UKC

This popped up on my facebook feed, its apparently some new process which allows hydrocarbons to be produced from seawater... seems too good to be true! Could someone more sciencey than me tell me the catch?

http://www.nrl.navy.mil/media/news-releases/2014/scale-model-wwii-craft-tak...

In reply to The Norris:

As a quick first read, I read it as extract CO2 and H2 from seawater, (which presubambly takes quite a lot of energy) then recombine them in a way I don't understand to make a hydrocarbon jet fuel. I don't think it's carbon neutral, because it will take energy to extract the H2 and CO2.

In reply to The Norris:
The catch is that you need a hell of a lot of energy to electrolyse the water in the first place. Sure, one day in the future we'll have giant desert solar farms and everything will be just peachy, but right now this might not even make much sense even if you had a handy nuclear reactor to drive the whole thing.

Of course, given that this is a Naval Research Lab project, they'll have different economics to the rest of us (and are more likely to have a handy nuclear reactor).