Got Gas?
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In response to Alternative Fuel and Hybrid Modifications: Water4Gas?, long-time Gnomie Jeff Partridge writes:
“but how about improving your current vehicle’s gas mileage by using hydrogen in its most basic and readily available state: water.”
I just saw the full report from the FTC about two nights ago. They’ve tested hundreds of additives and gadgets and come to the sad conclusion that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. That applies specifically to the item you reference in the newsletter. Some things showed a 2-5% increase in mileage, but not on a consistent basis. After studying the situation, I can only come to the conclusion that trying to squeeze the last few years out of using petroleum fuels is a losing proposition.
Ethanol isn’t much better, since it takes crops out of use for food. I personally think that the future lies with hydrogen fuel cells. Nothing else, as you point out, has the availability of hydrogen or the acceptable waste product (pure water). I only hope that the government will mandate the growth of the delivery systems at every gas station — and how long will THAT term survive?
My wife has her own ideas on the answer — a hybrid that uses one or more small wind turbines to recharge the internal battery rather than an internal combustion engine. One way or another, it’s time to wean ourselves off the gasoline pump.
One Comment
Bill
June 10th, 2008
at 3:41am
These ads are aimed at people who understand neither chemistry nor physics.
It is true that water injection will increase the performance of some gasoline engines under some conditions to a limited extent, but not under all conditions. The principle has been known and understood thoroughly since WW II (about 70 years, now). If it were practical or useful for modern engines, it would long since have been incorporated, since the technology is quite simple and inexpensive.
It is, on the other hand, not practical to run a piston engine on water power, unless one uses steam, which obviously requires an outside source of energy to heat the water. This is simply a matter of basic physics and mechanics. It is not rocket science. Unfortunately, students in the US are not required to learn those basics, and the more ignorant are, thus, sitting ducks for all sorts of snake oil salesmen, including those in government who are pushing biofuels.
As to hydrogen, the reader is correct that it is our best shot at a sustainable source of (portable) energy, but only with two caveats: use of solar energy to extract the hydrogen, to avoid using petroleum for either power generation or the expenses (fuel for production, fertilizer, transportation) attendant to biofuel production, and perfection of a safe means of storage.
In order to be practical, H2 must be stored under high pressure in liquid form. Since free hydrogen is highly explosive when mixed with air, the storage must be safe during collisions and other trauma to the system. A collision involving a massive breach of a hydrogen tank and a spark from a broken electrical wire would pretty-much eliminate the need for ambulances. Remember Challenger?
These are the avenues that are being explored at present and, since they will almost certainly involved petroleum-related plastics and other materials such as Kevlar®, they are one more reason to save what petroleum we have left. We’ll need it for a long, long time to come, if we manage to survive at all.