO2 emission and very likely economically counter productive as you'd be better chemically processing your fossil fuel instead.

By the time you're going to all of this trouble to turn electricity into fuel, it is unlikely that you'd want to run a car on it - you'd rather just have an electric car. For aircraft we really have no good alternative to hydrocarbon fuels, so it could be used here. However, on the road to a low-carbon future, we have decades worth of lower hanging fruit (notably coal power stations) before we really need to care about whether our aircraft fuels are carbon neutral.

Conspicuously missing from the articles is the energy efficiency of this process. Given the $3-$6 per gallon projected jet fuel cost, presumably the efficiency is not too bad. (I notice this number hasn't changed since 2012 which makes me suspicious that it is more guesswork than calculation.)

Re:Reading between the lines

[multi io]

By the time you're going to all of this trouble to turn electricity into fuel, it is unlikely that you'd want to run a car on it - you'd rather just have an electric car.

Not sure about that. Electrical energy can't be stored easily -- you need some high-tech battery with all kinds of electrolytes and complicated chemicals, and still the capacity is relatively measly. Electricity works much better if it can be consumed right after it is produced, without storing it (but if this can be achieved, electricity is otherwise very flexible -- it can be scaled up and down easily, and it can be transported quickly over long distances). HC fuels OTOH work well for storing energy -- they already store it, you just have to pour them into any airtight vessel, and they'll stay there until you burn them. So electricity and HC fuels might compliment each other quite well if the right technologies are in place. Any process that can convert electricity into fuel (and also happens to consume and thus neutralize the byproduts of burning the fuel) should be almost like a gold mine, if it can be scaled up sufficiently. So if this water-to-fuel conversion or similar processes can be made to work efficiently, chances are liquid fuels will continue to be the preferred method for large-scale mobile energy consumption needs.

Re:Reading between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

with the overall process being carbon neutral

No, it isn't. It is yet another scheme by the Republicans to put more carbon into the air. They've worked hard for decades to release as much carbon as they can from trees and from coal. Now, they want to empty the oceans of carbon.

Re:Reading between the lines

[swb]

I always thought an electrolysis plant was the ideal power sink/storage system for those renewable energy sources like wind whose availability didn't always line up with grid demand. Another good use would be desalination plants.

I know the processes are "inefficient" but efficiency shouldn't matter much if the input energy is free. It seems more inefficient to build windmills you don't let generate electricity when the wind blows.

Re:Reading between the lines

[CrimsonAvenger]

One is to put one of these chemical plants in an aircraft carrier, power it with the carrier's reactor, and generate fuel for the aircraft on board.

the nuclear plant of an aircraft carrier doesn't have the power output required to produce enough fuel for the planes operating on the carrier. Most of the power produced by those reactors comes in the form of steam for the main turbines, only a relatively small part goes to the turbogenerators that supply electricity.

And adding more turbogenerators means, basically, designing a new carrier - there's not a lot of spare space (or piping) in the current carriers for that large a mod.

Plus there's the whole "shorten the life of the reactor cores by ~75% by running them at full power all the time to make jet fuel" thing....

Re:Reading between the lines

[drinkypoo]

By the time you're going to all of this trouble to turn electricity into fuel, it is unlikely that you'd want to run a car on it - you'd rather just have an electric car.

Not sure about that. Electrical energy can't be stored easily -- you need some high-tech battery with all kinds of electrolytes and complicated chemicals, and still the capacity is relatively measly.

Most trips in cars are short. Once we can "refuel" on any streetcorner, batteries won't even seem like a hindrance any more. Contactless charging on highways will happen eventually as well. It's only really non-nuclear seacraft and heavier-than-air aircraft that are going to need to continue to burn liquid fuels for the foreseeable future.

This technology really has only valid military use, because it frees them from having to transport liquid fuels around the ocean; they only have to transport the nuclear fuel. But on land we can use free sunlight to turn water and air into hydrocarbon fuels using algae instead of a metal catalyst. You could do this in the ocean as well, but not as conveniently or reliably.

Re:Reading between the lines

[drinkypoo]

Plus there's the whole "shorten the life of the reactor cores by ~75% by running them at full power all the time to make jet fuel" thing....

It's got to still be cheaper than having to not only drag all that fuel around the oceans, but also having to have the ships to drag that fuel around, and the ships to protect those ships. Why are there so many comments in this story which completely ignore logistics? Fuel tenders don't just magic themselves to the location of your fleet.

Re:Reading between the lines

[jabuzz]

The new USS carriers have substantially higher power generation than the Nimitz class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

Re:Reading between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

What if they don't have to run it at full power, and where did you get the 75% number. I think you are making a lot of assumptions.

Re:Reading between the lines

[CrimsonAvenger]

Still not enough. I don't know what the Nimitz's electrical power generation is, but I DO know what the ratio of electrical power generation to heat generation of a nuclear submarine is.

If the two are even remotely comparable (no reason not to be, since the majority of the steam produced in a nuclear reactor aboard a ship is used to make the ship go, not to make the lights turn on), then even a Ford-class carrier can't make enough electricity to manufacture sufficient fuel onboard.

Re:Reading between the lines

[CrimsonAvenger]

It's got to still be cheaper than having to not only drag all that fuel around the oceans, but also having to have the ships to drag that fuel around, and the ships to protect those ships. Why are there so many comments in this story which completely ignore logistics? Fuel tenders don't just magic themselves to the location of your fleet.

I suspect I know more about the logistics then you do. Trust me on this, replacing reactor cores every five years, instead of every forty years, is not a trivial change in the operational capabilities of your nuclear carriers.

Even ignoring the internal changes required (be easier to do a new design from scratch than to modify the existing carriers to do this - and that means carriers capable of using this technology in 20 years or so), having to maintain extra carriers to keep the minimum number available for sea-duty is a non-trivial problem.

Re:Reading between the lines

[LWATCDR]

Actually carriers often carry fuel for other ships in the battle group and refuel them. At least they did in the past. The fuel oil is actually used to help protect the ship from torpedos.

Re:Reading between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

They must need to supply energy to this reaction, but whether this energy is as heat, electricity or something else is nuclear.

