Alchemy Alert! Israeli company produces on board hydrogen from water
Howard and Tim can save their cut and paste comments on this story right now, cause I'm calling BS on this one. There are a lot of promising ideas being worked on for producing and storing hydrogen in a safe, cost-effective manner, but this doesn't appear to be one of them. An Israeli company claims to be working on a system for on-board hydrogen production by reacting a common metal rod with water at high temperatures. There is no mention anywhere of what the source of this heat will be, but while the premise may indeed be able to produce some hydrogen, the probability of it ever working in a car seems extremely low. Click the read link for a tiny bit more detail, but I'm not holding my breath for a working prototype of this one.[Source: FashionFunky, thanks to Yash for the tip]
Update: Typo fixed.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Xoham 5:40PM (1/04/2007)
Not to mention that you had to spend energy to break the water into hydrogen and oxygen. You could do much better by simply using the electricity you used to split the hydrogen, directly on an electric motor from a battery.
Hopefully people are getting the message that hydrogen is a massive... massive waste of energy and is far from clean. We will all be much better off with an electric car that gets its electricity from clean renewables such as solar, wind, tidal, fusion (if it ever happens).
Hydrogen is a bad idea that seems like a really good idea until you look at conservation of energy.
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Derek 12:18PM (1/04/2007)
So, what are they going to power this vehicle with? ;)
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IanJ 12:42PM (1/04/2007)
Mmmm, alchemy.
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CM 2:22AM (1/05/2007)
There are many metals that will react with water or steam to produce hydrogen and a metal oxide or hydroxide, so there is nothing new there. Even iron will slowly react to produce H2 and iron oxide - rust!
All of these reactions are expensive and inefficient ways to make hydrogen, and it is a rediculously inefficient way to run an IC engine!
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Andrew Eller 2:53AM (1/05/2007)
Spot the error!!!!
hint: It is in the very first sentence.
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Tim 10:14AM (1/05/2007)
Sam- Cut and Paste? Who Me??? “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain...”
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Sam Abuelsamid 10:46AM (1/05/2007)
Tim - Nice to see that you do have a sense of humor. Keep reading, there's some exciting stuff coming very soon
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Sebastian 3:58PM (1/05/2007)
Andrew, thanks. Typo fixed.
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J.Elton Bell 4:47PM (1/05/2007)
Beech Aircraft Corp. helped develope a liquid hydrogen car during the early 1970s.They also developed liquid nitrogen cars switchable to
gasoline, in addition to flying a Beech airplane utilising a LNG fuel system. All of these were succesful experimental programs, spinoffs of
the man space programs. It is about time the innovators of today are waking up!
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CM 9:47PM (1/05/2007)
Spot the error? OK, first line:
"Alchemy Alert! Israeli company produces on board hydrogen from water"
should be "Israeli company produces on board hydrogen from water AND MAGNESIUM ALLOY"
The amount of metal wire needed to power this Rube Goldberg contraption for a reasonable range? 220 lbs. (100kg). Any guesses as to how much 220 lbs of magnesium alloy wire will cost?
(Hint: it makes steak look cheap...)
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