Everybody already knows that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.
However, perhaps you didn’t know that a team at the Naval Research Laboratories in Florida has successfully developed a technology that synthesizes jet fuel from only sea water and electricity.
With all of their ships and planes, the navy has a huge need of both diesel and jet fuel. Unfortunately, many of the regions that contain large sources of petroleum, have…how shall I say…political interests highly contrary to those of the United States. So sending an oiler supply vessel to shore to find a petroleum source could be a very hazardous strategic move in a conflict and might leave our ships dead in the water or forced to return home. This strategic achilles heel for the navy is bad, but the fuel is also increasingly expensive (cost of fuel for the navy rose from $0.63/gal in 2000 to $3.75/gal in 2013, and effectively costs over $7.00/gal to deliver to the vessels) not to mention environmentally disastrous.
So a team at the Naval Research Laboratories headed by Heather Willauer has jumped many technical hurdles over a period of 12 years to devise a technique that can use carbon dioxide/hydrogen from seawater and electricity from small modular nuclear reactors found aboard some navy ships to synthesize both F-76 diesel and JP-5 jet fuel.
The process begins by temporarily lowering the pH of the seawater to a value of 4.5 and removing 92% of the carbon dioxide (CO2). The CO2 along with elemental hydrogen from electrolysis runs through a specialized catalyst that synthesizes longer hydrocarbon chains. This creates a fuel that actually exceeds current specifications for the navy. Though it takes about 23,000 gallons of water (which is the volume of a large home swimming pool) to produce 1 gallon of JP-5 jet fuel, using available technology we can potentially manufacture 41,000 gallons per day from a single ship carrying a 100mW reactor. This means that we could supply the entire navy fleet with roughly 5 vessels carrying these systems, and they do not necessarily need to be devoted fuel manufacturing vessels (i.e. nuclear aircraft carriers). A cost analysis for the navy reactors puts the price of delivered fuel using this new fuel synthesis system at ~$2.90 which is much friendlier than the current ~$7.00+. With higher-temperature 4th generation reactor designs, this price would go substantially down, due to the fact that water dissociates at the high operating temperatures of these reactors thus making electrolysis unnecessary.
While the largest vessel flown so far with fuel manufactured from this technology is a model airplane, on a technology readiness scale (TRL) this system rates a 6 out of a maximum of 9. Almost all of the legwork behind the chemical concept has been diligently overcome, including the catalyzers, membranes, fuel synthesis specifications, etc. Now engineering issues of scaling up and making the technology robust are the primary hurdle to making synthesized fuel available to our navy as well as remote military bases.
But honestly, who gives a flying crap about the military when we have the potential to provide consumers with carbon-neutral transportation fuels that don’t fluctuate with demand and scarcity? For a variety of reasons, electricity from nuclear power is currently more expensive for civilians than it is for military, so an analysis puts the price for transportation fuels from civilian power at $5.90 per gallon, which is substantially more than a gallon of fossil-derived gasoline, but I know plenty of righteous hippies that would pay twice as much for fuel that they knew was coming from a carbon-neutral source.
However, nuclear energy has EVERY PROMISE of being able to profitably synthesize transportation fuels from gasoline to methanol (which can be a direct replacement for diesel). Think of how agriculture (and warfare) changed when the Haber process freed us from being slaves to having wars over bat guano found in obscure caves in Polynesia. By synthesizing fuel, we will no longer be a slave to digging holes in the ground to fuel our transportation infrastructure. The oil and fossil fuel companies will lose their monopoly on record profits from fluctuations in a market based on a finite resource, energy will simply be too abundant.
Totaling over a billion in capital invested, here are a variety of companies aiming to take advantage of the vast potential of ridiculously-safe, zero-emissions, low-cost energy that comes from 4th generation nuclear reactors here are some links:
