Water-powered cars will never work

EcoGeek went live more than two years ago with no fanfare and no traffic. We had a readership of about five people. Three days later, I received the first notice of a breakthrough water-powered car that would solve our energy problems. Those emails have not stopped since.

We wrote a while back about why getting power from water is entirely impossible. But we didn't apply it directly to cars ... so here we go again.

This story at Reuters, which claims that hydrogen is "extracted" from water to power a car is a big steaming pile. I don't know how these things slip through the cracks. I guess we'd all love for there to be a simple solution to the energy crisis. Solutions exist, but this isn't one of them.

Generally these things are picked up on local news stations who have poor fact checking and (obviously) no knowledge of the laws of physics. But the fact that Reuters did a whole story on one of these bogus machines, and then it traveled undeterred around the blogosphere, is simply inexcusable.

"Water-powered cars" generally work like this: Energy stored in a battery or generated by an on-board gasoline-powered generator, splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. The two are then recombined, either in an internal combustion engine or in a fuel cell. Energy from the fuel cell or the engine then drives the car.

So, simplifying this, they're breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen and then burning hydrogen and oxygen to create water. This is, of course, possible, but you can't get more energy out of the system than you put in. Otherwise, it's simply a perpetual motion machine.

If it worked, it could sit on the driveway and make energy all day, every day, and power the entire world without you ever needing to put anything in it. In short, if it worked, it would break the laws of physics, and we would never need to burn another piece of coal again.

This would be an extraordinarily easy thing to prove. Too bad none of these people who make these wonderful devices are too busy talking to the local news to actually build one.

There are a lot of variations on the water-powered car, but they're all bogus. People who say that adding gasoline-generated hydrogen to gasoline increases your gas mileage by 30% are full of it. It doesn't matter if they call it HHO or H20 or Brown's gas. It doesn't matter if they're creating it with a battery or a flywheel. It doesn't matter if they've postulated a sixth dimension from which flows seemingly endless amounts of energy.

Until someone puts a box on the driveway and it generates more power than goes into it ... everyone who says you can power a car with water is either a fool or trying to take someone else's money.