WASHINGTON – The U.S. Navy believes it has finally worked out the solution to a problem that has intrigued scientists for decades: how to take seawater and use it as fuel.
The development of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel is being hailed as “a game-changer” because it would significantly shorten the supply chain, a weak link that makes any force easier to attack.
The U.S. has a fleet of 15 military oil tankers, and only aircraft carriers and some submarines are equipped with nuclear propulsion.
All other vessels must frequently abandon their mission for a few hours to navigate in parallel with the tanker, a delicate operation, especially in bad weather.
The ultimate goal is to eventually get away from the dependence on oil altogether, which would also mean the navy is no longer hostage to potential shortages of oil or fluctuations in its cost.
This sounds crazy, unless it’s one of these things where the military doesn’t care how much it costs to extract the CO2 (COOH-, actually) and the H.
Getting at the hydrogen is the problem fuel cells solve. So that’s proven, if expensive, tech.
Dissolved carbon is present in seawater in very low quantities. They’d have to process a *lot* of seawater to get fuel out of it. Upside if they did it on a global scale: it would reduce the acidification caused by global warming. Downside at any scale: they’d chew up the plankton layer and probably trash marine ecosystems for their fuel. (So what else is new?)