FTFY

Re:Reading between the lines

[tragedy]

Most of these processes will be using heat from steam rather than electricity. Even electrolysis is more efficient and requires less electricity when done at high temperatures. So, the thermal output of the reactor is probably more the number to pay attention to than the electrical output.

Re:Reading between the lines

[drinkypoo]

replacing reactor cores every five years, instead of every forty years, is not a trivial change in the operational capabilities of your nuclear carriers.

Nobody said it was. It only has to be more convenient than operating an entire supply line to deliver fuel, possibly halfway around the world.

Editing Fail.

[Anonymous Coward]

provide fuel for a small replica plan

"Unwanted" Methane?

[Ihlosi]

In a civilian application, it wouldn't be necessary to spend effort in the process to reduce methane production. Just feed the methane into the natural gas network.

Re:"Unwanted" Methane?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point of reducing the methane is that it is more valuable being turned into the fuel than into methane.

Re:"Unwanted" Methane?

[CodeBuster]

It depends upon what sort of fuel you're trying to produce. Methane can definitely be burned as a fuel, on your stove for example, but it's not a good aviation fuel. The idea here is to skip methane and go straight to ethane or propane which can be up-converted to even longer chain hydrocarbons via more heat and pressure, eventually yielding jet fuel. Artificial hydrocarbon fuels themselves are nothing new. The basic processes have been known since the early part of the 20th century, but because it's way cheaper to simply refine naturally occurring petroleum pumped out of the ground, nobody does synthetic hydrocarbons unless they have to. For example, Germany produced synthetic aviation gasoline from coal during WWII as supplies of oil were gradually cut off and South Africa produced diesel fuel from coal during the sanctions of the Apartheid era.

Re:"Unwanted" Methane?

[Anonymous Coward]

The methane produced in the process has to be distilled out of the product, just as it does in the Fischer-Tropsch process (which it sounds like this process includes as a final step), this consumes additional energy and reduces the overall efficiency of the process. If you can design better catalysts so that more methane is evolved into longer hydrocarbons then the distillation takes less energy, and below some lower bound the methane can be left in the fuel without issue.

While it is true that at "room" temperature, significant methane evaporation will occur when the fuel is stored, other less volatile admixtures will also enter the vapor phase, and to separate them a condenser is needed. Thus instead of the energy being consumed in the heating of the fuel, as it is for example in an ethanol or crude oil distillation, the energy is consumed generating the temperature gradient for the condenser, as this has to be cooled below ambient temperatures to separate the methane from the heavier fractions.

Specifically the methane has to be cooled to -161.49C at 1atm, though typically this condensation is done at much higher pressures to reduce the working thermal gradient and thereby improve thermodynamic efficiency (and at cryogenic temperatures methane is quite viscous).

There are also a bunch of other components which must be limited in commercial natural gas to avoid unintentional condensation or corrosion in gas pipelines.

Re:"Unwanted" Methane?

[Ihlosi]

Specifically the methane has to be cooled to -161.49C at 1atm,

In that case, you'd end up with a gaseous fraction that's mostly hydrogen, and a liquid fraction that's methane plus everything else.

I would assume you'd have to cool the mixture to a temperature between -161.49ÂC and -42ÂC (boiling point of the next heavier alkane, propane), so you get hydrogen and methane in the gaseous fraction, and propane and heavier alkanes in the liquid fraction.

Re:"Unwanted" Methane?

[mpe]

The methane produced in the process has to be distilled out of the product

If the methane is so well disolved that the only way to remove it is by distillation then does its presence really matter if the intended use is in a gas turbine engine?

Re: Cool ...

[VernonNemitz]

Yes, so long as you have sufficient energy available, you most certainly can do the "net effect" of making hydrocarbon combustion run backward. It simply takes MORE energy to do that than you got from the original hydrocarbon combustion, because of inevitable inefficiencies in the system. So, if you have the energy to waste, and have no easier supply of hydrocarbons available, this certainly is Cool. Just not very practical for everyday use, worldwide....

liquid hydrogen

[Anonymous Coward]

Conversion from hydrogen to hydrocarbon has inefficiencies. china's plan to convert coal to hydrogen to methane is about 50 percent energy efficient. For big commercial aircraft, it will be better to use liquid hydrogen directly. if you have fighter jets, then it is worth the hassle to go to long chain hydrocarbons.

Re:liquid hydrogen

[khallow]

china's plan to convert coal to hydrogen to methane is about 50 percent energy efficient. For big commercial aircraft, it will be better to use liquid hydrogen directly.

The problem with this is that it's cryogenic with an extremely low boiling point of 20 K (Kelvin). You would have to carry a much heavier tank and insulation for the liquid hydrogen on the aircraft. There's also hydrogen leaks and transport of it to the airport from wherever it is produced.

You would also need to handle boil off of hydrogen while the plane is on the ground and the hazards of handling extreme cryo fluids, which is much more dangerous than handling jet fuel/kerosene. For example, oxygen condenses at 50 K meaning a poorly insulated tank (say due to damage inflicted while conducting maintenance) could be condensing liquid oxygen inside the plane's wing.

Further, there isn't a good reusable tank material for handling liquid hydrogen. Composites weaken over time due to gas pockets in the composite material (and thermal cycling) while metals such as aluminum are subject to hydrogen embrittlement.

I think there would be a huge redesign of aircraft in order to use liquid hydrogen directly. Thicker wings say from a flying wing design would be more fuel efficient.

There would probably also be huge logistics changes. Fuel tanks would probably have to be kept at extreme cryo temperatures indefinitely (including overnight) in order to prevent thermal cycling. You couldn't have the aircraft sit on the tarmac for hours because it would either lose too much fuel due to boil off or require considerable refrigeration power to keep boil off from happening. A traffic jam combined with a hot day and loss of grid power, would be a disaster for an airport.

Meanwhile methane can be converted to normal jet fuel with some additional loss of energy. For example, a coal burning plant/refinery on site of a coal mining operation could produce methane or longer chain hydrocarbons directly.

