Sounds too good to be true

By | October 25, 2005
4 Comments

…but then again, I’ve often wondered if there wasn’t a solution like this sitting out there somewhere waiting for someone to find it:

A unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside a car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum was developed by an Israeli company. The system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. When it becomes commercial in a few years time, the system will be incorporated into cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run, and will be completely emission free.

From reading the full article, it sounds as though the car will actually require two fuel sources — water and a very heavy metal coil which enables the production of free hydrogen by producing metal oxide (what folks like us call rust, one presumes) as the by-product of running the engine. Apparently the driver would need to put water in the tank on a par with putting gas into the fuel tank of a conventional vehicle. How long the coil lasts is not stated, but seeing as it weighs 100 Kg, one would hope that the driver won’t need to go sticking in a new one every week.

231005_Hybrid_Car.jpg

Via Kurzweil AI.

UPDATE: Plenty of healthy skepticism about this over at SlashDot, where I got the link to the cover story of the latest New Scientist — Metal: The Fuel of the Future.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    If the coil would only have to be replaced every few thousand miles, it would be comparable to having your oil changed. I imagine you’d pull up and guys in a pit below your car would take out what’s left of the old coil and lift the new coil into place.

  • http://ergosphere.blogspot.com Engineer-Poet

    It’s a relatively inefficient method of packaging hydrogen, with a large energy overhead and more difficult recycling.

    If you want to use a metal as an energy carrier, use zinc.  It works fine in zinc-air fuel cells (no hydrogen intermediary) and zinc can be regenerated from zinc oxide by electrolysis in water; you can’t do that with aluminum or magnesium.

    (I have seen this one bit of nonsense all over.  Crap goes around the world before fact has its boots on.)

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Phil Bowermaster

    EP –

    Yeah, and fact really needs those boots, what with the abundance of crap! (Hopefully, they’re hip waders.) Interestingly, the article says that this same company had already done some kind of proof-of-concept for using zinc to produce hydrogen. One would have to wonder why they didn’t settle on that method for powering their hydrogen car.

    Puzzling.

  • http://ergosphere.blogspot.com Engineer-Poet

    I decided to go over this in all the gory details.

    The results weren’t favorable to the concept.