First to garble the story was the International Business Times. “Goodbye, Oil: US Navy Cracks New Renewable Energy Technology To Turn Seawater Into Fuel, Allowing Ships To Stay At Sea Longer,” ran the headline over a report the next day. “The Navy’s 289 vessels all rely on oil-based fuel, with the exception of some aircraft carriers and 72 submarines that rely on nuclear propulsion,” wrote reporter Christopher Harress. “Moving away from that reliance would free the military from fuel shortages and fluctuations in price.” CNBC immediately reproduced the story verbatim under the headline: “US Navy Wants to Power Warships With Seawater.”
Emily Thomas of the Huffington Post fell hook, line, and sinker for the whole thing, directly quoting IBT: “Currently, most of the Navy’s vessels rely entirely on oil-based fuel, with the exception of some aircraft carriers and submarines that use nuclear propulsion, reports the International Business Times. The ability to render fuel from seawater may change that.”
Others quickly followed. FoxNews blew it with a headline, “Powering the Ships of the Future? Navy Develops the Technology to Turn Seawater into Fuel.” The supposed scientific experts at Discover didn’t get it right either. “If Navy ships create their own fuel they can remain operational 100 percent of the time, rather than conducting frequent fuel-ups with tankers while at sea, which can be tricky in rough weather,” reported Carl Engelking imaginatively.
Even DefenseSystems.com, a website devoted exclusively to military ordnance, got it all confused: “It might not be cold fusion,” wrote Kevin McCaney, “but researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory have, on a small scale, tapped into what could prove to be a nearly unlimited source of fuel for air, sea and even land vessels.”
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All these stories overlook the inconvenient fact that it takes energy to do all these things. It takes energy to split hydrogen out of water. It takes energy to synthesize it back into a hydrocarbon. And because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, energy is always lost in the process. Consequently, you always end up with less energy than when you started.
http://spectator.org/articles/58747/bulletin-us-navy-invents-perpetual-motion-machine
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