You may have seen the stories going around the net today about a scientist who’s discovered how to burn salt water, and that the DOE is going to investigate this as an alternative source of energy. Let me explain why this is stupid.
Dr. Roy said the salt water isn’t burning per se, despite appearances. The radio frequency actually weakens bonds holding together the constituents of salt water — sodium chloride, hydrogen and oxygen — and releases the hydrogen, which, once ignited, burns continuously when exposed to the RF energy field. Mr. Kanzius said an independent source measured the flame’s temperature, which exceeds 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, reflecting an enormous energy output.
Let me break this down for you, serious science style:
There is no such thing as free energy. Any time you get some energy out of something it’s got to come from somewhere. For example:
gasoline -> combustion byproducts + heat
So because the combustion byproducts like CO, CO2, NOx gases are all lower energy than the gasoline it’s possible to get that energy out of gasoline. When you eat food you can get (through Byzantine biochemical pathways) energy to make your body dance around because the food that you crap out is lower energy than the food you eat.
The articles floating around say that when you shine RF energy on water you can light it on fire. This is probably perfectly true. What’s happening is that you’re performing some kind of hydrolysis, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen (as stated in the news stories). The oxygen and hydrogen recombine, burning the hydrogen, which releases water and energy. All this is perfectly reasonable.
The problem is that the reaction looks like this:
water + energy -> hydrogen + oxygen
hydrogen + oxygen -> water + energy
The energy you add in the first line must, thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, be at least at great as the energy you get out in line 2. There’s nothing even interesting about this in terms of energetics. Said another way, it always takes more energy to split water than you get by burning the resulting hydrogen. Always.
It’s interesting that he’s able to make this happen with RF. Basically by shooting radio waves at the water you can cause the water to split apart, but you are doing this by adding energy to the water. It may be that there’s some nifty catalytic interaction with the salt that allows the RF to work, but the sad fact is that catalysis can’t change the overall energy accounting, it can only make a reaction faster/easier by lowering the activation energy. (Don’t get caught up in the phrase “lowering activation energy.” It doesn’t help you if you’re trying to create an overall positive energy flow).
The obvious analysis here is you’re putting energy into the water in the form of radio waves, which splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen. You burn the hydrogen in the oxygen to get water and energy, only you get less energy than you put in.
The other option is they are getting the excess energy from the salt somehow. That means that the water is ending up as high energy hydrogen and the salt is ending up at a lower energy state somehow. By which I mean:
“high energy salt” -> “some other stuff” + energy
There’s no “some other stuff” that I can think of that you can turn salt into which gets you energy. Salt is already a very low energy kind of molecule. It’s not a terrible stretch to say “that’s why they call it salt.”
Generating Hydrogen for Energy Storage
Some people say “but it’s not about getting free energy, it’s about a better way to make hydrogen!” This is also silly. Consider the energy path: You convert electricity to radio waves. The radio waves are converted into chemical-potential energy by splitting the water into hydrogen. So your net product is the relatively high energy molecular hydrogen. Perfectly fine. However, converting electricity to radio waves has an efficiency penalty, as does converting radio waves to hydrogen (i.e. the water doesn’t absorb 100% of the radio waves).
The other option would be boring old electrolysis where you just stick the red and black wires into a glass of water and hydrogen comes out. In this case 100% of the electrical work is used to make hydrogen (excluding some small losses in the wires which are turned to heat, but that would be the same in your RF generator).
So my point is, unless we get a lot more really exciting news about what’s being done here there’s no reason to think this is anything relevant to the average person. It’s a neat bit of electrochemistry, but we have no reason to think it’s relevant for energy production or a viable way to generate hydrogen for energy storage.
This synopsis sounds very educated, but there is a huge problem with it. Look at it from a different angle. The energy is already available in the water, you don’t need more or even as much energy going in to the RF/Water setup to make more energy. I can take gasoline and use 10mw at 900v to cause an arc for a split second to ignite the gasoline. No one in there right mind would argue that it took more energy then I am getting out to light the gasoline. The difference is that here we need to put some energy in to keep the reaction going. Until you run some tests you won’t know the energy output. For example, it may take 1 joule of RF power (3600 watt hours) to keep a flame at 3000degress, now take that “flame” and heat up some water with it, or a room or something, are you heating the room or whatever with the energy converted from the RF? Or are is there more to it. Lets see how many joules of power we can convert that flame to. Steam engine? Room heater? Water boiler?
You seem to be forgetting one HUGE thing. If you put X amount of energy into breaking down the water, some of that energy is going to come out as heat, some will be used for the breakdown and the result is we now have ACCESS to the energy stored in the water; we now have the energy of the hydrogen or whatever is “burning” as well.
Think Nuclear reactor, we are starting a reaction to release the energy. Not to create it. By todays conventional wisdom do we need at least the same or more energy to create another form of energy? Yes. Do we need the same or more energy to RELEASE already existing energy. Nope. Though, who is to say our idea of conservation of energy is correct in the first place, but correct or not there is no supposed law of energy conservation being broken here. You are thinking in too straight a line.
Hi Jason, thanks for the comment! I’m afraid I must have failed to get my point across though.
