Water In Your Fuel Tank?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Energy, Environment
Interesting new discovery as reported by the New Scientist:
Forget cars fuelled by alcohol and vegetable oil. Before long, you might be able to run your car with nothing more than water in its fuel tank. It would be the ultimate zero-emissions vehicle.While water, plain old H2O, is not at first sight an obvious power source, it has a key virtue: it is an abundant source of hydrogen, the element widely touted as the green fuel of the future. If that hydrogen could be liberated on demand, it would overcome many of the obstacles that till now have prevented the dream of a hydrogen-powered car becoming reality. Producing hydrogen by conventional industrial means is expensive, inefficient and often polluting. Then there are the problems of storing and transporting hydrogen. The pressure tanks required to hold usable quantities of the fuel are heavy and cumbersome, which restricts the car’s performance and range.
Tareq Abu-Hamed, now at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have devised a scheme that gets round these problems. By reacting water with the element boron, their system produces hydrogen that can be burnt in an internal combustion engine or fed to a fuel cell to generate electricity. “The aim is to produce the hydrogen on-board at a rate matching the demand of the car engine,” says Abu-Hamed. “We want to use the boron to save transporting and storing the hydrogen.” The only by-product is boron oxide, which can be removed from the car, turned back into boron, and used again. What’s more, Abu-Hamed envisages doing this in a solar-powered plant that is completely emission-free.
As with any story like this, the caution is always this is very early on, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Seems like we could be on the brink of somebody really cracking the energy code.
Fingers crossed.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 and is filed under Energy, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 6th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
Elephant in the room: If this catches on, how severely will this tax the nation’s fresh-water supply? Or could this technology run on un-desalinated sea water? Then again, even if it can, how would fuel tanks be kept from corroding?
November 1st, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Aluminum fuel tanks.