Us Navy Announced End To "big Oil"... And No One Noticed...?

[Specialist]

The thing to understand about all this, including the original Navy work, is that, since combustion of a hydrocarbon (or carbohydrate, or similar compound) is exothermic, (re)formation of such a compound from the combustion products (usually CO₂ and H₂O) is necessarily endothermic.

 

At that point, what you have is not a fuel but a battery. You "charge" the battery by collecting and reprocessing the CO_2, which necessarily takes more energy than you can recover by burning it again. (The Laws of Thermodynamics are not subject to repeal by human governments.)

[TheCorinthian]

The thing to understand about all this, including the original Navy work, is that, since combustion of a hydrocarbon (or carbohydrate, or similar compound) is exothermic, (re)formation of such a compound from the combustion products (usually CO₂ and H₂O) is necessarily endothermic.

 

At that point, what you have is not a fuel but a battery. You "charge" the battery by collecting and reprocessing the CO_2, which necessarily takes more energy than you can recover by burning it again. (The Laws of Thermodynamics are not subject to repeal by human governments.)

 

 

Um... well, that is not how this process works (your battery reference) unless you want to stretch and say your car is a battery that is recharged by the hydro cracking stations at BP.

 

You would have to read the technical paper for an in depth explanation, and I am only about a half inch into it (It's like 1000 pages when I printed it out.), but essentially it is a catalytic process, like the age old high school experiment where you use the enzymes in chicken liver to split H2O2 into H20 and O2. So you are taking in the fluid, adding a slight current and the catalyst "forces" the CO2 and H2 to split off. Again not even half way through it but it looks like the current across catalytic side is less than 10 apms.

 

But the real point is, this looks easier and cheaper to produce Hydrogen and hydrocarbons than drilling for oil...!