There isn’t energy stored in the water. That’s the point. Water is already at a very low energy state. In order to burn it, they first convert it to hydrogen and oxygen, which are at a much higher energy state. That initial conversion (low energy water to high energy molecular hydrogen) requires at least as much energy as you get by burning the hydrogen. In order to be able to extract energy from water, the total cycle has to start with water, then end up with something at a lower energy than water. The proposed cycle starts with water and ends with burned hydrogen, which is water again.
Gasoline is already a very high energy compound, so that’s why it’s different than water. You start with gasoline and end up with COx and NOx, which are low energy. The difference between the two states is where you extract the excess, useful energy.
Your post is perfectly reasonable if you assume that there’s energy stored in water, but that’s just not the case. The linked original news story explicitly states that the scientist in question is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Again, that requires at least as much extra energy to split water as it stored in the form of resulting hydrogen. Just because you are splitting water doesn’t mean you are liberating energy.
Consider 2 magnets that are stuck together: if you pull them apart that takes energy to do, and it takes at least as much energy to separate them as you could get by letting them pull back together. The alternative would be 2 blocks which have an outward-pushing spring between them, and you clip the blocks together. Now THAT arrangement has stored useful energy in it. By unhooking the blocks you get the energy stored in the spring.
Said one more way, the reaction described is
water+energy1 -> hydrogen+oxygen -> water+ energy2
In the first part “energy1″ is how much chemical energy is required to exactly convert a quantity of water to the higher energy hydrogen and oxygen. Then “energy2″ is exactly how much energy you get by burning the same generated quantity of hydrogen and oxygen. In a perfectly efficient system energy2=energy1.
If you write the same equation for gasoline you don’t include the flame to light the fuel. That activation energy doesn’t count in these balances. You’d just have
gasoline -> COx + NOx + energy
I am not knowledgeable of the fundamentals of physics or chemestry, however I am an informed respondant. I understand that if we are to use the salt water as an energy source much like we use gasoline, we will need an easy method of releasing the energy in the salt water. Seriously, how hard would it be to make a rechargable hydrogen cell that powers the RF generator necessary to produce the reaction? The fact is we don’t know the minimum energy needed to produce the reaction with radio frequencies nor do we know the maximum possible output of different solutions of salt water. We also do not know if this is even the most efficient method of breaking the hydrogen bonds of salt water. We do not even know if the raction is limited to just salt water! Until more research is done on this process we will not know. It is simply too early to jump to conclusions of whether it will or will not be used to power vehicles.
One thing for sure, with as much alternative energy research going on, there will be more than one discovered energy source that will be a sight better than our traditional oil burn…
Jason,
“Straight line” thinking is what science is all about. Anything else is just speculation.
Your analogies are somewhat broken in this regard. Take the first example of gasoline (BTW, did you mean 10mA rather than mW?) The gasoline has stored chemical potential energy which may be released in the presence of oxygen. Once the burning starts, enough energy is released to produce a self-sustaining reaction which continues until either the fuel or oxygen is exhausted. Since gasoline is a byproduct of petroleum, we didn’t have to add anything to it to give it the energy it releases upon burning — yes, it is refined, but the distillation process merely separates out the flammable constituents of gasoline from the raw petroleum, it doesn’t create them. The octanes and nonanes and so forth contain their energy when they are pumped from the ground.
In a self-sustaining reaction, more than enough energy is released to overcome the activation energy of the next reaction, which in turn produces enough excess energy to activate the next, and so on. That is clearly not the case here. External energy must be pumped in to keep it going; in fact, more external energy is required to release the hydrogen than is produced by the hydrogen oxygen reaction. This is a fact acknowledged by the inventor: yes, by the inventor’s own admission, the Kanzius process currently consumes more energy than it produces. So the second analogy, of using the resultant flame to produce steam and thus electricity is also flawed, as this would only reduce the efficiency even further (the steam generators generally have efficiencies of 90% or less).
The analogy of the nuclear reactor is flawed also. Fermi’s breakthrough in 1942 with the CP-1 reactor was that he found a way to initiate a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. That is, enough energy is released by the reaction to keep the reaction going on its own without any further input. Again, the energy (in this case, rest mass) of the fission byproducts is less than energy of the original atom (U235 or PU239). The atomic nuclei of the fissile material already contain the energy in the form of mass. That energy was contained there long before the nuclear reaction which released it; in fact, the only known source in the universe energetic enough to produce these heavy atoms is a supernova (good luck reproducing that on earth!)
The problem is that their whole catalyzation process is veiled in secrecy and covered in patent protections. All we have to go on regarding it is the word of the inventor and his collaborating scientist. It’s very difficult to do proper peer review — essential to the scientific process — under such conditions. Without that, it becomes impossible to know what the theoretical limits of the system are — and the result is not straight line thinking, but more speculation. I’m reminded of Fleischmann and Pons and the whole cold fusion debacle. Personally, I believe these guys are making a play for venture capital — but if I were any kind of investor, I wouldn’t touch this one with a high-risk derivative.
I think RH is correct. It’s an interesting idea, but not something that could go very far beyond being a cool lab trick. Keith is also correct though; if enough crazy ideas are thrown at the problem the chances that one will be viable are that much greater. So rave on, you mad scientists. Rave on.
