Cars that will run on...water. Hydrogen-2-Go

Domestically, the zero-energy home is a real technological possibility. Now, we only need to drive the price down.

The "crack in the dam" in our energy crisis is transportation. We need a clean, green mobile fuel source.

Last week in my post called, Virgin's new green super fuel; Branson on a roll?  we told you about Richard Branson's new company, Virgin Fuels which is  working on a secret green energy fuel.

After mentioning this during my talk at the World Future Society conference in Toronto this weekend, and speculating about possible options with some colleagues I'm more and more convinced that I know what Virgin Fuel might be working on....a clue might be in the name itself.

N.B. (for a copy of my presentation, send me an email with 7 pieces of informtion--your: 1) name,2) title, 3) department or division 4)company, 5) city & country, 6) telephone and 7) email; any ommisions will guarantee no reply )

My guess: Water or H2O, Yes water !!  Cars that run on plain old water. What could be more virgin and pure then water?

Problem:

Producing hydrogen (from water or other feed stock) by industrial means has already proved too expensive and inefficient. And there are also problems with storing and transporting.

Smart Solution:  Hydrogen-to-Go

Now, however, researchers have come up with a system for producing hydrogen on demand inside the vehicle itself – and all you need is water and the element boron.

Water can be catalyzed by boron or some other elements that react violently with water such as potassium or sodium ( remember your high school chemistry class ? )

Boron reacts cleanly with steam (water heated to 800 degree C) to produce only hydrogen (H2) and boron oxide (a solid) which can be stored and reprocessed back into boron. The hydrogen can be stored for use in a hydrogen fuel cell.

According to New Scientist:

".....a car would need to carry just 18 kg of boron and 45 liters of water to produce 5 kg of hydrogen, which has the same energy content as 40 L tank of conventional fuel."

Back in 2001, Daimler Chrysler built a concept car that runs on water called the Natrium ( after the Latin Word for Sodium; or Na)

Ian Pearson, British Telecom's (BT) in-house futurologist, predicts that after a short term energy crunch and shortage, we may be in for an energy glut in the next coming decades. 

Cars like the Natrium could contribute to that glut, driving us down the road to a more secure energy future and plummeting energy prices in the long term.

All of this may be for not though......Ian is less confident about the prospects for our next generation...a worst case scenario for a number of emerging technology clusters and the emergence of one or two "wild cards" points to a prediction that the human race could become extinct by 2080. All I can say is -- I hope he's right in the mid term and wrong in the long term.

© 2005-2006

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Guest Speaker on emerging Smart Technologies, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "

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Comments

[Account Deleted]

It's doesn't look like a solution for our energy needs as you said in article we still need to reprocess the boron oxide, and one more pure water is another problem, to make pure water, reprocess boron oxide, and filling boron in period of times which going to cost something near to today's fuel cost, hope fully they may came up with something other solution where car itself generate the hydrogen & reprocess the remaining wastage.

[Gary]

We can build a 60 ft. by 30 ft. greenhouse that can feed as many as 700+ people and can be constructed in neighborhoods, villages, etc. very quickly. The hydroponic produce grows much faster than in soil and is much better for us. So, there is a way to get around the high fuel costs for transportation, etc. We can also grow fish in this system for protein.

For more information:

[email protected]

[Rod Campbell-Ross]

No combination of renewable energies, all of them added together, can replace fossil fuels beyond a small fraction.

Oil is rapidly depleting and several poorer countries and poorer people in richer countries can no longer afford all the oil (products) they require.

The real problem is over-population. There are too many people and the earths resources and systems can no longer cope.

The next 20 years is going to be cataclysmic: massive changes will be forced on us by a shortage of energy and a rapidly changing climate.

Powering our cars is a trivial issue in the race of the problems we face. Consider just one other issue: Food. 1 calorie of food contains 10 calories of oil in the form of oil and natural gas based pesticides, fertilizers, farm machinary, trucks and processing.

