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US Navy Makes Gas from Seawater
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Age-old myths and fantasies about turning stuff that was worthless into gold. Alchemists leaning over their cauldrons of bubbling brew in the dark recesses of the dungeon of some mythical castle somewhere unknown to mankind. Well, perhaps not so unknown and not so fantastical. Today, the US Navy has succeeded in transforming sea water into gasoline. No point in having sea water these days either for all the eco-warriors that will worry about the fauna and flora. My, oh my! Since when did people actually care what might happen to the fish in the sea or the plants? We have been shown for many a year now that it’s the economy that counts; fuel and energy are the key-words of the 20th century and they are even more so in the 21st. Holy Cow! Damn the sea water, fill the barrels and turn it into gas!
How can they do it? Simple: Seawater contains carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Separating them in H2O would mean being able to create hydrocarbons. Oil is just one form of hydrocarbon, that’s all. The gasses are transformed into a fuel by using a process of gas-to-liquid using catalytic converters. Easy-peasy. Even the US Navy can do it! We wanted renewable energy, didn’t we? Haven’t we been harping on about the ethics of preserving our mode of consumption and at the same time not wasting our resources for years now? It’s taken the US Navy decades, but now they have managed to power a small model plane. All that there’s left for them to do is to produce it in industrial quantities. The proof-of-concept test was carried out in September 2013 atBlossom Point, Maryland on a model P-51 Mustang 2-stroke engine. It was made public just a few days ago.
The US Navy relies on oil-based fuel for 289 vessels. There 72 submarines rely on nuclear power. Moving into a new era of producing enough gas to power those vessels would mean that there would be incredible savings to be made and thus less reliance on the Middle East or other countries for the source of energy. The idea would be that the vessels would be transformed into floating refineries that would transform seawater into their own energy source, thus doing away with the need to refuel with tankers in tow. The Navy has called it a “game-changer” and a “huge milestone”.
Strangely, it can power ships, it will power aircraft too on the aircraft-carriers, but the Navy says that after a decade of research they can’t make cars run on it yet. Oh! Really? Does that mean the common and mortal American will have to continue digging in his pocket at the pump to get the tank filled with gas before he speeds off to the factory to produce…(what do we produce still in the USA?)? Right! So we’ll have to bleed the planet dry, use it all up, spend all the money and then maybe then, just maybe, they will have come up with the miraculous solution that they will announce to us in a few decades. Nice!
The predicted cost for the US Navy to fuel a jet has been estimated to work out to roughly $3-$6 per gallon. The US Navy has suggested that the project would come to commercial fruition within the next 7 to 10 years and that would mean that there would be removal of dependence on gas from other countries. But, what they fail to realize is that the object of a fight is not the important thing it’s the reason why the punches get pulled. If we aren’t fighting over gas in the future, then we’ll be fighting over sea-water. There’s lots of it on the planet, and everyone could get to it. But, whatever it is, if it’s coveted, then it’s a reason to go to war, invade, pillage, burn and plunder. If that new object is going to be seawater, so be it.
Just as well they decided to use the seawater. Apparently, the seas and oceans are rising in level due to the melting of the ice caps. Hey, you know, the Americans will end up being the saviors of the planet, ecologically-speaking!
There’s 96% of the world’s water in the oceans today. Water covers 70% of the planet. The US Navy has 332, 519, 000 cubic miles of water to turn into fuel now. Who cares about the fish? Having trouble working out how many gallons that works out to be? It’s simple: 352, 670, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000.
That’s going to take a hell of a long time at the gas pump, isn’t it?
Originally posted: US Navy Makes Gas from Seawater
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These technologies are fairly old; the NAZI's made synthetic fuels in WWII.
The questions are the costs and the source of the energy to make this happen. You cannot break water into hydrogen and oxygen or make more complex hydrocarbons without heat. Better catalysts would merely lower the costs.
If you have a high enough temperature source, such as from nuclear power, you can make hydrogen and oxygen cheaply. You can use Potassium Oxide to pull CO2 out of the air or water.
That purified CO2 can be turned into methanol, which is a clean burning, high octane, lower energy fuel. This means you don't get as good a fuel economy as gasoline. That methanol can be turned into gasoline or dimethyl ether which can replace diesel.
The author somehow thinks that this process would be polluting. The water and the CO2 are already available. Converting them into fuel closes the cycle. When they are burned the water and CO2 are returned to the environment. Why is the author against recycling?
Because he's an idiot.