Hi Keith,
Ah! But we do know the minimum energy needed to produce the reaction in which you split water molecules. That’s the key point I’m trying to make. There’s a very clearly defined energy difference between water and molecular hydrogen. Molecular hydrogen is higher energy than water, so it takes, at a minimum, that amount of energy to turn water into hydrogen.
So, we know the minimum energy to make that transformation, and that known minimum energy makes it certain that you can’t use water as a fuel. The concentration of the salt doesn’t impact the energy conten. It could only, based on the details we currently have, increase the rate at which you turn water into hydrogen. But of course, since nothing is free, if you increase the rate of conversion you require a greater energy input.
Jim,
Thanks for greater detail on the fusion argument. I knew the principles but didn’t think I could do the explanation justice. Thanks!
We are not going to end up with a net gain of energy but all things considered do we with with gasoline? I see the energy used to create the radio wave as no different than the energy needed to drill the oil well or transport the crude to the refinery. Then there is also the energy cost of the refinery to change the crude into gas. I see this as a form of battery that stores the energy that we put into it loosing some along the way, but the abundence has to count for something. Maybe you could use a dam to create the electricity to create the radio wave to split the hydrogen, it would still be better than relying on foreign sources of oil.
Brad,
All things considered we end up with a massive net gain of energy from petroleum. That’s the whole reason we use it.
Let’s say you have a box full of machines of any kind you want, but there’s no energy in the box at all. Literally, you can have any machine, any reactor, anything not forbidden by the laws of physics.
Ok, in one scenario you put gasoline into one end of the box, and then out the other end you get combustion products. Because combustion products (like CO2, water, etc) are lower energy than the petroleum you put in, there is an energy difference you can use to make the machines in the box do work. Maybe the difference is very very small (it’s not, but let’s say it is). There can be refineries, drills, whatever you want in the box, and if you put in enough petroleum you can make the stuff in the box work, because what comes out of the box has less energy that you put in. You can, in other words, extract work from the difference in energy between these two substances. In fact, it doesn’t have to be petroleum, it could be wood turning to ash. It could be anything turning into anything else in where the product has less energy.
Now consider a similar super-technological box, only you require that you put petroleum in, and you have to get petroleum back out. There’s no way, right? You have to turn the petroleum into something with lower energy in order to get work out of it. You can’t start and stop with the petroleum and expect to get energy out of it.
That is exactly what is being proposed with this burning of salt water. They use RF to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, then they burn the hydrogen. Do you know what you get when you burn hydrogen? Water. So if you don’t get focused on the second half of the process (burning the hydrogen) the overall process is: you start with water, and you end with water, and you want to get some kind of energy out of that transaction. Even if it was petroleum, or plutonium, or anything, if you start and end with the same compound you can’t extract energy. This is the chemistry equivalent of 1 1=2.
The abundance doesn’t have anything to do with it. If I gave you all of the petroleum in the world, and said “do what you want with it, but make sure you give me back all of the petroleum when you are done” you wouldn’t be able to do anything with it. Because you have to give me back just as much energy as I gave you.
I’ve had a whole day to read the several responses but I feel that I’m still confused as to what you all are saying. The scientists involved did temperature tests on the heat generated by burning the hydrogen and the temperature reached more than 1700 degrees celsius… Now your telling me that there was no energy produced… I dont believe that! My laptop can generate more than 30 degrees celsius using a lithium ion battery. If we scale it up, why can’t this reaction be used not to directly combust the fuel INSIDE the cars, but rather used in the pumps themselves to store the hydrogen that is used to fuel the cars? Or are you all saying that hydrogen has never and will never be used as fuel!? What about the sun!? Perhaps its not a matter of just burning this hydrogen, perhaps it is a matter of converting it to a storable form and releasing it over time and using the resulting energy in a minimalistic reaction. The fact is, we need more research on safely storing and using the hydrogen. I for one hope that they continue to look into this and that investors are not swayed by this hubbub about it not working because if it wasn’t a discovery, people wouldnt be on it as much as they are right now…
Hi Keith,
First, let me say that I’m all for continuing to research it. I’m a researcher, and my background is chemical engineering, so I appreciate that what they’ve done is pretty cool. It’s a new, interesting bit of electrochemistry. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be explored for it’s own sake. I’m just trying to clear up confusion about what they’ve actually done, and make people understand that this doesn’t have applications for creating energy from salt water. It’s really just a way to convert radio wave energy into hydrogen energy.
Let me see if I can help your confusion: Yes, they did get some very high temperatures, and the burning hydrogen liberated a lot of energy. However, they did this by shooting high energy RF radiation into the water. If you push on a swing set really hard and it comes back and hits you in the face really hard you wouldn’t say that the swing set generated that energy. You definitely got smacked in the face, so there was definitely energy there. But it was there because you put it there, just before it hit you, when you pushed it.
When they shoot RF waves into the water they are pushing the swing. When the resulting hydrogen burns that’s the swing coming back. There’s absolutely heat and light and energy coming out of the burning hydrogen, but it’s because they put that energy there when they split the water.