And at the current state of affairs, the cheapest hydrogen source is methane. Any plan for creating hydrogen from water is going to run into a similar degree of energy loss as that of converting coal and water to methane and syngas.

Re:liquid hydrogen

[mpe]

For big commercial aircraft, it will be better to use liquid hydrogen directly.

In order to be liquid the hydrogen needs to stay between -259 and -253 C. Hardly going to be easy to arrange in the wings of an aircraft. Never mind that such low temperatures are also likely to render the material far to brittle to function as a wing. Even trying to fill the tanks of an A380 with liquid hydrogen would probably destroy the plane before the engines could be started.

Re:liquid hydrogen

[mpe]

The problem with this is that it's cryogenic with an extremely low boiling point of 20 K (Kelvin). You would have to carry a much heavier tank and insulation for the liquid hydrogen on the aircraft.

Which would reduce both payload and fuel capacity.

You would also need to handle boil off of hydrogen while the plane is on the ground

Not just whilst on the ground. The ambient temperature at FL400 is still well above the boiling point of hydrogen. So further reducing range is going to be refrigeration. Boiling fuel in a wing tank is likely to be a very bad thing.

Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[Dave Emami]

What I'm wondering is, can they modify this process to produce edible hydrocarbons? Probably not something you'd enjoy eating, but the primary limitation on a nuclear submarine's endurance is the food supply for the crew.

Re:Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[Joce640k]

the primary limitation on a nuclear submarine's endurance is the food supply for the crew.

Under what circumstances would that actually be a problem?

Re:Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[Registered Coward v2]

What I'm wondering is, can they modify this process to produce edible hydrocarbons? Probably not something you'd enjoy eating, but the primary limitation on a nuclear submarine's endurance is the food supply for the crew.

While that is true, it really isn't an issue operationally. You can cram enough food onboard to last a long time, although towards the end powdered eggs get old. Given the space limitations inherent in a submarine it would make little sense to build in a food machine when the space could be better used to store real food.

Re:Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[Anonymous Coward]

But how else can you get a submarine of the damned, crewed by insane sailors, if you haven't crammed them underwater for 2 years on a diet of synthmeat?

Re:Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[Anonymous Coward]

A modern nuclear submarine can apparently run 25 years without refueling. 25 years worth of food for the crew might take quite a bit of space.

Re:Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't eat hydrocarbons, they eat carbohydrates. One has oxygen atoms, one doesn't.
Besides, the sea is full of edible material, not sure why you'd need to produce any more artificially.

Re:Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[VortexCortex]

It's too bad there aren't any bigger fish in the sea.

Re:Hydrocarbons besides olefins?

[ByteSlicer]

but the primary limitation on a nuclear submarine's endurance is the food supply for the crew.

That's easily solved: man it with a skeleton crew...

Waste in the form of spent hydrocarbons

[Anonymous Coward]

What form of exaust waste are we talking here? Will it mean destroying the oceans now to wage peace or is it just wierding out the atmosphere?

Re:Waste in the form of spent hydrocarbons

[Anonymous Coward]

"What form of exaust waste are we talking here? "

Oxygen. It's a nasty stuff.

Energy

[janoc]

This sort of reaction is nice, but don't forget that it needs gobs and gobs of energy to build those hydrocarbons. Don't forget that the energy you use up by burning that fuel (and some, because of the poor engine efficiency, reaction losses, etc.) had to be "put in" first. No free lunch here ...

So yes, maybe a nuclear powered aircraft carrier could be producing jet fuel for its planes, but I don't see this supplanting the fossil fuels any time soon. It would be extremely expensive.

Re:Energy

[profplump]

Converting electricity to liquid fuel, and in particular to a liquid fuel compatible with existing infrastructure, is potentially a big win. We're working on more sustainable electricity production, but no matter how much progress we make on the front there are still lots of applications where "throw some batteries at it" isn't a viable option for power storage -- being able to produce fuel from electricity and seawater is a way to bridge that gap in energy delivery without also requiring a breakthrough in electrical storage.

Re:Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

You could also run your on-land nuclear plant at peak efficiency at night and use the excess power to produce fuel. If the fuel production process is efficient enough, then compared to lowering the power output of the plant when demand is low, it could work out to be a net efficiency win.

Not that there aren't better things you could be doing with any excess power produced.

Re:Energy

[Registered Coward v2]

This sort of reaction is nice, but don't forget that it needs gobs and gobs of energy to build those hydrocarbons. Don't forget that the energy you use up by burning that fuel (and some, because of the poor engine efficiency, reaction losses, etc.) had to be "put in" first. No free lunch here ...

So yes, maybe a nuclear powered aircraft carrier could be producing jet fuel for its planes, but I don't see this supplanting the fossil fuels any time soon. It would be extremely expensive.

For uses where cost is a secondary consideration this technology would be useful. As for supplanting fossil fuels, this tech represents more of a price ceiling for fossil fuels because at some price pointy it becomes viable; just like any other fossil url sources that are expensive to extract from the ground.The real questions is how many kW are needed to produce fuels equivalent what can be refined from a barrel of crude oil. If say a 2gW nuclear plant could produce enough to be economically viable that would have significant political and economic impact world wide; especially on countries shoe economies are heavily dependent on energy exports.

Re:Energy

[EmagGeek]

True point, but if the process is efficient enough, and a nuclear energy source can be used to pull CO2 sequestered in the ocean (which came from fossil fuels) to make fuel, rather than pulling new oil out of the ground, then perhaps we could dial back the amount of new carbon being pulled from the ground and dumped into the atmosphere, thereby slowing the growth rate of the concentration of CO2.

Besides, we all know there is not an infinite amount of the stuff down there to drill for, and some day it will be so hard to find and extract that this method will be cheaper anyway. So, why not develop and commercialize it now?

Re:Energy

[smash]

Not necessarily. There is talk of energy being 10,000x more abundant for humanity if we were to put development into the LFTR reactor. If we have cheap electricity via safe nuclear power, then using some of it to generate fuel from sea-water is surely a lot better than putting the effort into getting it out of the ground and then shipping it half-way around the world.

