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« Kay Brooks Update | Main | Announcing... » May 18, 2006Oil and WaterWhat if, one day in the not-to-distant future, the oil sheiks of the Middle East suddenly found themselves floating on a sea of oil that nobody wanted? And what if the oil-rich terrorist-funding regimes of that parched desert region one day woke up and learned the fuel of the future was ... water. This news report from Fox 26 News in Clearwater, Fla., may turn out to be the most significant and amazing story of the 21st century. (Video requires Windows Media Player)
UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me in comments, emails and even a phone call from my mechanical-engineer dad that the process described in the story takes electricity, which of course is produced in electric power plants, which often run on ... fossil fuel. True. But, then, it always takes energy in some form to produce energy in another. All matter is just another form of energy. E=MC2 and all that, right? It takes energy to cut down trees to burn wood to heat a cabin. It takes energy to pump oil out from below the sands of Arabia or the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico or the frozen North Slope of Alaska. It takes energy to produce solar cells. Using electricity to convert H2O - water - into HHO, which then is burned as a fuel, giving off only water as its byproduct - takes energy. The trick to making the process a world-changing leap forward in energy technology will, of course, be to reduce the cost of producing the electricity needed for the conversion process to an acceptable level. In other words, efficiency. Chopping down trees to burn in a wood stove to heat a house gets the job down for one house, if you have time to spend all day chopping up trees, but it is not an efficient way to power a city, or power vehicles. Pumping oil out of Saudi Arabia has for years been a cost-efficient energy source, but the cost of oil is now soaring. Perhaps, years from now, we'll be driving cars equipped with highly efficient solar panels that produce the electricity needed to turn a bottle of Evian into fuel for hundreds of miles of car travel. That's the possibility - not the certainty - of the story out of Clearwater. Posted in Miscellaneous
Comments
That is awesome. And just think, there was no government funding used to develop this alternative energy source. Hmmm. Isn't that in itself interesting. Very cool. Posted by: toni at May 18, 2006 11:53 AMNow that is the coolest (pun intended) thing I've ever seen. 100 miles on 4oz of water? Thats simply amazing, but the skeptic in me is looking for the catch - so far, I am not coming up with anything. If this technology can be produced en mass, this guy might end up being richer than all the shieks combined. Posted by: DocB at May 18, 2006 11:57 AMThe catch is quite simple. You get less energy from recombining the Hydrogen and the Oxygen than you put in when you split them up. See the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Oil and coal are power sources. You get more energy out of them than you put in extracting, preparing, transporting and using them. The energy for a Hydrogen based economy still has to come from somewhere as Hydrogen is not an energy supply. See also the Decepticon's continual quest for Energon cubes. Posted by: byna at May 18, 2006 11:49 PMThis is certainly very interesting technology. How it fits into the long transition away from petroleum isn't clear. But it shows that we certainly do have options, many of which have not yet been explored. Posted by: Mike's America at May 19, 2006 12:23 AMThis should be treated as a hoax, but when a real breakthrough comes along, it will always be treated as a hoax. On the other hand, IF someone can "store" sufficient energy (read energy density) in a liquid by converting electrical energy at night (excess capacity), then use that liquid for transportation while producing no additional emmissions, then we have a winner. That appears to be what is claimed here. Posted by: Peter at May 19, 2006 10:22 AM100 miles on 4 ounces of water? No way. Sorry, but this story doesn't pass the smell test. This guy is claiming that the energy density of hydrogen is around two orders of magnitude greater than that of gasoline, which is ridiculous on its face. (128 ounces/gallon / 4 ounces * 100 miles = 3200 miles per gallon). Do any of you think that burning hydrogen will give you 3200 MPG? There are hydrogen cars available now. See http://archives.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science/03/16/hydrogen.cars/index.html for an example that may soon be production. The BMW described in the article has a a 140 liter (about 37 gallon) tank for hydrogen. Yet it can go only about 217.5 miles. That's just under 6 (yes, SIX!) miles per gallon. [sarcasm]Those German auto engineers sure must be dumb if that's the best they can do![/sarcasm] And what is this "HHO" that he is talking about? Hydrogen gas exists in nature typically as a diatomic molecule (H2). To my knowledge (from many hours of Chemistry classes in college), there is no such thing as "HHO". Electrolysis of a water molecule gives two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, each of which immediately combines into stable diatomic molecules of hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2). Sorry folks, but I think this guy is either self-deluded or scamming people. Posted by: Pete Nelson at May 19, 2006 5:32 PMPeter: If you visit the Hydrogen Technologies web site: http://hytechapps.com/applications/HHOS.htm You will have a better ideas about the capabilities of this technology. The news report was misleading in that it implied it only took 4 ounces of water to power the car for 100 miles. It took 4 ounces plus gasoline. The technology did increase gas mileage significantly. What do you bet if we ever do find a car that runs on water that congress begins taxing water? Posted by: Mike's