So they put the energy there with a RF radiation generator that ran on lots of electricity. Think of it like a powerful microwave oven, only the waves are at a different frequency than the ones in your kitchen. One of the previous commenters said that the original scientist who did this work even admitted that they weren’t generating any energy.
Hi,
I was the poster that mentioned the efficiency of the Kanzius process. I found that bit of information here (I don’t know what the original sources were):
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:John_Kanzius_Produces_Hydrogen_from_Salt_Water_Using_Radio_Waves
I agree it could be an interesting method of hydrogen generation if the inefficiencies can be reduced. It would even be useful if one could somehow power the RF from a renewable energy source, like solar. But by using fossil fuels as the source of RF power, I fail to see how one would realize any net reduction in either atmospheric carbon or petroleum dependence. Proposing to use the combustion of the hydrogen produced by the process to power the RF is just voodoo science: it would be like building a perpetual motion machine.
The biggest beef I have with the inventor(s) is the way they are publicizing this. If this is really new science, as claimed, then it should be published for rigorous peer review. If it’s a new process, then by all means patent it, but at least reveal the science behind it. As it stands, they seem to be treating their science as a trade secret, which is at least partly to blame for all the misunderstanding.
Hi Jim,
Thanks for posting that link. I agree that the quotes are pretty sketchy. After reading that page (assuming the quotes are accurately attributed) I’m more inclined to think that this may not be legit. Or that they may not be presenting the research in a completely honest way.
They seem to be publicizing it in a way characteristic of a scam. The secrecy and the appeals to the public rather than the scientific establishment are pretty much universal to money-seeking bad science. It may not be the case of course, but they are certainly looking like a duck and quacking like a duck at this point. The onus is on them to prove that they are not, in fact, ducks.
For those who might still not understand, think of the Hindenburg. The fire and heat that was created was as a result of Hydrogen mixing with Oxygen. I’m not a chemist, so my numbers might be off, but very simply:
H 2O = H20 Energy (heat)
To reverse the process, you need to add the same amount of heat (or energy) to water, and that will yield hydrogen and oxygen.
H20 Energy = H 20
Then you can burn the hydrogen again and release energy.
The amount of energy in both reactions is equal.
Add the inefficiencies of the various forms of energy conversion going on in RF process, and you have a negative net energy.
That equation didn’t format properly – sorry about that. But I just saw one of RH’s follow-up posts which already said it clearly.
For the actual equation, and a very good explanation of all this, see:
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/water/chemistryelectrolysis.html
To Jason, the first respondent, remind me not to invest in any schemes you come up with. Try the first 2 years of engineering coursework at a major 4-year institution and then get back with me on your theories.
I’ve heard of speculation that the aggressive yellow flame is indicitive of sodium burning (hydrogen burns blue). Is it possible that the radio waves are exciting the water and the salt allowing the sodium to burn. Chemistry is not my forte however I would think that the equation may be something like this:
H2O2 2NaCl = Na2O2 2HCl
Don’t ask me what this means; however I would welcome your thoughts. Are these stable molecules? Remember if they cause cancer the scientist that discovered this is also working on a cure for cancer!
First, the conservation of energy does apply here. This is not up for debate.
However, two important things need to be pointed out.
First, we don’t have a way to create hydrogen with energy today. In other words, we can’t take power from a dam, or nuclear reactor and convert that energy into something like hydrogen because this is WAY too inefficient.
People who talk about hydrogen cars are nuts because we don’t have a source of hydrogen. If this conversion process is 100, or 1000 times more efficient in letting us make hydrogen, then it is breakthrough because then we simply build tons of nuclear reactors, and then we have a good quality supply of hydrogen at a reasonable cost (remember, the USA has over 100 nuclear rectors running in the USA now). . We can’t use electricity now to create hydrogen, as it is complete useless in terms of efficiently. (about 25%).
So, a high efficient method of splitting water is a breakthrough. It essentially becomes that magical battery. We create the H here…and burn it there….
Just 75 or 80% efficient ratios would transform our ability to produce H at a decent cost….
It is NOT however a NOT free lunch!
Or is it?
Read on for a shock:
When you split water, and re-combine the H and the O, you get the SAME energy back that it took to split this.
Now, to pawn all of you here:
Who says were combing with the SAME oxygen molecule here? This is not a closed loop system, and if you can REPLACE the H bond to the O with something else then you can free a H molecule at low cost.
Think of the bond like a compressed spring pressing down on a marble. We could put a tiny amount of energy in, and compress that spring VERY small amount more, remove the marble, and put in a slightly larger marble (or same size one). Our RF energy is doing that for us.
At this point, we now have a H marble in our hand!!
If we re-combine the H molecule BACK with the O molecule in the water, then we get that TINY bit of energy back (that RF energy back).
However, who says we going to combine that H with the O from the water?
We now have a free H marble in our hand. And, that marble is now free to combine with oxygen from the AIR, NOT the water molecule. That is a big spring, and big source potential energy…
In a closed system, there is zero energy gain.
However, since we can take free oxygen molecule from the air, then we are using a DIFFERENT source of potential energy.
So, the conservation of energy does apply here. However, when you combine the H back with a 3rd O source like the air, then you have a DIFFERENT potential energy set to work with.
