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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.
No. Nothing like nuclear fusion. This is not an energy source. It is a fuel source.
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I just can't understand how Hydrogen gas can be produced from sea water. Anyone care to enlighten me?
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.)
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Dissolved ocean fossils don't count?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
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.
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.
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
Storing electricity in burnable liquid form probably *is* the breakthrough in electrical storage...
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.
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.
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.
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