That is exactly why its such a big deal. Current jet fuel costs over $8/gal delivered. It costs so much because even if it comes out of the refinery at San Diego at $2/gal it has to be loaded into an oiler [1] and then driven out to sea where the carrier task group is.
If you're on a nuclear powered aircraft carrier you have plenty of electricity so this is a pretty huge win.
Of course an alternative way to make this feasible for the fleet would be to build a nuclear powered oiler. It could process seawater into jet fuel as it cruised along with the fleet and transfer fuel as needed, but to this day fuel transfer at sea is one of the more dangerous things they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Gerald_R._Ford_(CVN-78) notes that ``Unfortunately the power limitations for the Nimitz class make the installation of the recently developed [Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System] impossible.'', which seems to indicate that existing nuclear powered aircraft carriers don't always have large amounts of electricity to spare. However, more electricity will be available on future aircraft carriers.
If you look at the power requirements for the EMALs system you will see why a Nimitz class carrier can't power it. Not only is it a crapload of power, its needed all at once. The JP4 from Seawater project can run at much lower powers and for long periods of time.
And in fact, here is another illustration of just how hard it is to replace conventional energy storage systems with electricity. High pressure steam stores an enormous amount of energy. EMALs effectively uses 4 flywheels as rotational energy stores, suggesting battery / supercap technology just isn't viable. It does have an efficiency advantage over steam though.
Batteries operate by the principle of ion formation. The chemical process is exothermic with respect to the transfer of electrons from the cathode to the anode. So the more charge that is moved the hotter the batteries get. This is often the limiting factor for charge conversion.
Capacitors on the other hand simply store charge using electrostatic field attraction, the only barrier to their current flow are the i2r heat generated in the conductive paths (a superconducting supercapacitor for example could dump all of its charge instantly without any problems, if such a thing existed, its manufacturer would be worth more than Apple :-)
Flywheels store energy mechanically as angular momentum, they have good energy density, and can return it quickly by being attached to a generator, but are generally hard to deal with in systems with an external acceleration because their tendency to precess if that acceleration results in a rotation that is perpendicular to the flywheel. The proposed carrier ones I've seen are shown as being on gimbals for that reason.
No, I expect they'd need to be specially designed for it, with a number of compromises (gas venting/replenishment) along the way.
Battery technologies tend to have a limiting internal resistance that determines the maximum discharge rate, although in many cases the maximum SAFE discharge rate is much lower - traditional lead acid will allow you draw so much current that the plates buckle and the acid boils...
It's all down to the chemistry, and every technology has different characteristics and weaknesses - for example, any secondary cell involving nickel or zinc has to deal with the tendency of these metals to grow dendrites when plating out of solution (ie. the recharge case) - this is what bursts a regular AA cell if you try to recharge it using DC. There are simple workarounds, and although the regular dry cell design is not optimal for recharging it can be done. It also causes the memory effect in NiCd cells, and explains why they can sometimes be recovered with a large pulse of charging current (local melting of the dendrites).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1B_reactor indicates that there's 300 MW per reactor on the Ford class, and two reactors, so maybe 600 MW total, although I'm not sure if that's the output of the steam powered electrical generators, or if it's the theoretical amount of energy in the steam coming out of the reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equiv... says the EPA figures 33.7 kwH is the same as a gallon of gasoline, and there's enough slop in estimating how much power a carrier will have left over for making jet fuel that the error in pretending that jet fuel is the same amount of energy per gallon as gasoline is probably noise.
Other commenters are saying that synthetic fuel is going to take 2-4 times as much energy as the synthetic fuel stores, so let's assume roughly 100 kwH to make a gallon of jet fuel.
That suggests that 600 MW total power might be able to make as much as 6000 gallons per hour if people are happy to leave the carrier drifting with no lights and all its defensive equipment turned off. If the carrier is carrying 75+ planes, that suggests it can make less than 100 gallons an hour per plane. The Google Search summary of http://www.google.com/url?q=http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_i... says a Gulfstream III consumes 568 gallons per hour. A supersonic fighter jet probably consumes somewhat more, and that leaves me wondering if a Ford class reactor is going to be able to produce enough jet fuel for an active fleet of fighter jets. Certainly, the planes don't fly 24 hours a day, but this estimate suggests that the carrier's reactors might not even have enough left over power to make enough jet fuel to have the average plane on board flying one hour out of 24.