If we can pull out H molecules from the water, and combine then with O from another source (such as air), then we do get a source a energy.
We can get a NET benefit of energy if combing the H with O from air is greater then that of combing the H back into our salt soup. It is possible that the reaction combines the O in the water with the salt some way (sodium, or chlorine). This would mean we get the SAME RF energy back if we combine the O back into the salt soup, but who says we going to do that? Why would we do that!
We get net energy if this reaction does release the H molecule for less energy then combining it with the *water* O. The reaction might be combining the water O with the salt (the sodium, or chlorine). So, if we can release a H molecule, and combine it with a 3rd party source of O (such as in the air), then we do get a net source energy here.
We are never breaking the laws of energy…but, we are not in a closed system either.
From the color of the flame, it looks like we are burning part of the salt here and the RF energy might very well be just a drying source to remove the water.
It is still possible that this is fuel. I much doubt it, but the people here claiming this is perpetual motion, or that the energy put in is equal to the energy you get out MUST be the same is silly because we are able to use O from a 3rd party source here.
Without knowing the details of the reaction, one cannot make the claim that a net source of energy is not available here.
Albert D. Kallal
Edmonton, Alberta Canada
Some people are debating it though :)
What makes you say that we don’t have an efficient way to create hydrogen? We don’t have a way to create hydrogen that doesn’t require a tremendous amount of electricity. But if you disconnect the power cord from this RF generator and stuck the wires into water you’d generate MORE hydrogen than if you used the RF generator. This is a thermodynamic necessity. If you think otherwise then YOU are the one proposing that conservation of energy doesn’t apply.
Do you have a source for this 25% claim? Where else is the power going if not into creating hydrogen? There’s no other losses in electrolysis. My understanding that the barrier to creating hydrogen with electrolysis is not that it’s inefficient, but just that it consumes so much electricity. Note that this is not the same thing at all.
Check out the wikipedia article on electrolysis. It may be that you got the 25% number for efficiency from the overall conversion of heat at a nuclear plant to hydrogen, which is 25-40%. The efficiency of converting electricity to hydrogen is apparently around 80-92%. And the lower efficiency number would apply (plus additional losses) if we used RF to generate the hydrogen.
I agree that hydrogen cars are probably a ridiculous notion, but it’s more about the requisite new infrastructure than the the efficiencies of creating hydrogen. I thought everyone accepted the self-evident reality that we could build a bunch of nuclear plants and create a bunch of hydrogen any time we wanted to.
No, you don’t. You get less. There are always entropic losses in any spontaneous process.
I’m sorry, but you just don’t know what you’re talking about. You seem very excited about it, so I feel bad for bursting your bubble, but that’s just not the way this stuff works.
The source of the oxygen doesn’t matter. The source of the hydrogen doesn’t matter. There is no free, unbound oxygen (O1, not O2) in the atmosphere. Oxygen is highly, highly reactive. If you did have an unlimited source of single oxygen atoms you’d have your unlimited source of energy right there and you wouldn’t need the hydrogen.
Look, just write out whatever overall reaction you are proposing here. That will tell you whether it even makes sense to talk about getting energy.
H2O NaCl -> H2 (NaOH? ClO2?)
I addressed this notion in my original article above. You are saying that “what if the salt ends up at a lower energy state and that’s where the excess energy is coming from. There’s no reason to think that’s happening. What do you want to turn the salt into that liberates energy? You are speculating and trying to find some way to make this mysterious process do what you want it to, but you don’t have any reason to think it can do it other than wishful thinking.
Of course it’s not a closed system. Don’t confuse the issue by bringing in inappropriate language and concepts. It’s not a closed system in the original system because they’re bringing in electricity or RF energy (depending on where you define the system boundary).
It looks like that to you, does it? What does it look like are the combustion products? That’s the essential question that the inventor must answer.
I’m sorry, but both the perpetual motion claim and your claim of substituting oxygen molecules are both silly. There is no difference in the energetics if you use the O2 liberated by hydrolysis or use O2 from the atmosphere. It’s the same reactions. You are saying “what if the oxygen from hydrolysis reacts with the salt to generate more energy.” There’s no reason to think that’s happening. You can’t burn salt. It does not react with oxygen.
But if you know some thermodynamics and some chemistry it’s possible to make some good educated guesses.
This is an absolutely terrible attitude to have, and it’s ruining debate on scientific topics. There is no reason to TRY to disprove an outlandish claim. The burden of proof is on the person making the lunatic claim. There are an infinite number of bullshit hypotheses out there, and it’s up to the creator to get themselves taken seriously. And, no offense to the internet, it doesn’t make a lick of difference if they can convince the uneducated, non-specialist public. The only reason to try to convince the public is if you are trying to just make a quick buck before the experts shoot you down.
There is every reason to believe that this is an interesting new way to generate hydrogen. It’s neat new science. But it’s not relevant to energy generation or storage. There’s no reason to think it matters. I’d be happy to be wrong. But the fact is that when an inventor claims to have created something radically new that will revolutionize the energy economy and they will not share the details with anyone qualified to verify their claims, they have always turned out to be blowing smoke up our butts to try to make a quick buck before anyone figured out the reality.
