Some people will believe anything…

I just saw a post on another blog linking to some supposed announcement of a technology that would allow people to run cas n water. Not simply a hydrogen powered vehicle with water as the only emission, but where you would supposedly pour in a liter of water, and off you go for some little while.

Riiiiiiiiggghhhhhht. ‘Cuz that’s possible. Just like the car that gets better mileage by some reaction it supposedly has that releases hydrogen from water, then feeds that hydrogen into the combustion chamber. (There’s less wrong with this claim, and I would really be pretty thrilled if it worked, but I’ve got to say -my BS detectors were screaming really loudly when I read that article.)

Sorry, morons, but the laws of physics are still in place. You can’t get energy out of nowhere, and what’s more, there’s no such thing as a 100% efficient system. Even theoretical, best case situation of a Carnot engine, can never be 100% efficient, because otherwise you’d get no work out of it, and it would thus be useless. Enter the real world, where you get other losses from friction, waste heat, and other inefficiencies, and you lose even more. There’s a reason the patent office requires a functional example of perpetual motion machines be submitted before they’ll issue a patent for one.

Now, since it takes a LOT of electricity before water will break down into hydrogen and oxygen, and nowhere near as much comes out when you run it through a fuel cell (or burn it, for that matter), there has to be some source of energy in the system. They say there’s a chemical reaction that liberates the hydrogen, but it would have to consume a reactant of some sort – either directly in the process, or to energize (heat) the reaction chamber and get a catalyst going. And that energy has to come from somewhere, and given the current state of technology, that’s gonna be fossil fuels. I suppose maybe not on the alleged car itself, but somewhere up the line. There will have to be some sort of consumable other than water; it’s just basic science.