> 600 MW total, although I'm not sure if that's the output of the steam powered electrical generators, or if it's the theoretical amount of energy in the steam coming out of the reactor
It's the latter. Most of that power goes to moving the ship, not making electricity.
But the launch system has to work reliably at any moment, especially when the ship is in full operation at a time of crisis. On the other hand, this process could work at off-peak times, of which I think there is plenty on a carrier too.
> existing nuclear powered aircraft carriers don't always have large amounts of electricity to spare
The limitation isn't the nuclear reactors, it's the electrical generators, which are only sized to make a small fraction of the total power the reactors are capable of. Most of the reactor power is for moving the ship, not making electricity.
We can look at it this way too: assume an oiler has maybe 10,000 t of oil and takes ten days to travel:
1E7 kg with energy density of 1E7 J/kg, in 1E6 seconds means an average power supplied by one oiler to be in the order of 100 megawatts. Or 10 kg/second. If that synfuel generation rate can be sustained, then the oiler is not needed.
Of course, there's efficiencies, probably the oilers don't always go full speed, there's different distances etc etc...
If we assume 1% efficiency and one dedicated reactor, then we get 0.1 kg/second, 8 tons per day. You could load about two Hornets' internal fuel tanks with that.
In the sea you could probably also try other things than nuclear reactors, like farm algae and harvest it to produce biofuels (biofuel has already been tested in a B-52), or put solar or wind plants out in the ocean where there's space. No energy storage problems if the fuel is generated in situ.
Given the refining steps you'd need after making the hydrocarbon feedstock and the dangers inherent in that process, I'm sure that they'd do this on a separate ship.
Jet Fuel (Kerosene) closed at $3.135/gallon today[1]. And that doesn't include the cost of transporting it from the Gulf Coast to where your Navy needs it.
That quoted price was the spot price. It doesn't include Federal or other taxes.
Let's suppose that it did include taxes. Federal tax for jet fuel for non-commercial-aviation use is 21.9¢/gal so even if the quoted price of $3.135/gal included federal tax, the without-tax price would still be $2.916/gal, which is a lot closer to $3/gal than $2/gal.
(Gas for commercial aviation use is also subject to the federal transportation tax and harder for me to figure out.)
In 2009, chemists working for the U.S. Navy investigated a modified Fischer–Tropsch process for generating fuels. When hydrogen was combined with the carbon dioxide over a cobalt-based catalyst, the reaction produced mostly methane gas. However, the use of an iron-based catalyst reduced methane production to 30 per cent with the rest being predominantly short-chain, unsaturated hydrocarbons [27] The introduction of ceria to the catalyst's support, functioning as a reverse water gas shift catalyst, furthermore increased the yield of the reaction. [28]. The short chain hydrocarbons were successfully upgraded to liquid fuels over solid acid catalysts, such as zeolites.
[A patent application and a more in-detail research paper describing the process(es) is referenced there.]
Overall this looks very interesting as a military application (independence from other sources, logistics).
You will find more articles from 2009+ on this topic by searching for "Fischer-Tropsch seawater".
This is why electric vehicles won't work. I'll copy in most of a comment I made a few days back.
Let's say tomorrow some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price. The best way to use this to power cars would be to use it to create a fuel with a high energy density. If you had 'free energy' you'd extract C02 from the atmosphere and turn it into a hydrocarbon.
the key quote is:
"The ones that are technically trained get it right away: hydrocarbons, which we burned today have the greatest energy density possible of all fuels. Things that have carbon in them. Will people fly airplanes? Usually people say yes for the same reasons. Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy. Oh--you can't have airplanes unless you have hydrocarbon fuels. You could in theory do it with hydrogen, but it's highly dangerous, noxious fuel. Quantum-mechanically, we know the energy content of those fuels is optimal. There will never be anything that beats them."
A massive breakthrough in energy density for batteries might be possible but it's unlikely. Huge resources have been put into improving batteries and while they have improved it's not been enough to get near the energy density of hydrocarbons.
Electrolysing water to make H2 and extracting CO2 from the environment, and then synthesizing hydrocarbons from them, is extremely energy inefficient.
Sure, theoretically, it can be done, and maybe one day it could even be done efficiently. But Tesla is making battery-electric cars that work today.
The military does not care about efficiency because they have nuclear reactors on their ships and their goal is to not to have to transport liquid fuel.