I’m certain they are making hydrogen with RF. I’m very skeptical that there’s any economically viable (as opposed to scientific) reason to do so. None of the discussion on the internet has brought forth any startling new insights into the nature of electrochemistry.
Rich,
I’m sorry I haven’t answered your question yet. I’ve been traveling for business and haven’t had my reference books with me. I’m trying to work out a list of possible compounds with Na, Cl, O2 and H2 in them and show that there’s nothing you can make from these ingredients that’s lower energy than water and table salt (the starting material in salt water).
There is also the heat dissipated during the electrolysis or RF process so the equation would be energy+water-> Hydrogen + oxygen + heat(lost energy), so you don’t get 100% efficiency.
The burning side would be hydrogen + oxygen -> water + energy + heat(lost energy). There is also the mechanical process and the mechanical losses by creating power from burning hydogen. There will always be a net energy loss. Gasoline is also a net energy loss or we wouldn’t be running out of it!
I think if a hydrogen car that runs on water is to be a reality then it will have to stop at a energy fill up station to fill up it’s reserve of energy, just like we fill up on gas.
The hydrogen car can convert water to hydrogen + oxygen and then burn the hydrogen oxygen mix, it can have a net loss of power due to the various mechanical and electrochemical processes, but there will be a reserve of power available from the energy station. If you run out of energy reserve then your car stops, just like running out of gas.
What is required is a quick way to recharge a battery, giant capacitor or equivalent. The car should also use regenerative braking to store additional energy during braking.
I also read somewhere that hydrogen, being the lightest element, can float up and be destructive in the upper atmosphere. I don’t know if that’s correct but assuming it is then there will always be some “gas ” leaks as there are now so there will be gaseous hydrogen floating up to the upper atmosphere casusing issues. We will need to convert the hydrogen right at the cylinder instead of storing it to reduce the leaked gas, which is one more hurdle to overcome.
I would love to see a car that ran on water and it may happen but it’s an up hill battle all the way.
Bill
1900 AD—- it is impossible for there to be nuclear power
2000 AD—– it is impossible to use radio waves to create a salt water flame.
Today— we know more because someone did the impossible.
As an inventor I am not interested in impossibilities, I am interested in probablities.
It is most probable that the flame is cause by a process that splits the molecule of water yielding no net gain of energy.
There is a small probablity that:
There is some type of burning of the salt;
There is some type of burning of the dissolved metals other than salts;
There is some type of burning of dissolved organics;
There is some type of “cold fusion” or other operation we have previously determined to be impossible;
The process could be used to desalinate water and recapture some of the energy of the process;
There is a use for the gas produced other than burning if it contains rare metals or salts;
The process could be used on other liquids;
The process could be used at different pressures and densities to improve yields or alter outcomes;
That the process is not at all connected to the recombination of hydrogen and oxygen via our common reactions, but by another previously unknown reaction.
We all could offer hundreds of possible outcomes with smaller and smaller chances of a useful invention from this discovery. Many inventors are expert in the laws of physics and chemistry. We know of the small number of ideas that actually are useful in modern life. Yet if no one searches out these small improvements then many of the larger improvements in human life would not be forthcomming.
To treat the idea with disrespect is not good in my opinion. To cut off discussion by intimidation is not wise. Many possible inventions (or perhaps none) could come from this discovery. It is not sensible to discourage people willing to investigate further this discovery.
Lets say that the fire were due to burning some dissolved metals, some organics, some salt and some hydrogen and it had a net yield of energy of .0001 btu per cc of water were available due to this process. And lets say that there was also a benefit of converson of salt water to fresh water. And lets say that it reduced the need for fossil fuels and lowered pollution.
When the number of cc of water in the ocean is considered then the low power gain is overwhelmed by the shear volume of fuel available.
This is in my opinion a worthwhile discovery and bright minds should not be discouraged from further investigation.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for the post, you raise an important point that I need to clarify.
You are absolutely correct that there is loss in burning gasoline, or in any energy conversion process. And you are also correct that we could absolutely run our cars on salt water if we filled up another energy reserve at a fueling station, then used this energy to hydrolyze the water as we drove. But in that second case I think you can’t really say you are running the car on water if water isn’t the source of energy.
So you have two scenario:
A. You fill a big energy store like a battery and use that power to split water through something like this RF energy technique. The hydrogen that comes from this split can be burned in a combustion engine or used to power a fuel cell.
B. You just run your car on the electricity stored in that big battery.
Option B is, by thermodynamic necessity, more energy efficient than option A. As you point out there are losses in any conversion, so in going from battery to RF to hydrogen to fuel cell you incur a lot of different losses, so the net result is much less energy than you bought at the fueling station to charge your battery. In option B you only have the losses in one conversion step, going from electricity to mechanical energy.
This is exactly the point I’m trying to make in the original article when I say that splitting water is not relevant for power storage or fueling your car. There’s no scenario in which the power required to split that water wouldn’t be better used applied directly to make your car go.
In the case of gasoline we are already running the thermodynamic equivalent of option B. Gasoline is energy rich, and by filling up on gasoline we are filling up on energy.
