Ok, lets break this down. Does this make sense? Lets figure out how much water you would have to process to fuel one destroyer. So what would it take to build diesel fuel from the carbon dioxide in seawater? The article states that 100mg of CO2 can be extracted from a liter of seawater. Diesel has 8 to 21 carbon atoms per molecule. Carbon dioxide has one, of course. So it takes at least eight molecules of CO2 to build one molecule of diesel. A given number of molecules of CO2 weighs 44 grams (this is called molecular mass). The same number of molecules of Diesel weighs 233 grams. So it takes 352(8x44) grams of CO2 to produce 233grams of diesel. Pretty close to 1.5 to one. So for a given weight of diesel we would need to start with 1.5 times as much CO2. (Oxygen is heavy) A liter of diesel weighs .85 kilos So to produce that you have to start with 1.275 kilos of carbon dioxide. So to get 1.275 kilos of you would need to extract CO2 from 12750 liters of water. A destroyer burns 1000 gallons of fuel/minute. So 3780 liters. So to extract that much fuel from seawater you would need to process 48195000 liters per minute. That is rather a lot of water. 3.5 times the average flow of the Chattahoochee river. With 60 destroyers in the US fleet you would have to process more than the entire flow of the Mississippi river to fuel them. That is a HECK of a lot of water.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Apr 2014 23:22:49 +0000
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