“Where does the energy come from in this process?
Sure you can reverse the combustion process but that requires energy.
Lots of it. More than you will get out of the fuel you make.”
The navy has been funding the polywell reactor for many years. They also wanted their Littoral Combat ships to use a rail gun, but the rail gun technology was not ready in time. Now this to make jet fuel and diesel at sea. They obviously think there is a power source available for all of that. Exactly what is anyone’s guess.
They say the cost is about $6 per gallon. That number is in the economic range.
If it was $25 per gallon I would say nice try, keep trying. But $6 gives a green light especially when they say they are working to improve the yield gained from the process. If there is success with increasing yields, then costs can enter the competitive market range.
This inversion of the laws concerning the conservation of energy puzzled me as well.
Simply unlocking CO2 and hydrogen from seawater is highly energy-intensive, and it has to come from SOMEWHERE. CO2 and hydrogen CAN be turned into fuel, through something called the Fischer-Tropsch process, but to proceed on an efficient basis, it requires a relatively high temperature to assure the carbon dioxide transforms into carbon monoxide, then the reaction can continue in the direction of forming hydrocarbon fuels.
The chemistry has been widely studied for 80-some years, and was put to use by the Third Reich in its dying days, to supply fuel for the Wehrmacht, after they had been denied access to oil fields in Romania and elsewhere. But the Germans still had a lot of coal, which was their base resource, and the process of making “syngas” had been well established many years before.
THERE IS NO COAL FLOATING AROUND IN THE OCEAN, but there may be a lot of organic matter there, which would be the source of the carbon necessary to make the carbon monoxide feedstock. Water, of course, is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, but it still takes considerable power to unlock that source.