Hi RC,
I don’t think anyone ever claimed that nuclear power was impossible. They just thought it was dangerous and impractical. That’s a different attitude than believing it’s a violation of the laws of physics.
Also, nobody, not even me in this article, is claiming that they didn’t cause salt water to generate a flame. As I said many times in the article, I’m certain they DID generate a flame from salt water. There’s nothing impossible or even difficult about hydrolysis.
Your post is very defensive. I’m not treating the idea with disrespect at all. I’m a researcher, and I value innovation and scientific progress as much as anyone. I praised their effort as innovative electrochemistry. What I’ve done in this article is try to clarify the claim for people who don’t know any better and get carried away thinking about irrelevant possibilities. I’m not discouraging any researchers or inventors from pursuing the topic further (the “experts in the laws of physics and chemistry” you refer to already know what I’m saying here). If you have the background and skills to build on their work then you will not need me to tell you the implications of the presented work. I’m talking to the casual internet reader who doesn’t know anything about electrochemistry and sees “burning salt water” and gets carried away thinking about power generation when that’s not implied by their results.
Of course research into using RF to split water will continue, and inventions will certainly come from it. That’s not in dispute. The focus of my post is that this is not a net source of energy, and it’s a waste of time to think that it is.
On the subject of remote possibilities:
You are of course correct that there is the possibility that what they have done does generate a net gain of energy. Let me add to that a few more remote possibilities:
By burning sodium ions in the presence of RF energy you generate a small black hole.
The RF energy causes a connection to the pre-inflationary universe to form allowing energy residue from the big bang to seep through into our time.
You could propose a limitless number of highly unlikely scenarios which are just as completely unsupported by our understanding of physics. I think it’s basically irresponsible of you to propose this viewpoint. By dragging out a limitless number of unlikely, unsupported scenarios you attempt to overwhelm the argument with an army of straw men. This is not the way science, research and development are done. You start from a fascinating discovery and you explore where than discovery leads you, but if you don’t close off the avenues which every single fact of physics and experience tells you will be a dead end then you never make any progress at all.
Bright minds should absolutely be discouraged from working on free energy and perpetual motion machines. They should be discouraged from working on anything which has repeatedly been proven to be a waste of time so that those bright minds will not waste themselves. If they are passionate and they really have good reason to think they can “prove the world wrong” then nothing I say can stop them. But don’t go around encouraging bright, inquisitive people to pursue projects which there is every possible reason to think will fail.
I think on board converting to hydrogen is really something that can be done in the mid term between current gas engines and commercially available electric cars. Real electric cars from GM, Ford, BMW, Toyota etc.
If all the car companies started making electric cars tomorrow it would be decades before everyone converted over to electric. It may never totally happen. We need a technology that will work with today and yesterdays cars.
As hydrogen can be fairly easily used in any internal combustion engine with a few modifications it seems that is the easiest way to get from here to electric cars is using current technology and converting engines to hydrogen, much like engines get converted to natural gas. If we can’t store energy then hauling around a hydrogen tank is probably still better then using gas. If the gas refineries were able to eliminate harmful exhaust gasses that would also be a great improvement but it’s still short term. Biofuels and ethenol are good alternatives but they still produce noxious gases and the amount of room and resources required to grow these gas substitutes does not justify using them.
Just a thought. I don’t know if it’s really even possible to have enough energy on board a car to run it a long distance between energy fill ups.
Well, RH, seems you are very well grounded in your thinking. If it takes 1000 gallons of sea-water to generate enough hydrogen to power the RF generator each second, we’d soon run out of seawater.
The way I see it, salt water makes up 3/4 of earth. Ultimately, all source of energy comes from the sun. Hydrocarbons were created from the energy of the sun. How about build a solar panel big enough to fire up the RF generator that will split the salt-water and farm the hydrogen from it? Sure, we can split pure water but we’d soon run out of water. I suppose we can directly use sunlight to charge batteries and achieve greater efficiency than using RF to split the salt-water. I think the future lies in harnessing the sun’s energy and storing it in the battery. Biofuels – like those produced by mutant algae – have possibilities, but in the end, you will need land size of Texas to produce enough hydrogen (and biomass) for useful purposes. Not to mention, sunlight, CO2, etc.
So it all goes back to how to harness the energy of the sun directly and transfer it to a medium that can be efficiently used.
I understand that we can not create energy but I would like to see some hard energy IN / energy OUT facts on this process. I see lots of speculation but no numbers. There must be someone out there that has tested the radio frequency generator power consumption against the energy supplied by the burning hydrogen. (Just so we can see just how efficient the transformation is!!)
Hi Sam,
That’s exactly correct. We just need the actual numbers. Without hard numbers it’s pointless to speculate that he’s creating useful energy.
My position is that in the absence of these energy-balance analyses we can just assume that it works as described and it’s just a way to perform RF based hydrolysis (e.g. no net generation of energy). The burden of proof is always on the person who is proposing something new to demonstrate and provide enough information to replicate the experiment.
Here’s something interesting I heard on the weekend. The Japanese car manufacturers are spending about $1 million per minute(!) on green energy alternatives. It was on a car show with a couple of well recognized car editors who were attending a Japanese car show.