$3 a gallon is what the fuel costs today when it comes straight out of the ground. Claiming to be able to build and run a nuclear reactor and then synthesize the fuel through multiple energy inefficient steps all for the same price is a pipe dream.
It's not competing against the price straight out of the ground; it's competing against fuel that's been refined and delivered to a moving ship somewhere potentially very far away. Instead of $3 a gallon, it could be up to 10X more.
And, dollar cost of the fuel is not the only cost of maintaining a "long supply tail." There's also the dollar cost of all the ships and sailors on that tail, and there's the logistical opportunity costs: we have to protect that tail with military resources that might otherwise have gone to more directly military purposes, and the head of the tail (the military activity at the front) is held back and slowed down by a "heavier" supply tail.
This doesn't eliminate the tail (we still have to deliver ammunition, lubricating oil, food etc. to the fleet) and it doesn't eliminate replenishment at sea (we still have to get that stuff from supply vehicles to ships), but it does lighten the supply load and create more military options.
Exactly. Less replenishment means more flexibility.
Lots of people killed by IEDs on long supply lines in Afghanistan is an extreme example of the human and military costs. Some of those died to fuel A/C for uninsulated tents... madness.
The amount of energy needed to refine crude oil is much less than the energy it takes to synthesize it. Think about it: people refine the crude, transport it, and use the end product in an energy net positive manner. To synthesize hydrocarbon fuel, you need to put in at least the amount of energy you're going to store, and with current technology probably 2 times as much at least due to inefficiencies. Then you need to still account for building and running the nuclear reactor. Try to imagine the systems as a whole, the number of steps and losses at each step. The scheme does not make sense.
1) uranium -> nuclear power -> expensive synthesis -> local transport -> fuel
Asking me to imagine a system as a whole doesn't prove your argument.
Instead of the energy system, consider the cost of military supply lines. There's more than the financial cost of delivery; long supply lines are vulnerable to attack and disruption. You don't need to imagine an example: consider IEDs in Afghanistan. Many of those were trucks delivering food and fuel to bases. Efficiency (i.e. insulating tents so less fuel is needed for A/C) results in less deliveries and less deaths.
The same principle applies at sea. Oil ships are a vulnerability and another thing to plan, as well as a major cost that can be more important than the energy efficiency issues.
I missed the part where you brought the argument back to the military. Yes, it makes sense for the military, as I acknowledged in my original post. The Parent, however was claiming that electric cars for general use are made moot by this technology, which is certainly not the case.
Telsa, like many startups, is pursuing a low-volume, price-insensitive market first. That helps pay for all sorts of startup and R&D costs, and lets them work out issues before they scale. Their long-term goal is, per Wikipedia, "eventually mass producing fully electric cars at a price affordable to the average consumer".
There are several fully electric vehicles in production that cost $35k.
Telsa cars are expensive for the same reason Ferraris are - they target people who want bling.
A mass-produced commuter could be much cheaper, but there's a huge risk. Tesla aims to reduce the risk by validating the market, solving technical problems, creating infrastructure (recharge stations) and solving social problems (convincing people that range doesn't always matter, and educating them on the strengths and weaknesses of electric cars).
A low total-cost (including fuel and maintenance) electric car can probably be produced, but it's not the Tesla's top model.
In non-currency terms, this sounds a lot like Unix-Windows arguments 15 years ago. If you can bundle Windows, why does it matter what computer you get? For 1/10 the price you can get a great Windows PC with 10 times more software. Tesla Roadster being like an SGI or Solaris box, Linux/FreeBSD is just for snobby nerds who like to tinker. Unless you can make it easier to use it just does not work.
Mass transit has some advantages with predictable trip lengths: no transit agency is going to insist that they need a bus that can go 200 miles on a charge if their average bus only travels 50 miles each morning. Meanwhile, the average consumer ``needs'' car with a battery that is several times what their 99th percentile trip length is.
It's energy inefficient, but you're thinking in terms of energy scarcity we have today. What if we had 10x more electric energy capacity (most likely due to nuclear resurgence)?
Energy scarcity is a fundamental property of technology and economics. Aside from a few countries like France, nuclear power serves a fraction of our electricity needs, and electricity is a fraction of our total energy needs. Where are all these nuclear power plants going to come from? The technology described in the article is a way to transform energy. Not to produce it.
