The U.S. Navy could soon be sailing through an ocean of jet fuel if new research proves economical.
By extracting dissolved carbon dioxide from seawater and combining it with hydrogen stripped from water molecules, Navy chemists hope to one day secure a cheap and steady fuel source for its fleet of jets.
"The U.S. Navy is surrounded by seawater and the Navy needs jet fuel," said Robert Dorner, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. who works on the technology.
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"In the seawater you have CO2 and you have hydrogen. The question is how do you convert that into jet fuel."
The answer, according to Dorner, is a modified version of the chemical reaction known as the Fischer-Tropsch process.