The stupidity of this article is only dwarfed by the incompetence of the writer's style.
I hate reading this article and I wish I could demand my 3 minutes back.
I hereby sentence the author to Detroit.
BTW-does anyone remember a few years ago when the Navy funded a program to make oil from garbage and turkey offal? It was something like a show plant where they would subject organic waste to high pressure and heat and oil was supposed to trickle out the other end. Aaaaaand you never heard about it again. I always wondered how it worked out?
E.R.O.E.I.
Pure bullshit. Or massive ignorance. Discredits ZH, a matter that should be of some concern to us.
H2O is the most stable strongly bound molecule known, and breaking its bonds the least likely energy source perhaps in creation. If energy is supplied from some other source however breaking and recombining those bonds can be a very useful cycle.
I can make gas from baked beans
Oh WOW. A real perpetual motion machine!
First ZH prints a totally bullshit article as above then, all the morons in the peanut gallery respond and react, eager to show off how stupid they are which then encourages ZH to print more bullshit articles! Etc, etc, etc, reductio ad infinitum ad absurdum. Et voila, perpetual motion.
I've said it before...and will say it again... Pivot Farm is an idiot. He gets his stories from Google search and MS...writes like a high school sophomore....and ONLY posts on ZH to shill his website.
TANSTAAFL
2nd law of thrmodynamics is my BS detector when it comes to stuff like this.
There's no violation here: simply use energy from the onboard reactors to drive the conversion. There's already been results on generating hydrocarbon fuels from solar, but nuclear is a much more doable option. I suppose ocean CO2 is easier to concentrate than atmospheric CO2, but with onshore nuclear you _could_ drive methanol or dimethyl ether generation from water + CO2.
Why every capital ship from Destroyer on up isn't powered by nukes I'll never know, is mooring in Australia that important? Maybe with LFTRs..
All you need to get this to work is a large source of power to drive the endothermic chemical reactions that are required. Your nuclear reactor on a ship could do it. Develop a wokable cold fusion system and your're in like Flint. Plants do it with solar power, you could too. Of course you could use that power source directly and avoid the energy loss of the conversion process.
Take home: If you have a lot of power you can synthesize the grease to lubricate the (DoChenRolling) bearings but it's a bad way to power the engine. There are some small, quirky 'exceptions' to the second law but this ain't one of them.
Laws of Thermodynamics:
1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't get out of the game.
4. It takes money to make money.
Second law of thermodynamics: If you think things are bad now, just wait.
Correct. yes, you can use sunlight to provide the energy required to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Unfortunately, you can't do it very fast.
The RATE at which you can produce the gas is important as these Navy ship will consume it very fucking quickly...
Define "money", because there is a differenece between capital and money. The Fed can print as much "fiat money" as they like, but it take real capital investment to innovate.
horseshit.
This is like beleiving in the magic of the Federal Reserve.
If it could be done, it would be done. These are little pearls of hope they drop into the steaming piles of shit they feed us in the media, they are meant to confound you and disrupt your logical thinking.
They are magic and there aint no magic.
ZH standards have indeed slipped. This article is moronic in both content and editing (and I have a high tolerance for morons).
In that case, would you happen to be free for dinner?
It won't be seawater we'll be fighting over. It will be uranium to fuel the nuclear reactors to convert all that shizzle. Unless they can get the thorium technology into production pretty quickly...
Thorium is indeed the answer to world's energy problems.
Wake us when even one fucking thorium fusion reactor is providing electricity for just one city or town. I know people who have been working on this for 30+ years.
Well, we had a working thorium molten-salt reactor _50_ years ago, so wake me when NIMBYs and entrenched uranium interests are taken out back, murdered, and dumped in ditches so we can have a nice Manhattan Project for LFTRs.
it sounds like some naval department is about to get the axe, so they dust off this old research paper to present to the sages in congress.
You could probably go to certain areas of the ocean and dump it straight into your gas tank.
Seriously?! This article and some of the comments here make me think people have been living under a rock and have no connection with basic science.
Yes you can make hydrogen from water...just add electricity. From hydrogen you can go many routes to form chemicals, fuels, fertilizers etc. just need power to be cheaper than other sources to make it economic.
....and no you can't run a car on water without the 'magic' of science. Seriously, why not start posting 'zero point' energy articles on ZH and then i will know it is really time to go somewhere else.
Tyler likes to allow an occasional idiot post like this one just to get our blood flowing on a boring morning. He's concerned about our health. We are just sitting on our butts looking at computer screens after all.
