You Still Can't Run Your Car on Water

On this post I stated I was mildly amused with the antics of idiot scammers who are trying to claim that you can "run your car on water".

So I was moderately amused when we get a nice spam/scam comment which I purposefully let through our spam detector to illustrate a point.

The comment said:

As everyone is looking for alternative fuel supplies to power their automobiles and trucks. As technology races ahead - and oil quickly runs out, people are actually converting their cars to run on water.

So what do you need to do to run your car on water? This sounds too good to be true.

So how does it work?

Introducing hydrogen into an internal combustion engine means you can burn hydrocarbon based fuels more efficiently, which means you can burn less fuel for the same power output - hence the saving on fuel.

This is exactly the scamming type of behaviour these sites use to try and get click-throughs or people to buy their insane $97 "hydrogen conversion kits". Lets look at the logical problems with the above quote

1) The comment says run your car on water, then starts talking about introducing hydrogen into an internal combustion engine. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe with 9 out of 10 atoms in the universe being hydrogen. Indeed water has hydrogen in it (the H in the H2O) and hydrogen can be used, through fuel cells, to power an automobile. But you can't just add water to an internal combustion engine (go ahead try it out, tell me how it works), you need to extract the hydrogen atom(s). But you can't add pure hydrogen to an internal combustion engine - it is a gas at temperatures higher than -253 degree Celsius. Gasoline of course is a liquid, not a "gas". So to use hydrogen in a fuel cell you need to extract it from water and then place it in a device which can harness the power (the fuel cell). Typical hydrogen cracking methods require temperatures of 2,000 degrees Celsius to remove the hydrogen atom. To generate that heat you need a fuel source such as natural gas or uranium in a nuclear power plant in order to crack the hydrogen atom out of the water. The problem is, it is very hard (if not impossible) to generate that kind of heat without using more fuel then you actually get out the hydrogen. So creating hydrogen from water in that way has a "negative energy balance" (you use more than you get).

2) Introducing hydrogen in the tiny quantities produced in these devices into an internal combustion engine DOES NOT mean you can burn fuel more efficiently.

When considering the above comment I really wonder how stupid people actually are. It kind of feels like arguing with a brick wall. It doesn't matter how outrageous the claim or how insane the concept, there are obviously people who keep these scammers in business by buying these ridiculous products which make claims that anyone who passed grade 7 science should know are BS.

As a note - the other comment on that post comes from Dan at www.autosanity.com who looks like he is fighting the good fight against spammers/scammers on the fuel use subject. The post on a $7,300 1996 Geo Metro is good for a laugh.

Also good a blog post from a couple days ago (!) about this exact subject. Same conclusion. Total BS. Although to see some of the commenters there argue about how HHO (Brown's Gas) is real is pretty hilarious (OMG it worked on my 1998 Taurus!!!!). And why is it that the same people who proclaim HHO or Brown's Gas works are the same ones who link to things like "free energy devices" or "how to make a perpetual motion machine".

Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

Edit: on July 17, 2008, www.consumeraffairs.com came out with this good report which (again) totally debunks the theories propsed by these water as gas hucksters. In fact they go straight to some scientists which are totally against even the concept that these devices work.

Dr. Andrew Frank, Professor of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at the University of California, Davis said: "This has been around for years, but it didn't work back then and it won't work now," Dr. Frank said. "It's such a very small amount of hydrogen-oxygen gas that it is impossible to have any real effect on combustion."

Dr. Thomas Asmus, retired Senior Research Executive with DaimlerChrysler Corporation and a current member of the Fuel Economy Panel for the National Academy of Science said: "These devices simply cannot generate enough hydrogen or oxygen to amount to a hill of beans. A 12-volt car battery might create some bubbles, but beyond that, a standard car battery isn't powerful enough to do anything," he said.

"This stuff has been around forever and it's been researched to death. It's a simple electrolyzer that could quite possibly cause more energy to be used than if you didn't use the device. It's as 'scammish' as anything I have ever seen," Asmus said.

So unless some of you crazy hydrogen injection fuel believers can come up with something as concrete as a peer-reviewed scientific study, I consider the case closed. Scam.