Lithium-air batteries (an immature technology, certainly) have an energy per gram 3.5 times less than gasoline's. But electric motors are about 3.5 times more efficient than internal combustion engines. And the technology to produce synthetic fuels from CO2 is pretty much as far from mass scale as lithium-air batteries.
I agree that we will need carbon-based fuels for jet engines, but as for cars, the physics and economics are by no means as favorable as you represent.
"Let's say tomorrow some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price. The best way to use this to power cars would be to use it to create a fuel with a high energy density."
That is incorrect. If the fusion source is compact, and can produce a lot of instantaneous electrical power, and is quick to throttle up and down, then a "Back to the Future"-style Mr. Fusion would be the best way to power cars.
Energy density isn't the only factor. There's also a question of infrastructure. Electrical distribution has few moving parts, while extracting C02 from the atmosphere to make fuel and distributing the fuel has many more mechanical parts. A fusion plant which could produce 50 kW, weighed 2 tons, and could be installed in the back yard of a home would mean that a house could be off the grid and still have power left over to charge the car, while using intermediate hydrocarbon storage would mean trips to fill the car, or heating oil, or cooking gas.
So while I completely agree that airplanes will not be powered by batteries, I don't think that energy density is the only factor to consider in the economics equation.
> That is incorrect. If the fusion source is compact, and can produce a lot of instantaneous electrical power, and is quick to throttle up and down, then a "Back to the Future"-style Mr. Fusion would be the best way to power cars.
On top of that, reliability. To have a large plant with a high mechanical complexity which can justify dedicated maintenance workers to help manage complexity and the results of part wear etc is likely able to achieve the same or higher reliability than a backyard unit, in TCO terms anyway.
So I think you both agree with me that it's not necessarily the case that a hypothetical fusion power source or free energy source is best used to produce hydrocarbons for distribution and downstream use.
Regarding the comment of sophacles, power distribution is part of the economic factor. It may be that the central plant is much more reliable than a backyard plant, but the power grid - subject to thunderstorms, ice, tree falls, backhoes, curious squirrels, and so on - makes the overall power supply system less reliable than a backyard fusion plant.
No. I will agree that a distributed power system may provide overall reliability but this condition must be true:
There is still a grid. If my power source goes out, I want backup to come from other nearby sources - the timeline of power restoration from the current delivery system is on the order of minutes or hours for over 80% of outages, and on the order of a couple weeks for over 99% of the rest of outages. If my power plant breaks, I need restoration numbers that meet that. (additionally, I need plant repair bills to be lower than however much money having the backyard plant would save me. TCO considerations again).
Further, these two assumptions are built into your "better" assessment:
* It is cheaper to have a power plant in my back yard than buying it from the grid.
* The backyard source can be made safe.
Combining these two assumptions is a big deal. If both are true, I will agree that it is a good option (with the caveat listed above). However, there is a HUGE amount of R&D to get there, including a massive set of efficient production runs for parts to build all the systems to make it happen. The economics of this points to it not being likely that everyone has a backyard fusion plant.
It is far more likely to see big fusion plants in greater number scattered around the power grid to provide higher reliability in the cases of line loss etc. Further, with energy now being much, much cheaper to produce, you'll likely start seeing more reliable distribution channels for electrical power. Overhead lines would be reasonable to replace with underground ones, which are less efficient, but are also more reliable as they are less likely to be damaged in weather events. You'll also probably see a reduction in star-topology distribution - more redundancy in distribution paths, at the cost of some efficiency, because the complex equipment will be cheaper to manufacture (you know, because energy to do so will not factor into costs anymore).
The original premise was already unrealistic. I made it even more unrealistic. If there is a "Mr. Fusion" device which can produce 1.21 GW, on-demand, safely, and it small and light enough to fit in your car, then there's no need for a grid. You would just have several of those devices in your house.
My hypothetical was to show that there could be cases where it does not make sense to use a Mr. Fusion type device to produce hydrocarbon fuel which is then used as the energy source. Everything I said takes place in the original fantasy world. Under the original premise -- "some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price" -- then it must be using some principle we haven't yet thought of. And with that premise in place, almost anything goes.
