Not Quite the End of Big Oil

I stumbled across an amusing bit of scientific confusion at Addicting Info (“The Knowledge You Crave”) in an article titled “The U.S. Navy Just Announced The End Of Big Oil And No One Noticed.” The author, Justin “Filthy Liberal Scum” Rosario, says the U.S. Navy has “achieved the Holy Grail of energy independence – turning seawater into fuel.”

He’s talking about an International Business Times article by Christoper Harress describing a process developed by he U.S. Navy:

After decades of experiments, U.S. Navy scientists believe they may have solved one of the world’s great challenges: how to turn seawater into fuel.

The development of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel could one day relieve the military’s dependence on oil-based fuels and is being heralded as a “game changer” because it could allow military ships to develop their own fuel and stay operational 100 percent of the time, rather than having to refuel at sea.

The new fuel is initially expected to cost around $3 to $6 per gallon, according to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which has already flown a model aircraft on it.

There have been rumors and conspiracy theories about methods for getting power from seawater for decades. I’ve heard it’s a good story for con men who claim to be looking for investors, because it has a built-in explanation for why they’re approaching individuals instead of Wall Street — the oil companies are suppressing it, you see.

However, this is not that rumor. It’s a real thing, although it’s not as good as it sounds, which I’ll explain in a minute. But it sure excites Rosario, who is eager for the demise of Big Oil:

This technology is in its infancy and it’s already this cheap? What happens when it’s refined and perfected? Oil is only getting more expensive as the easy-to-reach deposits are tapped so this truly is, as it’s being called, a “game changer.”

I expect the GOP to go ballistic over this and try to legislate it out of existence. It’s a threat to their fossil fuel masters because it will cost them trillions in profits. It’s also “green” technology and Republicans will despise it on those grounds alone.

Okay, first of all, the $3 to $6 per gallon price is the expected price once the process is industrialized. We’re not there yet.

Second, this won’t lead to energy independence for the United States because this is not a new energy source. What the IBT article is describing is a process for extracting hydrogen and carbon dioxide from the ocean and “un-burning” them to create a hydrocarbon fuel. However, the principle of conservation of energy tells us that if a fuel produces energy when burned, then the process of creating the fuel must consume energy. Ultimately you can’t get any more energy out of a fuel than you put into creating it, and in practice you’ll get somewhat less, due to inefficiencies in the process.

I’m guessing the U.S. Navy is interested in using this process to fuel aircraft and support ships associated with aircraft carriers groups. The U.S. carrier fleet is nuclear powered, but the aircraft and support ships all operate on hydrocarbon fuels. This is a major logistics problem because that fuel has to be replenished periodically from land-based stockpiles while the fleet is operating at sea, which is complex even in peacetime, and during a war, the Navy would have to be prepared to defend the refueling ships from enemy attacks along their entire route.

If this new fuel synthesis technology can be scaled up to industrial proportions, however, the nuclear power plants on board the aircraft carriers could provide the energy to synthesize fuel for the rest of the fleet right from seawater. Alternately, the Navy could deploy special purpose-built nuclear fuel synthesis ships. This would eliminate the need for refueling ships, thus solving a big logistics problem for the Navy.

That bad news for Rosario is that this will not overthrow big oil. That’s because if you have to put energy in to get energy out, then what you’re describing is really an energy storage system, not an energy source. The energy that you put into the storage system still has to come from somewhere else. We could use electrical power to synthesize fuel, but that electrical power still has to be generated, and here in the U.S., over 80% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, and almost half of that is from oil.

If we look only at electric power generation, almost half of it is from coal, with another quarter from natural gas. So we’d end up burning coal and natural gas to get the energy to make the synthetic fuel, and the transformation to electricity and then back to fuel would make it less efficient than just burning fossil fuels directly. There’s no free lunch.

(Oil and other fossil fuels are subject to conservation of energy as well, but we consider them to be energy sources because we didn’t have to provide the energy to make them. The energy content of fossil fuels was captured from sunlight by ancient organisms millions of years ago.)

You could argue that we could switch to cleaner energy to power the oil synthesis, but if it were economically feasible to shut down coal and gas powered electric power generators and replace them with cleaner energy sources, we could have already done so. Our choices of energy source are driven by availability, economics, and our existing investment in power generation infrastructure.

That’s not to say the Navy’s fuel synthesis wouldn’t be useful once we do eventually switch our electric power generation system to cleaner sources, such as solar, wind, next-generation nuclear power, or maybe even fusion (a.k.a. “The energy source of the future”). Because even if we switched our electric power generation to clean energy, and switched our industrial power and residential heating to work off the electric grid instead of burning fossil fuels, we’d still have to power our transportation system, which uses about 30% of our energy, and which is almost entirely powered by fossil fuels.

Switching our transportation system to use electrical energy would be difficult, because the elements of our transportation system — cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships — all have to carry their energy sources around with them, which means they need an energy source that is portable. (Trains travel fixed routes, so they could conceivably be powered electrically from catenary lines or the “third rail,” but that would require more infrastructure investment.) More to the point, most modes of transportation require an energy source that is lightweight, which means they must use a storage medium that has a high energy density — that stores a lot of energy per pound of added weight.

Our love of portable electronic devices has driven a revolution in battery power density, and yet with our current technology, we can just barely build battery storage units suitable for powering a small vehicle. The extended-life battery for a Tesla S model holds 85 kilowatt-hours of energy and as near as I can tell from a bit of Googling, the batteries weigh about 800 pounds. By comparison, the amount of gasoline needed to store 85 kWh worth of energy only weighs about 15 pounds. The lithium ion battery technology works okay for small, lightweight vehicles designed for relatively short trips, but it hasn’t proven feasible for larger vehicles or those that routinely travel longer distances.

The weight problem is even worse for aircraft. A Boeing 737-200 flies with 4780 gallons of fuel, which weighs just over 32,000 pounds, or just over 1/4 of the aircraft’s 115,500 pound maximum takeoff weight. That much fuel contains 187,000 kilowatt-hours of energy, and storing that much energy in lithium ion batteries would require a battery pack weighing 1.7 million pounds, or about 15 times the maximum takeoff weight of the aircraft. So unless we invent a whole new battery technology with unprecedented energy density, we will never be able to fly commercial aircraft on cleanly generated electric power.

However, as I said earlier, the Navy’s new fuel synthesis technology is really an energy storage system, and so it could well be the new “battery” technology for transportation. If it is as successful as predicted and it’s an energy efficient process and it can be scaled up to supply more than just a few carrier groups (that’s a lot of ifs), then we could generate the electric power cleanly and then use it to synthesize fuel for airplanes and road vehicles and anything else that can’t be wired into the electric grid. The synthesized fuel is not pollution free — it’s still hydrocarbons and burning it still produces carbon dioxide — but because the fuel is made by extracting carbon dioxide from the ocean instead of creating new carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, it can only produce as much carbon dioxide as was used to make it, so there won’t be a net increase. The entire cycle is carbon neutral.

However, the Navy’s new technology is not enough by itself. Energy independence and the end of big oil will have to wait until we get an energy source that is better and cheaper than fossil fuels.