HHO Water Powered Car
I sent this link to everyone on my email list with whom I’ve talked about interesting inventions, or whom I think would have insights into this invention’s implications. I’ll post the replies (with their permissions) here, because so far they have been really interesting.
http://www.hytechapps.com/company/press
Could this fuel be the next big thing?
Have you heard of it?
Why is 2006 the last anyone broadcast anything about it?Surf to the site’s press release page and watch the video’s, all taken from mainstream news broadcasts. Maybe we should invest in this company??
Let me know what you think, please, after watching the press release videos, and tell me if you think this whole thing is either a hoax, or in fact The Next Big Thing.
go to Youtube to see this video
thanks to brasschecktv.com for the video
From: Chris Brockman
Sent: Sunday, December 09, 2007 6:36 PM
To: me
Subject: Re: HHO - Is this the real water powered car??
I remember looking into this around that time it was announced. I’m quite interested in this stuff, so I hope you don’t mind a long (and maybe cynical) email…
The torch stuff is silly and takes a lot of credibility away from the whole thing. I could drop a battery in some salty water and make hydrogen for a torch. The machine may be valuable to someone who wants to cut/weld metal without carbon byproducts that may affect the metal (jeweller for example). The “Aquygen” gas is just a perfect 2:1 combo of hydrogen/oxygen that makes the hottest possible flame since the ratio is stoichiometric. From what I know of chemistry, a defined, invariable chemistry of H2O says that it takes ~35% more energy to split the hydrogens from the oxygen than what you can get from the resulting hydrogen. I think the root of his claimed invention is that he can tune the frequency of the applied electricity to “resonate” the molecules so they come apart with less energy input. For that idea I can’t find any independent proof or disproof, and I’m too skeptical to throw any of my money towards it. I admit I haven’t read the patents, but there are plenty of patents out there for “perpetual motion” machines demonstrating that you can patent any idea regardless if works.
If it worked, why would this guy mess around with cars… just make a machine that takes water in and feeds power to the grid. The proof would be watching the meter run backwards and see a check from the power company instead of a bill. Manufacture these machines and make billions. Do the process on useless saltwater and have clean potable water and electricity come out. You can imagine how huge an impact this could have on the world, desalination and clean energy, and it makes you wonder why scientists aren’t clamoring to reproduce this magic machine allegedly described in the patents.
While on the subject of vehicles and energy, I figured I’d toss out my thoughts on the matter:
• Running a car on hydrogen makes no sense. You cannot economically or safely store enough hydrogen in a vehicle to equate to a tank of gasoline (therefore hydrogen won’t have the same range as gasoline). Hydrogen is not a fuel, it’s merely an energy storage medium, a way to take power from the grid and make it portable (at a cost of efficiency). Sure, it burns cleanly, but most of the energy comes from burning coal.
• Ethanol is complete bunk, we throw tons of drinkable water and usable energy into growing corn to produce an inefficient fuel that makes more pollution than gasoline and increases the cost of food. Plus, we can’t grow enough corn to power 20% of our vehicles.
• Fuel cells are a poor answer due to complexity, cost, and they run on either oil-based fuels or hydrogen, both with a big bag of problems.
I think electric is the way to go, but how to generate the power:
• Coal plants put ridiculous amounts of carbon dioxide, mercury, sulfur, radioactive substances, and 1000 other things into the environment.
• Natural gas plants put out somewhat fewer pollutants, but it’s still non-renewable fossil energy mostly from other countries.
• Hydroelectric power is great, but we’ve already about maxed the amount of hydro power we can make (unless lots of cities volunteer to be submerged), so there’s no extra capacity to move a million vehicles around.
• You could use solar or wind, but you’ll pay 5-10x more, and use 20% of your paycheck to get to work, and we’d have to devote a significant fraction of available land to power generation to make enough power to move our vehicles. Solar might get efficient/cheap enough to help someday.
• Geothermal has some promise, but mostly for heating/cooling our homes.
• With a nuclear plant, you have a clean, affordable overall cycle, as long as we can figure out waste storage. One solution is to make better use of uranium. We currently only use a fraction of the available energy from the uranium because it’s cheaper to just stick a new fuel in than extract more energy from it. Activists whine about the “dangers” of a nuclear plant, meanwhile thousands of our soldiers die in the middle east to protect our oil interests, and countries like China and India are figuring out how to extract enough energy from the uranium to make it easy to store the waste.
So my vote is to build new efficient nuke plants (like pebble bed and breeder reactors) to generate energy to charge plug-in electric vehicles. We’re not too far from a decent battery design with lithium-ions, hopefully another 5-10 years of research will produce something with better energy density, more longevity, and less cost. Imagine if the half-trillion we’ve spent on the Iraq war went into battery, power generation, and vehicle research! Jobs for scientists and engineers, better economy, cleaner environment, etc etc…