I just saw the youtube fox news story about it. What do you make of it?

Why not use a boat and buils a network of canals ? Sails and oars only !

How was it a hoax?

It doesn't run on water, it uses gasoline to break up water into something that can be burned. It's an old techniques used to make fires hotter. It is not a source of energy.

How was it a hoax?

Spidergoat is correct. It's a very old technology that was developed in the mid-20th century. It was originally known as "Brown's Gas" and keeps popping up every few years by slick snake-oil salesmen that repackage it and sell it to a few hundred suckers before quietely going out of business.

It's been called "Free Energy", HHOH gas and a few other more catchy names that I don't recall right at the moment. It does, however, have limited use as poor man's substitute for acetylene in doing very limited welding. It won't handle thick pieces of steel because it's simply not hot enough and produce heat fast enough.

Best avoided on ALL fronts.

Is the car that runs on water a viable solution to oil dependence.

As long as the water is first made into hydrogen it would be a almost perfect fuel. It makes water when hydrogen is burned so water becomes water in essence.

Far from perfect, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Most water vapor than usual in the atmosphere could be bad. Basically, near any big city, the humidity could never get low.

Far from perfect, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Most water vapor than usual in the atmosphere could be bad. Basically, near any big city, the humidity could never get low.

Sort of like a tropical rain forest?

Far from perfect, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Most water vapor than usual in the atmosphere could be bad. Basically, near any big city, the humidity could never get low.

That's all true. But IC engines dump TONS of water vapor into the air as it is.

But on the other hand, hydrogen as motor fuel is just plain foolish - ask any decent power engineer or someone knowledgeable in physics and power conversion losses. Most people with a decent scientific education have already figured that one out - I cannot understand why so many hang onto the myth. (Even when they can plainly see it's gone nowhere over the years. And that's even besides the lack of a production/distribution network.)

When enough nuclear power is available, THEN would be the time for it. But until then, it's nothing but an energy sink - negative gain!!!!

Far from perfect, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Most water vapor than usual in the atmosphere could be bad. Basically, near any big city, the humidity could never get low.

First greenhouse gas I heard of that actively transports heat away from the surface of the Earth and radiates it out when it reaches high altitudes.

clouds tend to trap heat, that's why clear nights are often colder than cloudy ones

Read only that might be true but it will be a great susbitute to natural gas in the home eventually. We need a sorce of flamable gas because electricity isnt reactive enough to be as good for stove tops, ovens, water heaters or even central heating. At the moment natural gas is a much better alternitive but when the world changes compleatly away from fossil fuels and we need a gas to burn hydrogen will be a good solution. Actually i wonder wether home plants will use solor and wind to convert water into hydrogen for use in the home. This would mean that the flow would be more easerly stopped (if it could be done in real time) and would be safer for use in the home (insted of say pumping gas into a house that happens to be on fire). The main technical issues as far as i know stoping this is 1) that the equiptment isnt there to use it 2) that the clean energy sources arent yet avilable to convert the water to hydrogen and 3) we need something to make the flame burn with a colour so that you can tell if your stove is on

Read only that might be true but it will be a great susbitute to natural gas in the home eventually. We need a sorce of flamable gas because electricity isnt reactive enough to be as good for stove tops, ovens, water heaters or even central heating. At the moment natural gas is a much better alternitive but when the world changes compleatly away from fossil fuels and we need a gas to burn hydrogen will be a good solution. Actually i wonder wether home plants will use solor and wind to convert water into hydrogen for use in the home. This would mean that the flow would be more easerly stopped (if it could be done in real time) and would be safer for use in the home (insted of say pumping gas into a house that happens to be on fire). The main technical issues as far as i know stoping this is 1) that the equiptment isnt there to use it 2) that the clean energy sources arent yet avilable to convert the water to hydrogen and 3) we need something to make the flame burn with a colour so that you can tell if your stove is on

I'm afraid there are lots and lots of technical gaps in those thoughts, Asguard. Actually, it's pretty similar to what was said by whoever suggested we take human waste and use the methane that it would produce to power a vehicle. There isn't enough energy to be had that way.

First off, there's no way the average home could produce nearly enough energy - regardless if it used every single technology known. Second, the energy losses in power conversion from one type to another would be a HUGE drain on what little it could produce.

The only reality that would ever work is to produce our power through nuclear applications and break the stranglehold that fossil fuel producers have on the world. Any other approach is basically just whistling into the wind - there's simply no other way to produce energy in the quantities needed.