Then again, with cheap nuclear power, we can also effectively supply hydrogen (which is obviously much cleaner) for other internal combustion engines.

Re:Energy

[necro81]

but I don't see this supplanting the fossil fuels any time soon

Maybe yes, maybe no. We're probably going to continue using liquid fuels for a long time. Some folks talk about the hydrogen economy being the replacement for hydrocarbons, but I've often wondered why. Hydrogen is a tricky fuel, starting from its relatively inefficient creation, through the difficulties in storage, transportation, distribution, to tricky bit of transferring and storing it in a vehicle tor provide sufficient usable range. If you've got the technology for manufacturing huge quantities of hydrogen, why not go one step further and create low weight hydrocarbons (methane, ethane, etc)? Those are much more energy dense, easier to transport and store, and there's already an extensive infrastructure in place.

Re:Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Hydrogen storage is a problem: leaks, volume of tanks (even liquid hydrogen is not that dense, and a mess to keep liquid). Combining hydrogen with carbon which is not extracted from fossil sources solves these problems, and is carbon-neutral.

Re:Energy

[Anonymous Coward]

Storing electricity in burnable liquid form probably *is* the breakthrough in electrical storage...

Re:Energy

[Lehk228]

replacing or modifying every automobile to take hydrogen fuel is a huge endeavor, a 96% efficient conversion from electrical energy to carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel is outstanding

Re:Energy

[mpe]

If we have cheap electricity via safe nuclear power, then using some of it to generate fuel from sea-water is surely a lot better than putting the effort into getting it out of the ground and then shipping it half-way around the world.

There's also a refining process since what comes out of the ground isn't directly useful as any kind of fuel.

Then again, with cheap nuclear power, we can also effectively supply hydrogen (which is obviously much cleaner) for other internal combustion engines.

Except that hydrogen is a much more difficult fuel to handle in comparison with methane, ethane, propane or butane. With liquid hydrocarbon fuel being even easier to handle than gases.

Re:Energy

[mdsolar]

So, Austin Energy is paying $0.05/kWh for solar. http://www.treehugger.com/rene... and that price is expected to fall by 2020 when the technology is expected to be available. So, say $0.02 per kWh. You need about 32 kWh to make a gallon of jet fuel at 100% efficiency so that comes to about $0.64/gallon. If you want to stay under $2/gallon, the process could have an efficiency as low as 32%. Since hydrolysis can be done at much higher efficiency, and catalyzed fuel production is exothermic, they'd have to have very poor CO2 capture efficiency to make this look like the dog you are claiming.

That depends

[DeathToBill]

Depends on where in the supply chain that $3/gal is. $3/gal supplied to the US Navy is probably more like $7 or $8 at the pump for putting in your car - not so viable.

Re:That depends

[mrsquid0]

People in many parts of the world already pay the equivalent of US$7 for petrol, so the projected cost is quite viable for automobile use. However, it is likely that efficiencies of scale will bring down the price of seawater fuel if a mass production system is developed. If that is the case then this fuel could easily compete with conventional petrol at the pump.

Re:That depends

[ceoyoyo]

It won't be long before it is. The price of gasoline has doubled more than twice in the last thirty years.

Re:That depends

[Firethorn]

Jet Fuel created on site to the carrier for $6/gallon would probably save the USN money.

Gasoline equivalent produced 'on site' at the gas station for $3/gallon using fresh water* would allow the station to undercut other stations in most areas.

It also depends on the price assumed for feedstocks - are they figuring on a cost for the electricity needed?

*Because nothing in the process says that it NEEDS salt water to work, just that it can use salt water. Logically speaking it should work at least as well using fresh.

Re:That depends

[DeathToBill]

Well, yes, but the vast majority of the difference is in tax, not in production costs; $3/gal supplied to the US Navy is probably something like £9 per litre in Crawley.

Re:That depends

[DeathToBill]

Yes and no. In the UK the price has roughly quadrupled in that time, but the real increase (ie increase over RPI) is only 33%[1]. Assuming that overall rate continues (very unlikely, but there you go) it takes over 70 years for the price to double.

[1]http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html

Re:That depends

[ceoyoyo]

I don't live in the UK. It's been a couple of years since I've bought gas there, but IIRC the price in the UK, as well as most of the rest of Europe, is already high enough to make their projected prices reasonable. Particularly if there are tax credits, as there are with other carbon neutral, or even not so carbon neutral energy sources.

I live in Canada. Here's an inflation corrected chart. The price has doubled since 2000. The US, where it really matters, is here. It doesn't look quite as bad, although the price has also technically doubled since 2000. Inflation adjusted gasoline prices aren't really fair, since a major part of the inflation index (and the part that generally moves the most, at least here in Canada) is gasoline itself.

Also, the Americans are interested in securing domestic supplies of oil. Perhaps they're tired of fighting multi-trillion dollar wars, which are not reflected completely in the price. However you look at it, if the inventors of this technique are correct in their price estimate, it's not unreasonable to think it might be a viable source of gasoline in the near future.

Re:That depends

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, the Americans are interested in securing domestic supplies of oil. Perhaps they're tired of fighting multi-trillion dollar wars, which are not reflected completely in the price. However you look at it, if the inventors of this technique are correct in their price estimate, it's not unreasonable to think it might be a viable source of gasoline in the near future.

Hi, its me, yet again. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... this is perhaps a bigger issue for you than I thought. Although I see no link to the chart you refer to in the previous paragraph, I'll concede to you the benefit of the doubt, and just accept that it exists, even though we don't see what you're even talking about. Once again I have generously quoted for you and others just the part of your post that is, well, not worth reading, certainly not worth your writing it, and not worth anything at all because it is, again, fallacy... go back to the other post and click that link I left for you!! You can and will do better if you understand what hasty generalization is, and will stop attempting to use that sort of informal fallacy to make a point... because no valid point can ever be made with an informal fallacy. I wish you luck, sir! Thank you! Carry on!!

nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

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Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

2012 called, they want their headline back.

http://www.navytimes.com/article/20121013/NEWS/210130317/Navy-eyes-turning-sea-water-into-jet-fuel

This sounds WAY over engineered. Whales run on kri

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds WAY over engineered. Whales run on krill. That seems like it has to be a more abundant easily accessible hydrocarbon source.

