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Tim
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I'm a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, a writer here and there
on this and that and strangely, one of the global experts on the metal scandium,
one of the rare earths. An odd thing to be but someone does have to be such and
in this flavour of our universe I am. I have written for The Times, Daily
Telegraph, Express, Independent, City AM, Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia
Inquirer and online for the ASI, IEA, Social Affairs Unit, Spectator, The
Guardian, The Register and Techcentralstation. I've also ghosted pieces for
several UK politicians in many of the UK papers, including the Daily Sport.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed
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Op/Ed
4/08/2014 @
12:00PM 5,107 views

Don't Get Too Excited But The US Navy Can Now Make Gasoline
From Seawater

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This might sound like something from the far end of the sci-fi fantasy
spectrum but the US Navy can now produce gasoline starting with seawater.
Unfortunately this isn’t quite as exotically strange as it sounds, nor is it
quite the Holy Grail of beating climate change. It’s pretty cool for the
purposes the Navy wants it for, this is true, but it’s not about to become a
general technique in wide use.

They’ve a nice little video showing the basics:

There’s a longer
description of the research from a couple of years ago and a New Scientist
report here.

There’s nothing particularly odd about the basic thing that’s being done
here. Seawater contains both carbon dioxide and hydrogen: the CO2 is dissolved
into the water and the hydrogen is that H2 part of H2O. So, if you can separate
out those two parts then you’ve got carbon and hydrogen and then we know how to
make hydrocarbons from those two and oil is simply one type of hydrocarbon. The
process of refining oil (more especially the cracking part) is simply the
sorting of the longer, larger and heavier hydrocarbons from the light ones and
thus ending up with the series of products that we use, from asphalt to avgas or
jet fuel. And we know very well that we can run this process in either
direction.

However, and here’s the economic point to this, such a system is simply not
going to be economic, not in general usage. Currently they say that a gallon of
avgas will cost in the $4-$6 range and when it’s possible to pump up oil in
Saudi for $15 a barrel that price just doesn’t work. Not for general usage it
doesn’t work that is. It’s also worth pointing out that this process is an
energy sink. When we drill for oil we get a net addition to the useful power
available to us. This process reduces the amount of power available to
us. We have to put more energy into the system than we get out of it.

However, that’s not a problem given the economics of the situation that the
Navy is trying to solve. We’ve all noticed (who hasn’t seen too many reruns of
Top Gun for example?) that the Navy likes to fly planes off boats. And those
planes suck down that avgas like nobody’s business, all of which has to be
delivered to those boats out there on the oceans. An expensive undertaking: not
to mention the fact that those tankers are rather large potential floating bombs
in a war zone. So, while the process isn’t yet economic for us on land it can
(perhaps might is better) be given the constraints that the Navy is facing. The
larger ships are nuclear powered, the carriers certainly are, meaning that
there’s a useful surplus of energy on each of them. If they can process that
abundant seawater that is, by definition, all around them into that jet fuel
then that’s that problem solved. For which Hurrah! etc. and it’s time for
celebration.

Of course, what we’d all like to know is, well, when will this become a more
general technology of use to us all in combating climate change? For if we’re
sucking the CO2 out of the ocean to produce the gasoline that we then burn
putting CO2 back into the atmosphere/ocean then we’ve simply not got a problem
with our emissions. And here the answer is, unfortunately, never. For the reason
that this is an energy sink. We need more energy to go into the process than we
get out of it. And there are times, as with the Navy here, when we’re just fine
with that. But as a general rule it’s not really all that useful. We want to
produce energy, not just transform it with efficiency losses along the way.

Now, we could imagine solar power becoming ever cheaper. I’ve certainly
stated before that if installation costs fall to 10 cents a watt rather than the
current $1 or so then many things do change. But not, I think this one. For if
solar does fall in price so precipitately then we’ll all be happily driving
around in electric cars fed directly with that electricity, rather than taking
the efficiency losses of transforming the electricity into gasoline. Another way
of making the same point is that the very changes that would make this a viable
and general technique are the changes that would mean that we didn’t actually
want to do this at all.

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