He is talking either OTEC or nuclear. Now take all of his figures and then double the costs, which is about standard cost inflation for a military project.
Have you ever looked at what an Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion plant looks like? I would suggest that you do. One of those is not going to be mobile. It does require pumping large amounts of water from depths of at least 2,000 feet to get a sufficient temperature differential, and you need surface water with a temperature like you would find off of Hawaii. There was a test system operating off of there for a while. That does sort of limit where you are going to operate one of these. The paper mentions Diego Garcia, Guam, and Hawaii. If you produce the fuel there, you still have to get it to where it is wanted, i.e. the aircraft carrier, so you still have the at-sea refueling.
He is also not counting the energy required to produce the nuclear fuel for the reactor, which will be ship-based, and therefore utilize highly-enriched U-235. You are not going to put a natural uranium or a low-enriched uranium reactor at sea. There are quite a few countries which will not allow a nuclear-powered ship in their territorial waters. Given this thing would be carrying a lot of weapon-grade U-235, you are going to need a small naval task force to protect it. If I were a nasty-minded individual with the US as an enemy, I would target this thing with everything that I have. Take it out and the aircraft carrier goes away.
If the navy wants to do this from a shore-plant here, I can sort of see it, although making the jet fuel from coal using the mentioned coal to liquid conversion processes makes a lot more sense. Sasol in South Africa is already producing liquid fuels on that scale. It is heavily subsided. The current price of jet fuel is $3.135 per gallon. That is considerably lower than his cost, without assuming any cost inflation, which as I said, is likely to be about 100% based on standard military cost inflation estimates. Given that you would be trying to put a land refinery at sea, I would suspect that the cost inflation might be a lot higher. Also, refinery explosions are not that unusual, except in this case, a refinery explosion would also involve a functioning nuclear plant.
As I said, I would prefer my tax dollars be used more wisely. Build the synthetic fuel plant in the US, and make if a lot larger than 100,000 gallons a day, which is 2380 barrels of fuel a day.
