Sasol of South Africa has made liquid fuels via the Fischer-Tropsch process for decades. The synthesis gas comes from coal or natural gas. Clean synthesis gas from water, CO2, and clean electricity should be a drop-in replacement for fossil derived syngas. But it's relatively expensive to make liquid fuels this way even when starting with cheap coal. I only expect synfuels to be used for performance critical applications and niches like keeping collectible classic cars running.
For the Air Force, their particular need is to avoid billions of dollars in contractor expense for reliably supplying fuel to remote bases in hostile territory.
I read elsewhere on hacker news that the us military runs through 20 million barrels of fuel per day . I can imagine there is a great desire to be less dependent on suppliers both in terms of quantity and logistics. Imagine a nuclear powered aircraft carrier being able to generate fuel for its planes and support ships.
Since world production of oil is currently about 75 millions of barrels per day (mbpd)[1], this 20 mbpd figure is certainly wrong. Probably someone wanted to make the figure seem higher than it was and used gallons instead of the standard barrels unit. Even then, 1/2 million barrels of fuel per day would seem high to me when the US is not in an active shooting war.
20 million barrels of oil would be worth about $1.6 billion dollars. So the military would be spending about $580 billion a year on fuel. Or 3/4th its budget.
Yes the US Navy has been researching synthesizing aviation fuel onboard nuclear powered carriers since at least 2013. The goal is to reduce fleet dependence on vulnerable tankers.
- Maybe in the future they could use fusion reactors for power, synthesizing Deuterium and/or Tritium to enhance their endurance (maybe indefinitely?)
- make the carrier (with minimal crew) and the planes into drones (AFAIK already in research/testing) since even if the material could be at sea forever the people could not endure and also many probably wouldn't sign up for such a job
All subs and surface ships, literally since the very first nuclear powered vessel. Because all they did was switch to a different heat source for the desalination that ships had been doing for decades before that.
