In areas which have little or no access to oil , this can certainly be useful . For example , South Africa has hardly any oil , so makes a lot of its fuel synthetically . They make their CO and hydrogen from coal reserves instead , but other than that , the process is similar . I remember reading an article in Chemistry World a few years ago about how the US Navy were developing a similar mechanism to create liquid hydrocarbon fuels from carbon dioxide and water . They were planning to do this on their aircraft carriers , using excess power from their nuclear reactors to drive the process . The fuel produced would be for the aircraft , so that carriers wouldn ' t need to carry such large stocks of aviation fuel . Another advantage would be no need to transfer fuel to the carriers from fuel bowsers . That has always been a point of weakness , since a carrier is vulnerable to attack during any refueling operation .