What are you going to eat?

[xoddam]

Apropos "all energy is nuclear, geothermal or gravitational" and "free energy" -- geothermal heat is a combination of stored gravitational energy and nuclear energy, so you can drop that component too. But don't try telling us sunlight and the wind aren't free. No-one on Earth is ever going to pay a fuel price to use ambient energy.

Capture of wind power is pretty cheap nowadays. If you do the sums right (account for the financial risk of fuel price variation), it is the cheapest way now available to generate electricity. Its intermittency is never going to be a problem -- the present 20% integration limit is because legacy synchronised AC power grids destabilise if "baseload" power stations have no load to supply in times of high wind and low demand. Replace the antiquated technology with modern power electronics and all generation can become either intermittent or "peaking". In the long run all the peakers can use stored renewable power (biogas, pumped storage, hydrogen...) in any case.

If boron + water works out safer or lighter than ethanol, batteries or compressed hydrogen gas as stored energy for light vehicles, why does it matter that processing boron oxides back to boron fuel costs a lot of power in another place at another time? It's still an interesting technology.

[Denise Tredway]

Precedent does not determine principle. The fact that it has not been done before does not mean it won't be or can't be done. We simply need to uncover the principle that has been awaiting discovery since time began. As Troward wrote " There was a time when men built ships of wood because they knew that iron could not float". Then we discovered the principle that "anything will float which bulk for bulk is lighter than the volume of water displaced by it." I look forward to the time when some briliant person finds the basic principles of "water to energy".

[Joakim Lindén]

What about these new devices that seem to pop up like mushrooms that claims to somehow electrolyse hydrogen out of water with small amounts of energy and high frequency oscillation.
Here's one example, but I've seen even more astounding claims on video, but I can't find the links at the moment:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:BiosFuel#How_it_Works

[Robert Nelson]

"Boron reacts cleanly with steam (water heated to 800 degree C) to produce only hydrogen"

So, maybe if you have an onboard gasoline tank, you could burn the gas to get the water heated to 800 degrees C. Sounds like a "solution" alright.

[Peter Leach]

This article about a clean fuel for vehicles, while interesting, again only tells part of the story. Yes, water can be broken down to release its Hydrogen component by using one of the many elements that oxidize aggressively. Boron and Sodium are two of these. The part of the story that isn't here is the processing and reprocessing of the oxidizing element, or more correctly the oxidized element that is used. Once oxidized, these elements can only be recovered with the application of more energy than was given up when the oxygen was separated from the hydrogen by the boron or sodium. (This presumes that we haven't found either a solution here that breaks the energy equation or we are not passing the oxygen to an even more aggressive oxidizing element. I don't think we have any matter being turned into energy). So the allied question is where do we get the energy from to reprocess the catalytic element - oil, nuclear, solar, wind, wave, hydroelectric, tidal, geothermal. We are back to the same question - where do we get our energy from.

All the arguments about Boron etc. and water for vehicles are merely about the mode of energy storage for vehicles. We still have to get the energy itself from somewhere. The separation of hydrogen from oxygen so that they can be recombined doesn't create any energy. To use water as a carrier, we need effective, highly efficient systems that can separate and recombine oxygen and hydrogen. However, this always has a net negative energy balance

There are no "simple solutions" because energy has to be produced somewhere and the only sources that we really have ultimately are nuclear (the sun is a nuclear reaction, so sunlight is part of nuclear), geothermal and gravitational. Tidal (gravitational) and geothermal are the only two that are not ultimately nuclear i.e E=MC2 based. People that are making claims of "free" energy, are trying to convince us that we can defy the laws of nature. We can't!! The only issues that we can manipulate are how efficiently we obtain access to the solar or other nuclear reactions that destroy mass, how we can generate energy from gravitational forces or how we can effectively harness geothermal. There isn't anything else that we know of !!!