+1000
It's up to us to keep them honest.
1. Zeroth, first and second laws of thermodynamics.
2. Difference between a source of energy and a store of energy.
3. "The End of Ancient Sunlight" (it's a book, main point = approx. "wood is a store of ten year old sunlight, coal is a store of thousand year old sunlight, oil is a store of million year old sunlight")
That should do for starters.
The author is a bit naive. He doesn't understand the difference between military economics and that of Main Street. And that can be disasterous for more important issues than money and energy policy.
The US Navy use Gas Turbine engines in their ships and Jet engines in their aircraft. These engine can burn anything that’s flammable. They can be easily tuned to burn Browns gas by adjusting the amount of air drawn in and compressed in the compressor section of the engine, the amount of fuel injected into the combustion tubes, and changing the angle of adjustable stator blades in the power turbine section. Currently these adjustments on most Gas Turbine and Jet engines are done manually. It would not be difficult at all to add computer control to automatically adjust these perimeters. Piston engines are not as adaptable to changes in fuel. If they were you would not have three or more choices of fuel at your typical service station.
Bingo! I hope this stops people from wondering why the M1A1 Abrams has a turbine engine. Simplicity, modular, can burn most anything.
Piston engines would be too expensive to modify.
The problem with turbine engines as far as cars goes is the amount of heat they produce. Supposedly someone figured out how to mitigate this problem so they could be used in automobiles and was promptly killed over it after the technology was patented and buried.
Their
Er theres alot moar t it than H2O its sea water so its NaClH20 i.e salt water and when you preform electrolysis on salt water you make oxygen hydrogen and clorine gas and a pile of sodium, so salt water is the last thing you want to make browns gas from but they run it though a distiller to get just the water out first which takes a lot of energy to do. then again maybe they store clorine gas for a rainy day.........
Lot's of private engineers and inventors have died or have been silenced after releasing their water powered engines. The question is: is human sheeple prepared to be freed from their state of slavery and evolve into a free, unlimited energy world?
Plenty of free energy machines on the internet. Why don't you download the plans and make one? And make a few more for your friends. Don't tell anyone.
Or are those guys only still alive because their machines don't work?
Shit! These guys are still around:
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
You might want to read up on their patents. They might not notice if you sneakily make one when they're not looking.
i made a Newman electric motor and tested it.
some clame it produces more than it takes to run.
not true but close, combining this with solar or sterling or geothermal is a winning combo.
as for h2 and o2 from water you need salt for the electrolisis process to work " it needs to conduct" ergo the sea water.
it also needs DC power, pulsating dc works best.
I use h2 and o2 for brazening with my oxygen torch and get the DC from ½ amp solar system it produces no soot when setting and shutting down the torch. Anyone who torch welds knows what I mean.
"but the Navy says that after a decade of research they can’t make cars run on it yet." If you believe that statement you believe in the tooth fairy. This technology has been known about for at least 100 years. Most recently a japanese firm was bringing out a car that ran on water. It was shown on a news report by Reuters. Then very quietly they decided to liquidate the firm. It happens all the time or the inventor suddenly meets an "untimely death". Well I guess the Navy is desperate enough as the military is already preparing for a post dollar world to use sea water rather than continue to pay for gas. As to your last comment, it shows incredible ignorance as the technology works with any sort of water as it only concerns splitting the hydrogen from the oxygen. Even if it was only sea water what do you think is given off as one of the by products? Oxygen which then binds again with hydrogen to form (wait for it...) water! A bit of elementary chemistry would help you in the future.
Browns gas been around for years http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyhydrogen
Like all government projects, the total cost is either 10x or not disclosed at all. More importantly, where are the guys turning seawater into gold?\
Like I said above, two questions:
1. What source fuel are they using for the process?
2. How many Joules of fuel are consumed in order to create a Joule of fuel?
No need for CO2 or anything but the H2O (and [solar] energy). Just pass electricity through an appropriate conductor (carbon rod) in H2O and... presto... O2 bubbles off one end, H2 bubbles off the other end.
In case anyone didn't know, when you run a conventional car engine on H2 and O2, the output is H2O. Some effort is required to assure temperatures are within the optimal range, otherwise other molecules may be generated (besides H2O2, which is good stuff).
H2 and O2 are also great rocket fuel... for both boosters and other stages.