Depends on the effort.

[Ihlosi]

It depends upon what sort of fuel you're trying to produce.

And on how difficult (read: expensive) it is to avoid unwanted byproducts. And on the possible market value of the byproducts.

If you can sell the liquid hydrocarbons that you want to produce and the methane that appears as a by-product for almost the same price, it would be economically counterproductive to spend money on reducing the fraction of unwanted methane. Just produce both and sell both.

Energy requirement

[Anonymous Coward]

While it's true that an equal or greater amount of energy must go into their creation, an endothermic reaction that results in fewer gas molecules in the product than was in the reactants can be done without supplying any more energy than is needed to pressurise the reactants - once pressurised they will react and take in energy from the surroundings. Same principle as a refrigerator.

True, you then have to do something with the cold, but that's usually not a problem - I imagine the navy has some use for it, and if not they just have it leak into the surrounding ocean.

And if that was done on a large enough scale, the ocean temperature would decrease (true, it would have to be a very large scale, but I imagine a limitless source of hydrocarbons would act as incentive) and global warming would halt or reverse. Although I'm not sold on the wisdom of doing that - all ice ages have to end sometime, and better than going back into the main glacial period of our current (yes, we're in one) ice age.

this was proposed with the LFTR reactors as well..

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the 'byproducts' of a LFTR reactor was a hell of a lot of 'waste' heat. Sounds like that's what drives this entire reaction. One of the talks about LFTR advantages was the ability to cook up a 100% compatible replacement liquid fuel for cars, diesels, etc. Sounds like this is the same exact process. This isn't hocus pocus, it's a proven chemical process. What I don't know, and what's most important, is how efficient the operation is. How much heat/energy has to go into the process to produce how much usable fuel, and in what quantities. It's not really viable if you can only get teaspoons of jet fuel at a time. Pretty fascinating stuff really.

Sea levels

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally! A solution to rising sea levels .... now we can get rid of that pesky sea water completely.

Hardly surprising

[StripedCow]

After all those oil spills recently, this story hardly surprises me.

Not trivial at all

[sjbe]

At sea refueling is trivially easy, all you need is a ship that can carry a lot of fuel, a pump, and a hose.

"Trivially easy"? I think the Navy would disagree strongly with you on that. There are a huge number of non-trivial logistics issues. You have the expense of maintaining a second ship. You have to have that ship transport the fuel to an arbitrary location on the globe. You have to keep the fuel supply safe and ensure that the fuel tender isn't tracked back to the ship it is refueling. You have a ship with a large amount of potentially explosive fuel on board with all the attendant safety hazards that causes. It means your ships are limited in where they can go and how long by their fuel supplies rather than mission parameters.

The fact that they're fairly good at doing it doesn't mean it is something they find easy or useful. Cut of a military's fuel supply and they are effectively helpless. Fuel logistics are a HUGE and expensive problem for the military. It supposedly costs something like $16 to transport $1 worth of fuel. Also bear in mind that a lot of fuel comes from pretty volatile locations that we are likely to engage in hostile action with. There is a reason our military is putting a LOT of money into alternative fuel research. It's a huge cost and a huge tactical/strategic problem for them.

And realistically, when is a carrier or other ship likely to be far from supply lines?

Middle of the Pacific perhaps? Or any other ocean? Or when near hostiles? You don't really want to be refueling anywhere close to the people you are fighting if you can avoid it.

Re:Not trivial at all

[Zontar The Mindless]

IIRC, one of the reasons the final conquest of Germany didn't happen even faster than it did in WWII is that, towards the end, both the Western Allies and the Soviets kept outrunning their supply lines.

Re:Not trivial at all

[InvalidError]

Even if carriers did not need fuel, they would still require food resupply, equipment resupply, spare parts resupply, munitions resupply, crew swaps, etc. so carriers and other ships would still need to meet with supply ships every other week even if you take fuel out of the equation.

Re:Not trivial at all

[taiwanjohn]

Fuel was certainly the critical factor in the final victory. The Germans had nothing but coal, which they used in very creative ways, but they depended on a couple of refineries they'd captured from Russia. In particular, there was a place called Pleisse (or something like that) which was destroyed in the spring of 1945. One high-ranking general later wrote in his memoir that he knew on that day that it was all over.

Sorry I can't recall the details better. I heard this in an @Google Talk by Robert Zubrin about becoming energy independent by establishing an open "flex-fuel standard" for vehicles.

Re:Not trivial at all

[Anonymous Coward]

A carrier can easily store enough food for a year or longer. Fuel on the other hand caps out around a month. People need to be rotated every 1-3 years max and that isn't something they will get around, but being able to do away with 11/12th or more of the logistical nightmare annually is no laughing matter. Imagine they are on a stealth mission, the route they took to access it is closed off by patrols of an enemy for 3 months - this technology is the difference between having to break silence and engage and enemy while burning the last of your fuel in the hopes of getting more vs just waiting them out and going undetected. There is no way to overstate how enormous an advantage that is.

Re:Not trivial at all

[Zontar The Mindless]

Maybe you're thinking of Ploesti in Rumania? There was a huge refinery there--I seem to recall reading a book about the Allies' effort to knock it out from the air.

Re:Not trivial at all

[jcr]

Ploesti was a very expensive target to take out. Allied casualties were massive. Hundreds of men were lost in a single day.

-jcr

Re:Not trivial at all

[Zontar The Mindless]

Ah! Finally remembered the name of the campaign that book was about--Operation Tidal Wave.

Battery

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps its a bit simpler to say that this system is like a battery, only instead of storing energy a solid object that produces electricity this system creates a liquid that can be burned in a device (engine, turbine, etc) to produce heat that can be used to do work. And assuming the numbers are correct its not too bad as far as efficiency, at least on the creation part. Once you get to the utilization point the efficiency of the cycle probably drops quite a bit, but it could very well be worth it to get rid of the exploration, extraction, refinement & transportation losses that are inherent to petroleum use.