Once I put realism into place, then the original hypothetical is not sustainable. The long term solutions for real life are decreased energy use, fission, hypothetical fusion, and renewable. None of the last three can exist without a grid, at least for most people. The only way to be without a grid is greatly reduced power use, a less concentrated population, and switch to local renewable resources. That isn't going to happen.
Several strings of solar panels + lithium ion batteries might very well be cheaper than paying your local electric monopoly for transmission line capacity in 20 years. And if the non-redundant parts (the inverter, perhaps) fail, it might not be all that different from your water heater failing today.
(Although if we had that technology in cheap enough form, some of the major loads in your house may switch to DC to avoid conversion losses to AC, since solar panels and batteries are both inherently DC technologies, and that might make the inverter less important.)
There will still be a grid. The scenario you mention will be useful for some, but assuming $80/month for electricity over a paid-for grid vs. $10,000 for installation of cheap solar panels+batteries gives a pay-off time of about 10 years. (Currently solar water heaters cost about $5,000, so the best is 5 years.)
I don't think most will be willing to take that capital investment.
It would be interesting to see how distributed solar compares to grid-based distribution in the face of large disasters like a hurricane or ice storm. Especially if the power lines were underground. I assume that those with damaged panels would quickly look for replacements, causing an instant demand and price spike. While the large electricity companies would have stockpiled reserves and have agreements already in place to handle the short-term demand. I don't know how this would affect the overall long-term costs.
IIRC, solar prices have been dropping at a rate of 7% per year. If that keeps up, and if the grid price remains constant, solar will eventually become cheaper than grid.
In 1992, would you have told me today's smartphones would be impossible?
If you only lose a few solar panels in a storm, and most of the panels on your roof survive, you may just use a bit less electricity for a while.
I don't think you necessarily need Li-ion for that - in my experience lead acid works well enough in the domestic case, is a lot cheaper and probably safer (although hydrogen venting is perhaps an issue).
I built a little mixed DC (lighting) + AC (1kW inverter) system out in the garden (far enough from the flat that running a cable would be a nightmare of planning permissions & digging trenches).
Since it's for intermittent use the panel is tiny (50W Kyocera) compared to the battery (110 Ah 'leisure') & inverter (1kW true sine), and it works just fine even here at 53 deg latitude. It would scale up for the entire house quite well, were it not for the fact that it's a four-in-a-block with a communal roof, and 1/2 loft space unusable due to loft conversion.
There are some interesting questions about economies of scale, etc, though.
If we figure an average American has a lead acid car battery and maybe a laptop battery pack, we currently have more lead acid batteries than lithium ion, certainly by weight, but probably also by total watt hours.
Tesla and Nissan might end up inverting that ratio in a market where they merely have to get the battery to beat the cost of gas; and if we get to the point where every American has an 85 kwH battery pack in their car, that's multiple days of average US electrical consumption (I believe average per capita electrical consumption is about 1.5 kw, and average per capita total energy consumption around 6 kw in the US).
Meanwhile, there's no path to pushing up volumes of lead acid battery production significantly. Maybe there will be a few old lead acid car batteries getting recycled after Tesla conquers the world, but if that's all we're relying on, those recycled batteries won't power very much in the grand scheme of things.
Nickel-Iron batteries have a life measured in decades and are very robust against deep discharge. They can also be refurbished. Their formulation has been around since Edison. In fact, I think he invented them. Their big disadvantage: they're heavy. Perfect for home use.
EDIT: Edison did not invent NiFe batteries, but he developed and championed them.
Your argument is only balanced on that one premise of Fusion or free energy, both of which are still vaporware and will be for decades if not centuries to come. Have you considered that maybe electric cars will fill the gap between now and then if ever? And you consider free energy a possibility but advancement in battery technology too far fetched. I don't agree at all.
Energy density is a critical issue for aircraft because lift/drag ratios are capped at around 15 to 30. For every 15-30 N of fuel weight, you must supply at least 1 N of additional thrust (which translates to power, once you multiply by speed).
Cars, on the other hand, experience a combination of aerodynamic and powertrain drag and rolling resistance, of which only (mostly?) the rolling resistance depends on mass. The typical coefficient of rolling resistance is about 10x better than the typical L/D ratio for aircraft (if I believe Wikipedia). Hence, road vehicles are 10x less sensitive to energy density than aircraft.
So a statement that electric vehicles won't work is nonsense, without considering how sensitive the different vehicles are to fuel mass.
