U.S. Navy says it can now convert seawater into fuel

originally posted by: FormOfTheLord
I think its a good technology and could aid our society, salt water is plentiful and can solve all of our energy needs.

There is no energy in salt water. That's the issue.

The Navy is using stuff IN the salt water to fabricate petroleum. By pumping in huge amounts of energy. More than you can ever get back by burning the fuel. WAY more. All the salt water is contributing is hydrogen, oxygen and dissolved carbon dioxide. It's not a fuel. There isn't any energy to get out of it.

The Navy is ripping the water to pieces using nuclear energy, extracting the dissolved CO2 using nuclear energy, then putting the resulting bits together as jet fuel using nuclear energy. It's hideously inefficient. It doesn't "solve energy needs" because you could just use nuclear reactors for electrical power and get 3x the efficiency.

This is a stop-gap thing for the Navy to use when they can't get readily available petroleum.

Salt. Water. Or. Any. Water. Is. Not. An. Energy. Source. Ever. With the possible distant exception of extracting deuterium from it for fusion reactors, which we don't have any of at the moment. But it's value as a chemical fuel is zero, the same as its energy content.