With the re-acceptance of breeder reactors, we would have more than enough fuel to power the whole world until fusion is finally made to pay off. And once that first step is made (enough ordinary fission and breeder reactors are built), everything would open up to be powered electrically. Electric vehicles, hydrogen-powered vehicles, etc., etc. And that would be far safer for both industry and the general public than using gas (hydrogen or any other) for heating, cooking and similar applications.

Fossil fuels cannot last forever and will do nothing but increase in cost until they are finally exhausted.

The choice is very simple - a nuclear future or a miserable one.

read only, i have to dissagree with you there. We have not only quite large wind comming from off the southen oceans but we have HUGE levels of solor energy pooring down on australia. It maybe true that not ALL our power could come that way (though i would need convincing on that) but there is vast amounts of hot rocks in australia that could be used to produce power if money was put into it. Now this may not be true of eroup where the solor energy isnt there but in Australia DOES have the energy aviable. The problems here relate to investment not resorces unfortunatly

read only, i have to dissagree with you there. We have not only quite large wind comming from off the southen oceans but we have HUGE levels of solor energy pooring down on australia. It maybe true that not ALL our power could come that way (though i would need convincing on that) but there is vast amounts of hot rocks in australia that could be used to produce power if money was put into it. Now this may not be true of eroup where the solor energy isnt there but in Australia DOES have the energy aviable. The problems here relate to investment not resorces unfortunatly

That's still far from the whole story when you're talking about each and every HOME producing it's own energy. And estimates I've seen on wind say that if the majority of sites that have reliable wind power were used, it would produce something like 20% of the world's needs. (Sorry, don't have a source readily available at 3:45 in the morning.)

20% is a fair number BUT that still leaves 80% to come from somewhere! And sites that are good for photovoltaic and photothermal are remote in most parts of the world. Remote means difficulty in getting the power to where it's needed AND those places produce practically nothing more than half of the time. Seems people tend to forget that the sun doesn't shine at night and isn't at full brightness every single day, either.

Even if you took advantage of everything you could get from those sources, can you not see that the energy produced would not replace what is currently being produced by burning oil, gas and coal? You might not be aware of this either - efficency plays a BIG part in all of the so-called "green energy" sources. For most of them, it's pretty low.

your right. Its unlikly that ALL nessary power could be produced in the home (though a fair percentage could be if all the roof was used for solor pannels) but thats no different from the way things are currently. If commertial solor, wind and hot rocks were added to that i think i could surplie enough energy to cover the electric componant of demand. The federal and state goverments could actually pay the cost of putting solor on peoples homes so that as much energy could be recovered as possable, suplimented from commertial surplies this would not only reduce energy costs but make australia alot greener than it is currently. Unfortuantly they wont because it would cut jobs from the energy sector. As for the gas i do think hydrogen is an option because as i said we need a flamible gas to provide instant controlable heat for things like hot water (though solor can be used for hot water) and cooking

Is the car that runs on water a viable solution to oil dependence?You have to understand that it isn't a question of the particular type of technology that powers the car. Regardless of whether it's traditional internal combustion, something more contemporary like an electric battery, alternative suggestions like a flywheel or a hydrogen fuel cell, or exotic but not-quite-scientific theories like yours... the energy that powers the car was converted from one of the standard energy sources that powers this whole planet.

If it's a fuel-burning engine that fuel was ultimately refined from a fossil fuel such as petroleum, natural gas, coal or peat (or wood or dung which aren't technically fossilized but nobody's figured out how to run a car on them yet). If it's a fuel cell, that fuel was created by chemical reactions that required the expenditure of quite a bit of chemical energy, and that chemical energy, once again, originally came from a fossil fuel. Ditto for the elementary physics of all other portable energy sources such as the kinetic energy stored in a flywheel.

If it's electricity, which is probably the power source of the future, that electricity was pumped into a battery from a power plant. Most power plants today burn fossil fuel so they don't solve the problem of oil dependence.

Some are powered by natural forces such as the earth's gravity that pulls water over a dam, or the sun's gravity that causes tides, or the wind that turns windmill blades... but it's not clear that there's enough of this energy to power all the earth's technology or that we can extract it without upsetting nature: the Three Gorges Dam, China's showcase project for which they destroyed a giant swath of their ecosystem and archeology, only provides about 3% of the nation's electricity and they don't even have a billion electric cars yet.