Most people miss the difference between hydrocarbon fuels as energy source* and as energy carrier. If you make HC fuels from atmospheric or oceanic carbon, you have a nice closed cycle.
(*) Technically fossilised solar energy of course.
Very good point. But it doesn't make Tesla cars a folly so much as put a strong constraint on their long term economic viability: the invention of fusion power or some other method of making energy abundant turned to making hydrocarbons effectively renewable. But that could be decades away, timeline of practical viability is effectively unknown. Considering how speculative this notion of really cheap energy is (for now), I still think Tesla is a good bet. On the event of the floor dropping off the prices in energy markets, there will be few that are dependent on large energy barriers to entry that will emerge unscathed.
It is also effectively win-win. If such a thing becomes possible the costs in much of production will cut very drastically and the potential of things now open would be just incredible. So much of expense is due to energy constraints.
Electric engines run at 92% efficiency. Car engines run at ~15%. So energy density need not reach equivalence.
That physicist is wrong too (Nobel prizes don't mean you aren't wrong - it just means people listen to you more) - jet engines on planes require oxygen to work - hence capped at ~10 km altitude with massive drag causing ineffecient travel.
10 years till battery tech reaches complete parity for lowest denominator cars, and 7 years before we start to see hyper sonic electric passenger jets being tested way up in the upper atmosphere (no oxygen needed, go as high and fast as you want - London - LA in a few hours - space views - cheap power).
What? 10 years until battery technology has advanced to the point of parity?
Gasoline has an energy density of 132 MJ/US gal, or say 1500 MJ on a full small tank. Modern engines hit 30% thermal efficiency, but then there are drive train losses etc, so I'll give you the 15% as an absolute worst case, AND give you a 100% efficient electric motor / drive train. Therefore your car needs to provide 225 MJ of stored energy for parity.
The best commercially-available Li-ion battery has an energy density of around 245 Wh/kg, or ~ 880 kJ/kg. Therefore you need at least 255kg of conventional batteries for motive energy parity (ie. not counting heat/AC/light etc.). The equivalent in gasoline (0.77 kg/l), weighs 35 kg.
You are asking for nearly a ten-fold increase in usable energy density in battery technology in ten years, at price-parity with gasoline, and with the charging infrastructure to support it. I don't think it's going to happen - assuming lithium-air batteries ARE commercialised on that time scale, the cost of charging that kind of energy in reasonable time, safely, is going to be the real problem here. Every gas station is going to need its own nuclear power plant!
Don't rest all your hopes on ITER. Alternative approaches that could well be cheaper and come to fruition a lot sooner include NIF/LIFE, polywell, focus fusion, General Fusion, Tri-Alpha, Helion, levitated dipole, petawatt picosecond laser fusion, and Sandia's new approach to magnetized inertial fusion.
If none of them work, advanced fission designs like LFTR or IFR could be almost as good, with better safety and a hundred times less nuclear waste than conventional reactors.
When energy is cheap, plentiful and clean things like this are possible. If only we built more nuclear power plants and solar power farms. Turning coal into jet fuel isn't a great idea :)
One of the main endurance (and damage control) problems for a nuclear carrier is the huge amount of jet fuel used by the air wing, so this would be a huge deal. After jet fuel, they just need to underway replenish armaments and food, both of which are easier than fuel (food isn't dangerous, and most missions don't expend weapons now, so the total volume is lower than for fuel).
Once again, military research might lead the way. Note, if they invest into this, it's _not_ because of reduced price, increased efficiency or reduced greenhouse effects, but because of an _strategic_ advantage against "the enemy".
Personally, I read about similar methods, for synthesizing carbon based fuels, many times before. Most of them were private founded but rather small scale. I can't judge if there was a significant science or engineering breakthrough. So, I suspect the only thing that might have changed, is that a clever guy convinced the military this would be a huge strategic advantage.
The ironic thing is, the US could instead focus on producing all their fuel at home to end the dependency on oil from the middle east. Then, they would have an even bigger strategic advantage and wouldn't need as much military investment.
Anyway, we might end up with synthetic carbon based fuel with all its advantages - and probably the military can keep their carriers.
Can someone who knows about this stuff comment on whether the energy required to extract the H2 from the water, is more than the energy contained in the chemical bonds of the H2 itself?
(assume both sides of the comparison contain equal number of molecules)
I suspect it is.. otherwise they are potentially sitting on a much more important innovation, than mere jet fuel.