Nuclear Subs

[Anonymous Coward]

They could make all those nuclear subs much safer with this - just such up seawater, make it into fuel and use that to turn the screw. No longer "nuclear powered" but a "nuclear hybrid" - everyone knows hybrids are better for the environment ;-)

Misleading headline?

[Kultiras]

While the verbiage is not inaccurate, the headline insinuates (and is reflected by the comments) that the seawater is consumed by this process. I'll admit that IANAC, but from what I read (yeah, I know...) the first step in this process only extracts CO2 from the seawater. The byproducts of that step are acidified seawater, hydrogen gas, sodium hydroxide, and carbon dioxide. Putting the CO2 aside, the rest of it can be recombined into seawater at it's original pH. Maybe I overlooked something?

Re:Misleading headline?

[tragedy]

Hydrogen?

Energy inputs

[FishTankX]

Assuming that this process is 10% efficent let's take a look at the numbers.

Let's say you can dedicate half of the 1.1GWT (thermal) of the nimitz to aviation fuel production, if you're holding off coast.

And let's assume conservativley that the process is 20% efficent.

Diesel (pretty close to JP1) has an energy density of 35 MJ/L. This means at 20% efficency you'll be needing 175mj to create 1 liter of JP1.

At 1/2 1GWT you're looking at about 3 liters of fuel per second, or about 172,000 liters a day, or about 40,000 gallons. The nimitz has about 3 million gallons of fuel capacity so the refueling time of the entire tank from 0 would be around 2 months. According to this article here

http://large.stanford.edu/cour... (Also about marine jet fuel fabrication, provides some of the hard numbers) 3 million gallons is enough to refuel the onboard fleet about 20 times. So onboard fuel production would provide 1/3 of a full tank of gas for each aircraft onboard per day. Not terribly good, or bad.

Re:Energy inputs

[mdsolar]

You can probably count on better than 10% efficient with the quoted cost range of $3-$6/gallon. With an energy cost of $0.1/kWh you are already in the quoted range at 100% efficiency.

Re:Energy inputs

[FishTankX]

Probably. But many thermochemical processes fail to achieve 100% efficiency. So i'm not sure how efficient this one would work. And @$0.1/kw that's probably the figure for electricity, not thermal energy. I think most chemical conversion processes use thermal energy not electrolysis.

Re:Energy inputs

[mdsolar]

In this case no. This is a catalyzed reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The hydrogen comes from electrolysis. The reaction is a more complete version of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... They try to go past methane. That reaction is exothermic so you should not need process heat to any great degree. The reaction won't be 100% efficient but if it is too inefficient the cost range can't make sense.

Re:Energy inputs

[FishTankX]

Fascinating. So electrolysis is the main driving force of this reaction....

If they could somehow install nuclear plants capable of running a sulfur iodine cycle, they could probably achieve 50% efficency, probably enough to obviate the need for at-sea resupply.

Re:Energy inputs

[mdsolar]

The other energy cost is collecting carbon from sea water. That is not very high.

There is no more debate fools

[Anonymous Coward]

It is working it is done.

Just refine all the leaked dielsel in the water

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't the just filter out and refine all the diesel that is floating around in the water?

Re: Cool ...

[suutar]

Yeah, but everyone keeps saying the benefit of liquid petroleum fuel is ease of transport, fueling, and energy density. If we can get the total energy expenses down to parity with long distance electrical transmission, we can get much of the best of both worlds: reduced net carbon emission (because you're sucking it from the air, not the ground), fast fill ups, and not as much need to beef up the energy grid.

Game Economics Come to Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Most games where you have an energy resource (Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander) include some method of storing your excess power. In the case of the Real World, how do you do that? For a Nuke Powered Carrier, the method is to replenish the Aviation Fuel used by the air craft during normal operations.

Although it doesn't make sense yet for a community on a day to day basis, from TFS, they're able to generate precursor compounds that go into making multiple products from fuel to fertilizers and this makes sense not only for the military but from a space colony/ship purpose. All that's then needed is the ability to reverse the process and gain the precursor materials from the recycling stream and you now have a closed loop (what efficiency I don't know) for general use products.

And after the ship sinks ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Some day, after this catalytic system is fully developed and self-maintaining, somehow, a ship will sink.
Into an undersea heat source, volcano or rift. Lo and behold, the ocean isn't going to become solid Ice-9, it's going to turn into Gasoline-9!

They do.

[Anonymous Coward]

"All US carriers are nuclear-powered, and being able to synthesize aviation fuel would drastically reduce the logistics cost of operating them."

What he said. Until we create nuclear powered fighter aircraft the nuclear navy will always have a need for hydrocarbon liquid fuels. If this could eleminate the need for aviation fuel it would save carrier fleets millions in operations and logistics as well as making them more resilient and able to carry out longer duration missions. In other words yes they have a nuclear reactor on hand and yes it is still worthwhile for the next 30+ years.

Petrol taxes

[Firethorn]

However, areas that pay $7/gallon are typically paying most of that money in taxes, so unless the country in question is willing is to forgo at least some proportion of that revenue...

$3-$6/gallon

[mdsolar]

TFA: "The predicted cost of jet fuel using these technologies is in the range of $3-$6 per gallon, and with sufficient funding and partnerships, this approach could be commercially viable within the next seven to ten years. Pursuing remote land-based options would be the first step towards a future sea-based solution."

This cost range is an interesting number. That is the cost for parasiting off a naval reactor. But those reactors are built to be rugged before they are built to be cheap. It could be that if you were to use stranded offshore wind energy the cost would fall to $1/gallon or so, which would be below market value.

Minimizing cost/complication

[sjbe]

Even if carriers did not need fuel, they would still require food resupply, equipment resupply, spare parts resupply, munitions resupply, crew swaps, etc. so carriers and other ships would still need to meet with supply ships every other week even if you take fuel out of the equation.

So your argument is that we should not take fuel out of the resupply equation if possible because we're going to have to resupply other stuff anyway? Peculiar argument you've got there...

Why would you make a resupply schedule any more costly and/or complicated than absolutely necessary?

