Other government agencies can also benefit from the proposed technology. The US Air Force is breaking ground on pilot-scale FT jet fuel production facilities, and our technology is equally applicable to the cracking of FT waxes. Other military applications include in-situ generation of diesel-like fuel to operate the DoD's portable diesel-engine electric generators. Electric generators are usually the largest consumer of fuel on the battlefield, and this fuel often must be trucked in at a high "fully burdened" prices that can be in excess of $100/gallon. The proposed technology can of course also be used for commercial conversion of plastic waste into liquid fuels, as companies like Envion and Global Finest have shown with similar technologies. This is likely to be our break-in market, as there is a great need to make use of the used plastic that is currently being incinerated or kept in landfills for decades. The proposed technology can later be adapted for upgrading unconventional petroleum reserves, including tar sands, oil shale, and heavy crude. Unconventional petroleum reserves are an important component of world petroleum reserves, and innovative upgrading technologies will be required for economically converting them into useful transportation fuels.
The target NASA application for the proposed technology is in-situ liquid fuel production in the moon using waste plastics and other organic materials. The purpose of NASA's effort for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) is to harness and utilize resources at the site of exploration to create products and services, which can enable and significantly reduce the mass, cost, and risk of near-term and long-term space exploration. Such capabilities are considered extremely important to human expeditions to Mars which, because of the distances involved, would be much longer missions entailing a minimum of 500 days spent on the planet's surface. We anticipate that the proposed system can be used during lunar days, in conjunction with solar heating and excess solar-electrical power, to generate fuel that can be stored and used during lunar nights. Lunar nights can last up to 334 hours, and storage of electrical energy in batteries and flywheels for use during lunar nights is not practical even with the most advanced electrical storage technologies available today. Liquid fuel obtained from plastic waste will inherently be low in sulfur and can be readily used in solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) for electrical power generation at night. This fuel can also be used to power generators, heaters, and similar appliances needed in space missions.
More »