America at May 19, 2006 6:43 PMSorry to get all nerdy on you here, but your solar panel idea won't work. The maximum amount of solar energy that reaches the earth's surface is about 1000 Watts per square meter. So if you covered the entire surface of a vehicle the size of a Suburban with solar panels, the maximum power it could produce, even on a perfectly sunny day in the Sahara desert, and with a 100% efficient solar panel and conversion system, would be less that 15 horsepower. To be even more nerdy: "Y'canna break the laws o'physics, Cap'n." Posted by: Red at May 19, 2006 7:25 PMByna is correct. One can't start with water, break it down to its constituent parts, and then recombine those parts to return it to water, without producing less energy than was consumed in the first deconstruction process. The search for the perpetual motion machine--which this is--is as old as alchemy. And just as possible. At best, all one does with this process is move the point of pollution from cars to electric power plants. However, this process is worse, since it actually increases the total amount of energy used. Whereas gasoline and coal actually use less energy to mine/drill, transport, and process than is produced by its burning. Both fossil fuels are cleaner, unfortunately, than this water to hydrogen/oxygen back to water machine. Sorry to break the bad news. For more, look here for one of the most concise explanations of the "science" of perpetual motion machines. I will only add that if the science is hard to follow, all you need to see to understand why perpetual motion doesn't work, is this Escher. Posted by: Bob K at May 19, 2006 9:36 PMI did a bit of googling to see what's up with all of this. It appears to be a scam. I searched on the name of the "scientist" that is behind all of this, "Ruggero Maria Santilli" and came up with a bunch of hits. One of them was this site: http://www.magnegas.com/. It appears that this "HHO" bit is not the first of "Professor" Santilli's magical gas routines. If you do the same search I did, you will find links to articles debunking his claims (you have to hunt through a bunch of garbage, though). In short, this is 99.999% (well, it's actually 100%, but I'll leave a miniscule bit of doubt) a scam. Don't get sucked into investing *any* money in it!!! Posted by: Pete Nelson at May 23, 2006 4:16 PMIn response to the UPDATE on the original post: It seems that you are missing the point of exactly why this is not a good idea. You are assuming that somehow using water as a battery is desireable. Combustion engines today (and for most of their history) have never gone over about 25% efficiency. Most of the energy from the fuel is lost as heat and waste energy. Electric motors are about 95% efficient, loosing very little energy to operation. And every time you move energy from item to another you loose energy. It is a fundamental flaw. If I take all the energy in battery A and transfer it to B, I will loose some. If I transfer that to C I will again loose some. There is no such thing as a lossless energy system or else it would be perpetual motion. So knowing that the process of taking electric energy (from say a solar panel) and using that to break apart water, then burning that water to move a car is adding inefficiency when you could have just used the original energy to power an electric motor. Look at it like this, you could take a tree, burn it and heat your house. Or you could take a tree, feed it to some termites, put the termites on a treadmill, have them activate the treadmill which turns generator which powers an electric heater. Every step of the second way wastes energy and is obviously only making the system worse. The same is with the HHO gas, sure you could take solar energy, use it to make HHO, and burn HHO. You could also use it to fill up a conventional battery, use that to turn a turnstyle, which pushes a weight up an incline... etc etc eventually turning the wheels of your car. The point of all this is that the HHO is a useless step that people mistake for being valuable, it is just a different kind of battery. Instead of a lead acid battery, it is a water battery, and as such it is a dangerous on when compressed to useable size. I ask that you think carefully through the process and see for yourself why it makes no sense to add more steps to a process when steps have no benefit. No magic energy is being found, in fact energy is being lost in the process. Just becuase it releases water does not make it some magic energy source. Posted by: John at May 24, 2006 5:30 PMPlease people, retract your endorsements before this think sinks with your intellectual reputations. This is nothing short of nonsense. Let's pretend for a moment that HHO exists, it would take more energy to create it than it would give off, by the first and second laws of thermodynamics. If it were possible, you wouldn't put water in your car (because you'd still have to have a gas-powered engine to produce the HHO), you'd be putting HHO in your car, which would be produced elsewhere, using fossil, nuclear, or wind power (i.e. normal power sources). So the claim that a hybrid isn't necessary is just nonsense. Nonsense nonsense nonsense, and suggests every word of it is a hoax. That is unless the laws of thermodynamics are wrong. They may well be. And fairies might be real. But the owerwhelming, crushing stifling mound of evidence is that they are not. Posted by: Nathan Lassig at June 1, 2006 12:10 PMIt's funny though, because the reason most people are slamming this is that you can't take water, convert it to something else, and then burn it to make water. That's precisely why hydrogen power is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY overhyped. Hydrogen is a battery, and it's only advantages would be Well Im just waiting for a compact nuclear reactor to power my Hyundai!!!! Posted by: fox0311 at July 31, 2007 8:01 PMPost a comment
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