The only technologies that truly free us from oil dependence are nuclear power generation and solar power. We can build nuclear power plants pretty quickly if we have the will to do so, but their drawbacks are well known. Still I believe they are our only choice in the short term, for the stark reason that there simply is no alternative.

The long-term solution is solar power. This will be a massive project, requiring the building of gigantic solar cells in high orbit, where they can absorb more of the sun's output than the entire earth's surface and still allow us to use that surface in our traditional ways. Existing solar cell technology can convert that energy into electricity, and existing microwave technology can transmit it to earth in tight beams that won't hurt the cattle grazing on the land where the giant receivers are placed.

This technology was designed in theory forty years ago and is so straightforward and unremarkable that its lack of flaws can be easily verified by any university undergraduate in physical science or engineering. It can supply enough energy to power this planet even if our population doubles ten more times--to six trillion people. Even then the limiting factor is the low-energy waste heat from our biological and technological processes that must be radiated into space at lightspeed, rather than the capacity of the sun to send us high-energy source radiation.

A reasonable scenario is to start building nuclear plants to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. By the time extraction of the last deposits of fossil fuel becomes prohibitively expensive in 150-200 years, we'll be completely converted to nuclear. At that point, the orbital solar collectors will be online and that system of energy generation will be perfected and hooked into the power grid, so we can begin shutting down the nuclear reactors.

There are only two problems with this scenario. One is that powering the earth with nuclear fission or fusion for a couple of centuries will generate a prodigious amount of nuclear waste as well as providing opportunities for the bad guys to sneak off with some of the material to build weapons. We'll have to think up a better way to dispose of nuclear waste than we have so far, and we'll have to accept the risk of an occasional low-yield nuclear terrorist attack that might kill as many people as China's occasional earthquakes. The other problem is that once we have built all those nuclear plants and there's abundant cheap energy even in Bangladesh and Burkina Faso, people and their governments will become complacent and they'll put off the orbital solar collector project because they'd rather spend the money on beer and weapons than on the security of their great-great-great grandchildren.

That is, after all, how we got where we are today. We've known for several generations that the supply of fossil fuel is limited, yet the government of the nation with the world's largest energy footprint has consistently encouraged its citizens to use more of it rather than less.

Far from perfect, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Most water vapor than usual in the atmosphere could be bad. Basically, near any big city, the humidity could never get low.

Not a valid point. Such system can use a closed loop. That is the water created is collected and recycled. To be useful it should employ green energy sources to break down the water into 1H1 again.

It is merely another form of stored potential energy for transpotation. Unfortunately it has low yield per pound or ft^3 and storage of 1H1 presents problems.

That's still far from the whole story when you're talking about each and every HOME producing it's own energy. And estimates I've seen on wind say that if the majority of sites that have reliable wind power were used, it would produce something like 20% of the world's needs. (Sorry, don't have a source readily available at 3:45 in the morning.)

20% is a fair number BUT that still leaves 80% to come from somewhere! And sites that are good for photovoltaic and photothermal are remote in most parts of the world. Remote means difficulty in getting the power to where it's needed AND those places produce practically nothing more than half of the time. Seems people tend to forget that the sun doesn't shine at night and isn't at full brightness every single day, either.

Even if you took advantage of everything you could get from those sources, can you not see that the energy produced would not replace what is currently being produced by burning oil, gas and coal? You might not be aware of this either - efficency plays a BIG part in all of the so-called "green energy" sources. For most of them, it's pretty low.

I was actually hired to do a 3 year study in N.M. for a hybrid power plant.

"Statistically" when the sun doesn't shine the wind blows. That is wind to some degree is generated by temperature change and when the sun rises or sets wind is produced. Also when it is cloudy or stormy you have wind. So a combined solar/wind farm makes a lot of sense.

But on the other hand, hydrogen as motor fuel is just plain foolish - ask any decent power engineer or someone knowledgeable in physics and power conversion losses. Most people with a decent scientific education have already figured that one out - I cannot understand why so many hang onto the myth.

I think you just answered your own question.

I think you just answered your own question.

Sad, but true. Even though the vast majority of people in Western nations graduate from high school and it provided them with enough basic knowledge to handle the task, it appears they forgot most of that information the day after leaving school.

Sometimes I actually think they seem to believe that getting an education, instead of preparing them for dealing with the world, was some form of punishment.

Well, what I have heard, is that the way most people split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen is they merely use a DC current accross an anode and a cathode, usually stainless steel.

