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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."
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.
All US carriers are nuclear-powered, and being able to synthesize aviation fuel would drastically reduce the logistics cost of operating them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
when you can already burn it as fuel ;)
No. Nothing like nuclear fusion. This is not an energy source. It is a fuel source.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I just can't understand how Hydrogen gas can be produced from sea water. Anyone care to enlighten me?
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.
I don't read AC A human right
Next step is to find a country where they have too little democracy but a lot of this "seawater" they mention.
Curiously yours, crip.
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.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
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.
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.
But you can use a fission reactor. And the Navy has fission reactors at sea (and underneath it)
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 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?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
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.
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....
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.
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.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
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.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
"What form of exaust waste are we talking here? "
Oxygen. It's a nasty stuff.
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.
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.
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
You mean like this?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
You realise that doesn't make it a FOSSIL fuel right?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
Nuclear Fission =! Nuclear FUsion
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.
After all those oil spills recently, this story hardly surprises me.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Dissolved ocean fossils don't count?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
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.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
It shows up 20 years later and is a huge disappointment?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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?
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.
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.
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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...
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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?
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.
Fusion was shipped by Teller in 1956. Packing it into smaller boxes has been the problem since then.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
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.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Ethanol is a hydrocarbon that people, especially sailors, like to ingest. :)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
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?
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?
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.
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.....
Jack of all trades,master of none
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?
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes. That was my intention. Well done.
Does it go on forever?
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.
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.
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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.
I don't read AC A human right
Nuclear fusion = not required.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.