U.S. Navy researchers have been working for more than a decade on a way to tap an abundant and relatively inexpensive source of fuel. Earlier this month, the Navy announced it had successfully extracted carbon dioxide and hydrogen from seawater, synthesizing the gases into liquid hydrocarbons that can be refined to produce fuel to power ships, jet aircraft, and virtually anything else that has an engine. The discovery could give the Navy the ability to produce its own fuel while deployed at sea.
“The total CO2 content in seawater is 140 times more concentrated than it is in air on a weight-per-volume basis,” Willauer said. “There’s so much more carbon in seawater than in the air.”...