This page has a biased and jaded overview of the potential for water as a fuel in automobiles and a general overview of some of the more contentious claims that have been made for powering cars on water. Clearly the writer is not impressed with the numerous claims made over the years for cars that run on water or use water as a storage medium for Hydrogen or Browns gas.

However the writer also fails to mention the plasma spark plug, the Geet Plantone fuel system allowing leaned out ratios of 80:20 water:gasoline, the Firestorm sparkplug from Robert Kruiper, the Plasmatron from MIT, ArvinMeritor’s Plasma Fuel Reformer, the potential in using Al-Ga composite from Jerry Woodal at Purdue, solar hydrogen electrolysis and photosynthesis using silica catalysts from MIT or even a general overview of the actual energy potential available in a liter of water in real world numbers and not just abstract (for most readers) chemical algorithms.

Even though there is an indisputable energy loss in freeing hydrogen from it’s watery prison that does not mean it is not possible to use it as a fuel source. The question is how inefficient are we prepared to be when it comes to transportation and energy supply and are there other ways to coax hydrogen out from it’s watery orgy so that we can also use it as an energy source.

Water is fully oxidized hydrogen. Hydrogen itself is a high-energy, flammable substance, but its useful energy is released when water is formed–water will not burn. The process of electrolysis, discussed below, would split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but it takes as much energy to take apart a water molecule as was released when the hydrogen was oxidized to form water. In fact, some energy would be lost in converting water to hydrogen and then burning the hydrogen because some heat would always be produced in the conversions. Releasing chemical energy from water would therefore violate the first and/or second laws of thermodynamics.

Tags: Chronology, Fuel, Fundamentals // Add Comment »