SF Husky Wrote:I did my part. I am driving a hybrid now and I highly recommend everyone does the same. I think it would be really neat if we can develop technology to run on water. Water can be recycled. I think it would be easier to develop water recycling plants vs. just drilling for more oil.
Hybrid is one of the few realistic options right now. Water is not an option. Here is a good example of someone that knows how realistic pumping water into your car would be.
"Water as a engine fuel is one of the oldest penny stock scams there is.
Water is not a source of chemical energy.
Many people are confused by this. The answer above by pushstroke is a good example.
Pushstroke uses the example of steam.
The source of the energy is the fuel that is used to boil the water and turn it into steam, not the steam itself.
The steam is merely a means to transfer the energy to the piston in the engine.
Other misconceptions are that since water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen all we have to do is separate the hydrogen from the oxygen and burn the hydrogen and...
VOILA! WE GET FREE ENERGY!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Unfortunately it does not work that way.
It takes far more energy to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen than you get back when you burn the hydrogen.
One way of splitting the hydrogen is through a process that is called electrolysis. This process uses electrical energy.
The currently available equipment that you can buy off the shelf works at approximately 60 to 70% efficiency, depending on how fast you want the reaction to run.
The faster the reaction, the lower the efficiency.
With this equipment running at 70% efficiency it requires approximately 50 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce an amount of hydrogen with the energy equivalent of one gallon of gasoline.
If you "burn" that amount of hydrogen in a fuel cell to produce electricity you will get approximately 15 to 18 kilowatt hours of electricity back, depending on the efficiency of the fuel cell.
Again, the faster you run the reaction in the fuel cell, the lower the efficiency.
Since you only get 15 to 18 kilowatt hours of electricity back for every 50 kilowatt hours that you spend, this clearly is not a way to create energy.
Electrolysis has been proposed as a means to store electrical energy when you have excess generating capacity.
For example in France they get over 80% of their electricity from nuclear power plants.
You do not just start and stop a nuclear power plant. The plant runs 24 hours per day.
At night you have a huge excess of generating capacity.
The French use some of that excess generating capacity at night to produce hydrogen electrolytically. The hydrogen is then used to fuel vehicles such as buses during the day.
As you can see this is a rather ineficient process because you only get back 15 to 18 kilowatt hours of electricity for every 50 kilowatt hours that you spend.
However when you have excess generating capacity it is better to get something back rather than nothing.
The other way that has been proposed to get energy out of water is to use the hydrogen in a fusion reaction.
A fusion reaction is essentially a nuclear reaction. It is the source of energy in our sun and the hydrogen bomb.
The hydrogen bomb is a very powerful nuclear weapon. It is far more powerful than the Uranium or Plutonium nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately we have never been able to figure out how to contain a fusion reaction. We have been trying to figure that out for the past 50 years or so.
So far we have been unsuccessful.
We probably will not be able to figure out how to contain a fusion reaction for at least the next 50 to 100 years, if then.
Unfortunately until we figure out how to contain a fusion reaction, water is not a source of energy as an engine fuel or for any other purpose.
If someone calls you offering you a penny stock in a company that says they have an amazing new technology that uses water as a fuel, hang up on them, bacause it is a scam."
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