Thus... this so-called "government development" seems like nothing but pointless, misleading propaganda. People have made standard Honda car engines run off H2 and O2 input, so it isn't like some magic technological leap is required. Adding CO2 does nothing except create opportunities for additional unwanted output molecules (pollution).
How can you get CO2 from H2O? There is no carbon to extract. The EPA and SCOTUS have declared CO2 to be a "greenhouse gas", even though plant life cannot live without it. Is the U.S. Navy in danger of being shut down by the tyrannical morons at the EPA?
We are being governed by morons.
I think they said they can get CO2 out of ocean water, not pure water. And that is true, though I don't know how much CO2 is dissolved in ocean water.
Hydrogen is an excellent store of energy, much better than petrol when measured in Joules per kilogram. Unfortunately, not so good when measured in Joules per litre. Hydrogen is the lightest gas we've got and compressing it and cooling it so that it can be compressed is a real pain! (Although it is not too much of a problem in great big fuel tanks that are a convenient size for rockets.) Also, it burns with an invisible flame, which may be a safety problem, on top of the hazards already inherent in unplanned releases of explosive gas into the atmosphere.
Roughly speaking, add Carbon to Hydrogen and you get, progressively - methane, ethane, propane, butane ... octane ..., each one slightly heavier, lower energy density, and progressing from gases to liquids and then, later on, to solids.
Petrol (gasoline) is a blend of liquids C5H12 (pentane) to C12H26 (dodecane). While less powerful than Hydrogen, it still has a decent energy density ( Joules per kilogram ) and it packs a lot more energy into a given volume than Hydrogen (Joules per litre), plus it doesn't need to be cooled and compressed. Because it is a liquid, an accidental release of fuel results in a puddle on the floor instead of an explosive gas in the atmosphere (except on a hot day. Petrol is volatile, "Volatile" means "evaporates easily" so then the puddle on the floor does end up in the atmosphere). This is a safety issue because in order for fuel to burn, it needs oxygen. A puddle of fuel burns at the surface because that is where the oxygen is. A gas ( or vapour ) mixed in air has oxygen available everywhere and so burns immediately (explodes).
I used to love the idea of Hydrogen for a fuel but these days I'm more interested in finding new sources of petrol. Find an easy, cheap way to compress Hydrogen, add a bit of dye so it burns with a visible flame, and you may rekindle my interest in Hydrogen.
But petrol is just a great way to store energy for use in personal transport. Batteries haven't quite got there yet - their energy density is too low. Do you want a solar powered car? A 100kW car would need 100 square metres or more of solar panels on the roof, depending on the efficiency of the solar cells.
Plus, by staying with petrol we don't make the world's car fleet obsolete (okay, okay, I'll go along with a good Hydrogen conversion kit).
Petrol burns to give carbon dioxide and water ( in theory. Depending on the quality of the burn, in reality there is also carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and a few other nasties.)
What happens if we just take the carbon dioxide and water out of the atmosphere and turn it back into petrol? First problem : in order to turn water and carbon dioxide back into petrol, we have to add back the energy we took out of it. Second, we need to add even more energy to power our "petrol producing equipment". We use more energy than what we get back. Would you spend two Joules to produce one Joule? But millions of Joules of sunlight hit the earth every day. Who cares if we waste two Joules of sunlight ( which we get for free and weren't using in the first place ) if we can use it to make one Joule of petrol, which is very convenient for us? The added bonus of this idea is that if we are just continously burning / returning the same Carbon dioxide to petrol, the whole petrol industry becomes carbon neutral - the carbon that is burnt into the atmosphere is returned to fuel in people's cars.
Is anyone working on this?
http://phys.org/news178203219.html
Or just google it ("turn carbon dioxide and water back into petrol" ). A lot of people are working on this, including solar powered versions.
Is it better to extract fuel from sea water instead of the atmosphere? I don't know. I imagine the seawater version would be more efficient.
I would appreciate it if the writer of this article would mention the efficiency of their fuel conversion process. What fuel source do they use to run the "fuel producing" equipment? How many Joules used to how many Joules produced?
Hydrogen gas is NOT a "source" of energy and energy is requireed to produce the gas in the first place moron.
hydrogen gas is an alternative energy currency or store of energy.
The term (admittedly non-physics) is energy vector, similar to electricity...
Irrelevant. Using the word "source" implies that there are large stores of hydrogen gas on earth, much like helium or fossil fuels. There are not, hydrogen gas is produced by consuming energy. However, hydrogen can be stored in special matricies and has been a wonderful mechanism for providing energy in specialized applications like space travel etc.