12 thoughts on “Jet Fuel From Air”

  1. For a moment I thought they were going to claim the engines could make fuel in flight, shades of the Bussard ramjet! And of course it relies on the sustainable energy scam.

  2. Carbon Dioxide is an ash.

    Takes a lot more energy to turn it back into fuel than it would to make something like diethyl ether (diesel substitute)

  3. At best it’s a chemical “battery” for intermittent wind/solar. Funnily, the most efficient way to do it would be to put the plant right next to a coal generator or cement factory to suck up the CO2 that’s emitted, otherwise you’re struggling to extract 0.042% of the air. Then you have to move the intermittent power all the way to the CO2 emitter. Sounds great. It’s the sort of engineering we expect from years of government training.

    1. ISWYDT.

      Yeah, concentrating the CO2 is going to be a pain. I wondered a few years back if extracting CO2 from seawater might be easier than extracting it from the air but never looked into it.

  4. Don’t have the URL but there was a company which claimed to have a process where US Navy nuke Carriers could make jet fuel from seawater +energy from the nukes at a price competitive with the usual delivered on board cost.

    1. TBH, if the equipment could me made small enough that might make sense. I believe battle groups range is limited by jet fuel and fuel for the support ships.

  7. There’s a reason that CO2 and water doesn’t spontaneously turn into jet fuel but all it takes is a spark to turn jet fuel and O2 into CO2 and water. It’s called the third law of thermodynamics.

  8. I’ve thought about the use of such a process as a workaround for the difficulties in getting a nuclear plant certified. If it produces electricity for supplying the grid, it falls under a host of extra scrutiny. Kirk Sorensen (former NASA) looked at other certification routes, such as supplying military bases, to avoid the vastly larger regulatory burden.

    But one cheat is to build something like a highly efficient fossil fuel plant whose CO2 output is turned back into fuel by the nuclear plant, which supplies the fuel to the conventional plant that’s hooked to the grid. If adds a lot of inefficiency but technically the nuclear plant isn’t supplying the grid, it’s just synthesizing fuel from waste. The whole cycle would be just as green as a nuclear plant.

    Of course there are better ways to accomplish the same thing, with the nuclear plant inducing a chemical reaction or state change in some material, to store energy, and then the energy being released in the plant that’s hooked to the grid.

    Of course the simplest approach is to have the nuclear reactor make steam, and then supply the hot steam to a steam plant hooked to the grid, which then sells the spent steam as water vapor back to the nuclear plant, which conveniently uses it for cooling.

    You just have to split the installation up into two separate companies.

  9. Hmm. Well we already get public policy and litigation this way, why not jet fuel as well?

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