Consider it from the perspective of the conservation of energy:
2H2 + O2 = 2H2O + energy
The energy is on the right because the reaction is exothermic.
The opposite reaction must be endothermic and must have the same amount of energy on the left:
2H2O + energy = 2H2 + O2
Otherwise, energy isn't conserved.
Because nothing is 100% efficient, there's also energy lost to inefficiencies. So the answer to your question is that yes, you need more energy to make the second reaction happen than is stored in the chemical bond.
Isn't this also heavily destructive to our ecosystem because they use the carbon trapped in the water and release it into our atmosphere? Didn't we want more trapped carbon than less?
I don't get why everyone finds this great since it takes a very long time for carbon in the atmosphere to get trapped in seawater.
CO2 in atmosphere -> CO2 in water -> Ocean acidification[1] -> Change in ocean ecosystem
The oceans absorb OC2 from the atmosphere, which you could argue is good, but it is not without consequences. Putting CO2 in the water moves the problem from having it in the atmosphere elsewhere, but it's still a problem. In some ways then, this can be seen as a good thing, because it is undoing the effects that increased CO2 in the atmosphere has on the oceans. Obviously though, I doubt that its effects would be at all noticeable.
The wiki article already linked has a chapter called 'Possible Impact'.
You only really have 2 choices here[1] (provided this gas-to-liquid thing pans out):
1. Take carbon out of the ground, where it is not active in any carbon system. Put it in the air, and ultimately the ocean. This releases more carbon into the whole system, and causes problems we all know about. It eventually goes to the water as the parent mentioned, with the acidification problem (s)he brought up. Adding ever more carbon to the system only adds to the total carbon load.
2. Take carbon out of the water, reduce acidification, albeit by transferring it to the air. This doesn't actually put new carbon in the system tho, so it has benefit.
However, the carbon put in the air with #2 is the same as traditional jet fuels from sources in the ground, so those effects cancel out as a consideration in our choice range.
Sure in a perfect world, we would find a way to start actively reducing the amount of carbon in circulation, however, to get there we have to find ways to stop adding new carbon to the system. This helps with that.
[1] I know there are lots of options we could consider, but I highly doubt any option that effectively translates to "have the military be less effective" will fly politically, so I am assuming that short-term achievable options have to have no negative effect from the military POV at minimum.
But it's taking carbon out of the ocean and releasing it into the atmosphere. The issue becomes, how long does it take for the released atmospheric CO2 to be reabeorbed back into he ocean? Does it do more harm in the atmosphere or in the ocean?
Right now we're taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.
The ocean presently has a lot of extra carbon, which it absorbed from the atmosphere. So this is an indirect way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and then putting it back...a closed loop. If we did this for all our hydrocarbon fuel we'd be carbon-neutral.
France could certainly use this technology. With their abundance of unused nuclear power and access to the sea, this could bridge the gap between hydrocarbon powered and electric vehicles.
Watch any of the documentary series about life aboard an aircraft carrier [1] and you'll see that there's essentially no "just sitting around in the ocean." But your main point is still accurate: If there's power available, putting it to work making jet fuel might be a good trade-off for the additional drain on the nuclear fuel.
From friends and family in the navy: whenever you see a fleet or battle group "stationed" somewhere, it means they are basically doing right turns in the middle of the ocean (a joke being that someone has to balance the effect of all those left turning NASCAR races). While they are doing operations etc, a lot of this time is considered extremely boring, more so than even long voyages going somewhere. Further, they usually aren't going full speed, so to some extent they are "just sitting there", particularly in the effect that they aren't using the full output of their power systems - leaving lots of power and (if needed people time) available for fuel "creation".
Former Navy aircraft-carrier nuclear engineering officer here. The basic point --- that a carrier might be able to refine its own jet fuel --- is certainly valid. But so that future readers don't get the wrong idea: Any time a carrier is at sea, it does a lot of flight ops just about every day, whether for actual missions, for war games, or just refresher training. That in turn means most of the crew is hustling, usually 12 to 14 hours a day minimum, and sometimes 'round the clock. Maintenance has to be done in the gaps. When we were at sea, it was rare to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep in a night. Somehow I doubt that has changed.
initial studies predict that jet fuel from seawater would cost in the range of $3 to $6 per gallon to produce