Mention the Defense Department these days and you'll get shit from both the left and the right. The left hates everything they do and fails to recognize how they are leaders in non military activity such as breast cancer research. The right complains about how much money they spend and how they are in a constant state of intervention around the world.
Yet, it's stories like this that show that they are of enormous benefit to our society.
After decades of experiments, U.S. Navy scientists believe they may have solved one of the world’s great challenges: how to turn seawater into fuel.The development of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel could one day relieve the military’s dependence on oil-based fuels and is being heralded as a “game changer” because it could allow military ships to develop their own fuel and stay operational 100 percent of the time, rather than having to refuel at sea.
Consider the implications of this as related to climate change. Obviously, seawater is in ample supply and this technology could massively reduce carbon emissions and put us on a path for renewable and sustainable energy for quite a long time.
Way to go, US Military!
2 comments:
This article has a much better description of the process. It's a lot like the system I described previously for pulling CO2 and hydrogen out of air and water and making methane.
The system as implemented by the military is not very efficient: it takes a lot of electricity to create fuel in this fashion. They will probably use nuclear reactors.
Thus, they should be able to make jet fuel onboard a nuclear aircraft carrier or a naval station on the coast. That would make them independent of short-term supply chain disruptions.
In the long term, similar processes in the civilian realm could be powered by solar and wind power. Burning this kind of fuel is far superior to burning things like coal and gasoline, because it's pure and creates no net increase in CO2. It will produce mostly CO2 and water, and none of the heavy particulates and sulphur dioxide that coal and diesel do. It's carbon neutral because it's getting the carbon out of the ambient environment, essentially recycling CO2 pollution, instead of burning ancient reserves buried in the ground.
More efficient systems are under development with algae or bacteria that produce fuels directly, just by exposing them to sunlight and feeding them.
The left hates everything they do and fails to recognize how they are leaders in non military activity such as breast cancer research. The right complains about how much money they spend and how they are in a constant state of intervention around the world.
Well, I think you have actually managed to misrepresent both views. That may be a first for you.
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