Re:Minimizing cost/complication

[InvalidError]

Since when is fuel transfer costly or complicated? Even if your reduce or eliminate fuel transfer to the carrier, you still need fuel transfer to everything else.

Re:Minimizing cost/complication

[cheesybagel]

You are assuming you could not use the carrier itself as a fuel resupply base for the escorts. The nuclear attack submarines do not need refueling as it is. However you could run the destroyers, etc, on generated fuel.

Re:Minimizing cost/complication

[sjbe]

Since when is fuel transfer costly or complicated?

It is HUGELY expensive to transport millions of gallons of jet fuel out into the middle of the ocean. A Nimitz class carrier can hold around 3 million gallons of jet fuel which sounds like a lot but it's enough to keep the planes flying for a few weeks of active operations. You seriously think 3 million gallons of jet fuel every few weeks is cheap?

Furthermore underway transfers are dangerous to both the ships involved and the personnel. Don't mistake a good safety record for an activity being safe.

Re:Minimizing cost/complication

[InvalidError]

And that was exactly what I said.

If you use the carrier as the fuel supply ship, the carrier still needs full fuel transfer facilities and crew.

Re:Minimizing cost/complication

[InvalidError]

You would likely still want to retain fuel transfer capabilities in order to rescue carriers if their on-board fuel generators go offline for whatever reason until they can be repaired or swapped out and supply other ships along the way anyway.

What about liquid hydrogen powered aircraft?

[nbritton]

It seems to me that if you're on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, you would have, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited supply of electriciy to convert sea water into hydrogen and oxygen, and also the ability to compress those gases into liquid form so they can be used as fuel for aircraft. Furthermore, it would seem to me that using Brown's gas (HHO) in a jet engine would be an ideal source of fuel, by mass, liquid hydrogen has an energy density of 143 MJ/kg.

With unlimited electricity you can also convert carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide, and at that point you can react carbon monoxide and hydrogen together using the Fischer–Tropsch process to produce synthetic jet fuel.

Alternatively, you could simply use hydrogen for hydrogen assisted jet ignition, which improves the combustion efficiency of traditional fuels. Additionally, liquid hydrogen can also be used as a coolant for very high speed planes, i.g. the SR-71.

Re: Cool ...

[LWATCDR]

If you combine this with Thorium fueled fission or if the Lockheed high beta fusion reactor or the polywell reactor work out then yes it becomes real practical.
You can use this to make liquid hydrocarbon fuel for things like long haul trucks, ships, and aircraft. None of those are practical uses of electrical power. Now if the polywell or high beta really work out well you could use them for ship propulsion but you still have long haul trucks and aircraft.
BTW it takes more energy to make electricity as well than just to use the fuel. The thing is that electricity is a more convenient form of energy for some uses like running a computer and lighting. Really the same thing.

Vulnerable oilers

[GPS Pilot]

If you run out of fuel, just refuel the damn thing. At sea refueling is trivially easy

During wartime, you worry about whether your refuling ship -- which is known as an "oiler," by the way -- will be able to make it through a gauntlet of enemy subs and other anti-ship forces targeting that vulnerable part of your logistics infrastructure. It would truly be a force multiplier to eliminate that vulnerability.

Maintaining a global fleet of oilers isn't cheap, either.

Hydrocarbon fuels are not necessarily fossil fuels

[GPS Pilot]

these processes don't really transition us away from fossil fuels

Whether a hydrocarbon fuel is a fossil fuel depends on where you source it.

This process is a carbon-neutral source of hydrocarbon fuels. To the extent that you pull CO2 out of seawater, you increase seawater's ability to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Edible hydrocarbon

[GPS Pilot]

Ethanol is a hydrocarbon that people, especially sailors, like to ingest. :)

Re:Edible hydrocarbon

[tragedy]

Ethanol has a hydroxide, which makes it not a hydrocarbon. If you replace that with a carbon, you get Ethane, which is a hydrocarbon, but which you probably don't want to ingest. Ethene (or ethylene) you might want to ingest, if you don't care too much about long term consequences (it was most likely the substance used to produce the oracular trance at Delphi, for example).

Converting seawater to liquid hydrocarbon fuel ..

[DTentilhao]

How much energy goes into the conversion process?

"The predicted cost of jet fuel using these technologies is in the range of $3-$6 per gallon"

What's it cost as compared to burning fossil fuels as jet fuels?

So, they evolved to flourish under AGW?

[slew]

I wonder if they are effectively taking advantage of the the current concentration of dissolved CO2 to operate efficiently (e.g, if we hadn't burned up all those hydrocarbons and acidified the ocean), or are there enough natural CO2 to extract to make this a worthwhile endeavor?

With all the oil spills

[Stan92057]

With all the oil spills over the last 20 years or so making fuel from seawater should be easy lol just skim the oil from the top :) This comment is made in jest.....

IT's even better

[geekoid]

scale it up, and use it commercially means jets will stopping putting more CO2 into the air.
Scale it up more, and Cars stop producing so much extra CO2.
scale it up even more, it can be used as a carbon sink and buried.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, you don't have to store large amounts of volatile jet fuel if you can make it on demand.
Makes the severity and consequences of an onboard fire/battle damage somewhat less.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the energy required to move around large amounts of stored jet fuel?

If you make it on demand, you have less stored fuel to lug about, and it reduces the fire risk as well.

china

[Anonymous Coward]

china

Backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

California has too much democracy and not enough freedom!!!

Answer a question, Zontar

[Anonymous Coward]

How'd "eating your words" taste + your foot in your mouth & washed down w/ "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" too? Here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

* :)

(Ahem: Zontar - Libeling me's OR me via attempting to LIE about apps I wrote above's one thing, however also being caught in it & being uanble to backup your OTHER lies too -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ) - Take your meds for THAT one: You're HALLUCINATING again, Zontar!

Please...

APK

P.S.=> Now, you just KNOW I've just GOTTA say it, now don't you? Ah, but of COURSE you do:

THIS? This was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'" & it always is, especially vs. LYING libelous done ZERO losers & admitted loonybirds like Zontar ( multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

Answer a question, Zontar

[Anonymous Coward]

How'd "eating your words" taste + your foot in your mouth & washed down w/ "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" too? Here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

* :)

(Ahem: Zontar - Libeling me's OR me via attempting to LIE about apps I wrote above's one thing, however also being caught in it & being uanble to backup your OTHER lies too -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ) - Take your meds for THAT one: You're HALLUCINATING again, Zontar!

Please...

APK

P.S.=> Now, you just KNOW I've just GOTTA say it, now don't you? Ah, but of COURSE you do:

THIS? This was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'" & it always is, especially vs. LYING libelous done ZERO losers & admitted loonybirds like Zontar ( multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

Answer a question Zontar

[Anonymous Coward]

How'd "eating your words" taste + your foot in your mouth & washed down w/ "the bitter taste of SELF-defeat" too? Here -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

* :)

(Ahem: Zontar - Libeling me's OR me via attempting to LIE about apps I wrote above's one thing, however also being caught in it & being uanble to backup your OTHER lies too -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ) - Take your meds for THAT one: You're HALLUCINATING again, Zontar!

Please...

APK

P.S.=> Now, you just KNOW I've just GOTTA say it, now don't you? Ah, but of COURSE you do:

THIS? This was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2ez'" & it always is, especially vs. LYING libelous done ZERO losers & admitted loonybirds like Zontar ( multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p... )

biofuels

[Firethorn]

Since the 1970's, cars have been run on ethanol; but until recently (post 2000 or so), you had to choose either gasoline or ethanol and buy a car based on this choice.

Any citation on this? From what I remember they were always flex, even if sometimes you might have to manually adjust something.

And where would the biodiesel come from? Algae for fuel is something I hadn't heard before, I'll look into it. One promissing source of fuel is the digestion of celulose, this is what I'm hoping for.

Algae, of course. You use a strain that's high in lipids(fats) that converts to biodiesel through various processes, and the carbohydrates can be turned into ethanol and butanol, which is closer to gasoline than Ethanol, so has a number of advantages as a fuel(you don't have to modify the engine is a big one). You use the remaining bits as fertilizer to grow more algea or even plants/crops.

Re:biofuels

[Rato Ruter]

Any citation on this? From what I remember they were always flex, even if sometimes you might have to manually adjust something.

Since you quoted wikipedia, there it goes: ethanol fuel in Brazil. To get the info in a glimpse, check for the caption on the first image of the section (the FIAT 147 one), and read on for further info.

But I know where your misconception comes from: only recently pure ethanol has been used. It was used both as solute and as solvent to gasoline. As a solute, up to 25% volume, it was used to reduce gasoline dependency; and as a solvent to gasoline it was used to help deal with cold start problems of the ethanol prior to electronic injection, but cars were classified as ethanol fueled or gasoline fueled, nevertheless.

Hydrogen

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just run internal combustion engines off of Hydrogen and Oxygen? That can run a internal combustion engine also, and not pollute.

Re:Answer a question Zontar

[Anonymous Coward]

zontar, ac trolling isn't proving apk wrong on you. You prove apk right.

Zontar - sockpuppeteer & libeler

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said my "APK Hosts File Engine" is a virus/malware http://slashdot.org/comments.p... but it's EASILY PROVABLE it's not, right there in that link too.

Now PROVE YOUR FALSE ACCUSATION above: Show me a quote OR POST of me posting off topic on hosts where they did NOT apply... go for it!

---

You avoided backing up your accusation where YOU said I say you are Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... , & sockpuppeteer like you) -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Funny you can't back up your "bluster" there either, lol...

---

Why, Lastly?

You're crackers! See here multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

APK

P.S.=> So, THIS quote below is my policy on sockpuppeteers like you Zontar = TrollingForHostsFiles (your sockpuppetry):

"The only way to a achieve peace, is thru the ELIMINATION of those who would perpetuate war (sockpuppet masters like YOU, troll -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ). THIS IS MY PROGRAMMING -> http://start64.com/index.php?o... & soon, I will be UNSTOPPABLE..." - Ultron 6 FROM -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Which quite obviously, I am, since none of you DOLTISH TROLLS are able to validly technically disprove my points on hosts enumerated in the link to my program above of how hosts give users of them more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity... period!

(Trolls like YOU that use sockpuppets http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (your sockpuppet "alterego" TrollingForHostsFiles) & TomHudson - Barbara, not Barbie too http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... before you)

... apk

Zontar - sockpuppeteer & libeler

[Anonymous Coward]

"You barge into discussions with your off-topic hosts file nonsense" - by Zontar The Mindless (9002) on Friday April 11, 2014 @09:51PM (#46731153) FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

You said my "APK Hosts File Engine" is a virus/malware http://slashdot.org/comments.p... but it's EASILY PROVABLE it's not, right there in that link too.

Now PROVE YOUR FALSE ACCUSATION above: Show me a quote OR POST of me posting off topic on hosts where they did NOT apply... go for it!

---

You avoided backing up your accusation where YOU said I say you are Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... , & sockpuppeteer like you) -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Funny you can't back up your "bluster" there either, lol...

---

Why, Lastly?

You're crackers! See here multiple personality disorder http://slashdot.org/comments.p... + manic depression http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

APK

P.S.=> So, THIS quote below is my policy on sockpuppeteers like you Zontar = TrollingForHostsFiles (your sockpuppetry):

"The only way to a achieve peace, is thru the ELIMINATION of those who would perpetuate war (sockpuppet masters like YOU, troll -> http://slashdot.org/comments.p... ). THIS IS MY PROGRAMMING -> http://start64.com/index.php?o... & soon, I will be UNSTOPPABLE..." - Ultron 6 FROM -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Which quite obviously, I am, since none of you DOLTISH TROLLS are able to validly technically disprove my points on hosts enumerated in the link to my program above of how hosts give users of them more speed, security, reliability, & anonymity... period!

(Trolls like YOU that use sockpuppets http://slashdot.org/comments.p... (your sockpuppet "alterego" TrollingForHostsFiles) & TomHudson - Barbara, not Barbie too http://tech.slashdot.org/comme... before you)

... apk