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A colorful twist to mostly dry experiments on turning to alternate sources for fuel, the Navy used a radio controlled (RC) airplane to test a fuel that essentially came from seawater. Curious they choose an Army plane (P-51 Mustang) and not a Navy plane like the Hellcat or Wildcat fighter.
Essentially, on a very basic level, what the Navy is doing is extracting CO2 and Hydrogen from the seawater, and then recombining it into hydrocarbon chains, and then liquefying that (via a metal catalyst) into synthetic fuel. The type of synthetic fuel that can be made can vary, but jet fuel (similar to diesel) and petroleum-type fuels, like what was run in that little model plane, and, yes, that same sort of fuel could potentially be run in your normal old gasoline car with minimal or no modifications.
While there is a cost, it takes over 23,000 gallons of sea water to make one gallon of fuel, the Navy feels it could be a viable product within 7-10 years.
The Navy is saying they feel that the system could be commercially viable in 7-10 years or so, and resulting fuel would cost between $3-$6/gallon, which is not bad at all, really - that's essentially on par with current costs for fuels we pull out of the ground.
(Score: 2) by Nobuddy on Tuesday April 29 2014, @12:33AM
Possibly, I dealt with JP4 mostly when I had to deal with it. the diesel tugs and generators loved JP4.
Anectdote- I was hazmat, and had to deal with hundreds of gallons of "waste" fuel from testing. Pull a gallon from Bird1, test, send gallon to hazmat. Repeat for Bird2 through Bird250.
Major pain in the butt to process. So i got the idea of simply re-purposing the waste to fuel in the tugs. A simple checkoff on a waste re-utilization sheet and I have reduces the diesel demands of the base by a significant fraction as well as reduced my workload by half.
As a result, my boss was awarded a medal.