However, one thing I heard, was that if a man could use a high freqency wave modulator and attempt to find the frequency at which the static electric charges are spinning around the nucleus atoms of the H2O molecular bond, that by apply the same very high frequency, with amperage/power large enough to excite these charges out of their normal electron orbits and thus to make the molecular bond break apart.

The way I see it: Those static electric charges are always moving around the atom, an endless source of supposedly "untap-able power." Since energy cannot be created or destroyed: why has it been deemed impossible for a way to tap into such by splitting water more efficiently?

Well, what I have heard, is that the way most people split water into Hydrogen and Oxygen is they merely use a DC current accross an anode and a cathode, usually stainless steel.

However, one thing I heard, was that if a man could use a high freqency wave modulator and attempt to find the frequency at which the static electric charges are spinning around the nucleus atoms of the H2O molecular bond, that by apply the same very high frequency, with amperage/power large enough to excite these charges out of their normal electron orbits and thus to make the molecular bond break apart.

The way I see it: Those static electric charges are always moving around the atom, an endless source of supposedly "untap-able power." Since energy cannot be created or destroyed: why has it been deemed impossible for a way to tap into such by splitting water more efficiently?

Your first two paragraphs are correct but the third is nonsense.

The problem with the first two is the losses in the process of energy conversion; you can never recover as much power as it took to split the molecules - therefore it's a negative gain, an energy sink. In other words, energy has been wasted.

Your first two paragraphs are correct but the third is nonsense.

The problem with the first two is the losses in the process of energy conversion; you can never recover as much power as it took to split the molecules - therefore it's a negative gain, an energy sink. In other words, energy has been wasted.

I think that the amperage amount required to split the water would decrease massively once the frequency of the pulse reached as high a frequency as that of the H2O molecule. I think this is more of a question of: Can we make freqencies that high in the first place? I'd imagine that frequency would be in the 100 to maybe even 1000 ghz... But do we have technology capable of that?

I think that the amperage amount required to split the water would decrease massively once the frequency of the pulse reached as high a frequency as that of the H2O molecule. I think this is more of a question of: Can we make freqencies that high in the first place? I'd imagine that frequency would be in the 100 to maybe even 1000 ghz... But do we have technology capable of that?
The problem is that you have to add energy to water in order to turn it into hydrogen and oxygen gas. There are many ways you can add the energy, but since H2 and O2 have more internal energy than H2O, you will always have to add that energy. The energy that you add whem you go from H2O to H2 and O2 is the energy that you get back when you burn the H2 and O2 to make water again. Since the only energy that you get back from burning H2 and O2 is the energy that you add to it, you can't use water as a source of energy. Only a way to store energy. You can add the energy with radio waver generators if you want, but you will still only get as much energy out of the resulting H2 and O2 as you spent making it.

I think that the amperage amount required to split the water would decrease massively once the frequency of the pulse reached as high a frequency as that of the H2O molecule. I think this is more of a question of: Can we make freqencies that high in the first place? I'd imagine that frequency would be in the 100 to maybe even 1000 ghz... But do we have technology capable of that?

Sorry, but you're just dreaming. Your ideas have absolutely no basis in the laws of physics. The energy levels involved are well known - there's nothing mysterious here and nothing to even speculate about. At the worst case, you're attempting to get something for nothing - at the best case you're trying to find a loophole - that doesn't exist - in the basic physical laws.

Regardless of HOW the molecule is split, it's going to take energy. And energy is always lost in any conversion process. That's just basic Physics-101.

Sad, but true. Even though the vast majority of people in Western nations graduate from high school and it provided them with enough basic knowledge to handle the task, it appears they forgot most of that information the day after leaving school.

Sometimes I actually think they seem to believe that getting an education, instead of preparing them for dealing with the world, was some form of punishment.

I really hate to see this sort of comment but unfortunately I have to agree it is true. The US today sucks when it comes to education.

I really hate to see this sort of comment but unfortunately I have to agree it is true. The US today sucks when it comes to education.

Yes, it's bad in the U.S. But if you watch these forums you'll see that it isn't alone in that problem. There are good (bad?) examples here of people from the UK and other parts of the world that say things that make you wonder if they've ever been to school at all.:( Surely they have been but it's certainly not apparent.

I'll give the youngsters some slack because they ARE still learning - but the people I'm talking about are in their 20s and beyond. It's little wonder that most are so wasteful and keep the world spinning in endless circles. (And that so many will believe ANY kind of nonsense!!)