The show said the Japanese manufacturer’s started by thinking what kind of auto will be required in 2050 and working backwards to today. That seems pretty smart thinking.
Not really part of this discussion but an interesting side note. I’m sure they have their ears to the ground about any energy alternatives, although large companies, like large rocks, are hard to move but once started are hard to stop or change direction.
Hi Bill,
I’m skeptical that anybody could correctly envision what kind of cars we’ll need in 2050, but it’s certainly a valuable exercise to try.
You also raised an interesting point about biofuels and ethanol. If I wasn’t so crushingly busy at work I’d write up a post on my thoughts on biofuels. I did want to point out something though: you said that it would take a lot of extra land to grow these crops for fuel. If the work on lignocellulosic ethanol pays off then we could essentially use the stalks and leaves of our existing food crops to generate fuel. So there is no additional land required, and any new land would be both food AND fuel production.
Of course the economics of cellulosic ethanol are not entirely clear, and while it’s technically feasible I’m not sure it’s the right move. But it is worth pointing out that extra land use is probably not a problem with that technology.
I tend to think that we will have to go to some kind of solar-based energy economy in order to achieve any kind of carbon neutrality. I think direct solar power is probably a waste of time in any short term sense (it will take so long to become economically viable that there’s no way direct solar can win). If we want some kind of real “green” solution then we will have to go with something that converts plants into fuel. It’s overall carbon neutral, solar powered, etc.
Just a though. If we start putting solar panels every where whats going to happen to the earths suface?
I think the interesting point with the Japanese manufacturers is that they are not just designing for next year or a few years down the road. That kind of forward thinking is what’s required. I figure they know they’ll be wrong in their assumptions but they are smart enough to see that things will be different and are planning for big changes.
The whole biofuels stuff is massively overblown and dangerous. I was just reading an article on it and almost everything grown with the exception of sugar cane actually adds to the global warming effect as the current supply or corn, soy etc. is not enough to supply the fuel makers and feed the population so more land needs to be cleared. Clearing land releases the CO2 into the atmosphere. Farmed land doesn’t sequester near as much co2 as a forest so we cause more problems by trying to do better.
I also wonder if you can ever really see a net gain from any hydrogen generation by RF and salt water or any other kind of electrolysis. The RF generation itself would create loss from resistance in the circuitry and sucking the water up to the point it was converted would require a huge amount of power. I think this is unfortunately just another parlor trick meant to suck money out of “investors”
Using Solar cells to do the work of generating power for this device is a bit of a waste of time as it would be more efficient to store or use the power generated.
I think in the end we’ll all need to use a bit more muscle power to run the world.
Closed mindedness seldom leads to scientific breakthroughs. Not that the theory/concept isn’t flawed, but we can’t rely completely on theories, concepts, and laws made now almost a century ago.
Can’t we all just get along? I think this is a very viable technology but it is not developed enough yet. People made fun of the Wright borthers for trying to fly and now millions of people do it all of the time. The purpose of injecting Hydrogen and Oxygen extracted from H2O via electrolosis is to make the combustion of gasoline in the internal combustion engine more efficent… who can argue that the ICE is not efficent?
Hi KCDC,
No one disputes that burning hydrogen provides power, and it’s perfectly reasonable to think that you could have an ICE that is augmented by injection of a flammable gas.
This discussion is really about whether “burning” salt water is a viable energy source.
So here’s an interesting thought about this burning salt water scenario.
The videos all show the flame instantly being produced as soon as the radio waves are directed at the test tube vial. If the hydrogen/oxygen mix is burned as it’s being produced then it’s going to be difficult to store the hydrogen. It also doesn’t show the energy that’s required to generate the RF.
So the problem is how to create the hydrogen without burning it right away and how to store that hydrogen so it can be used.
Also what RF frequencies are being used and will they affect all of our other electronics that we have around us.
Also how efficient is the technology. The inventor says 100%, I say prove it with numbers, not retoric.
If they are using salt water which is not just hydrogen and oxygen then all those other chemicals are also vaporized. Do we really want those elements being released into our atmosphere?
Those are some fairly major hurdles to overcome. The inventor is pushing this technology as a cancer cure. Let’s hope it works for that.
Time will tell if you can run your car this way. I personally think that if it worked that well then this company would have been swallowed by big business by now.
RH, you have explained very clearly why salt water is not a viable power source. The clarity, logic, truth, and scientific fidelity of your explanations are all beyond dispute.
I suppose, just in the spirit of free (and irresponsible) speculation, we could imagine that some utterly free, clean, wasteable, and otherwise unusable (this is important, this wonderful power source might have some better use!) power course could be found which was uniquely adaptable to the directional production of radio waves of the proper frequency, the salt-water-fueled cars could receive those waves and travel around on the hydrogen the waves would release (if they really do that; I’m skeptical you can really do that with radio waves!) Then, this idea might work IF you could design the car and the durable engine and market the package for a total cost of ownership less than the total cost of ownership of a gasoline-powered car. Go pursue that, somebody – and let me know how it works out.
OK i saw this salt water burning trick in youtube only now…
U have provided a clean explanation of the procedure’s feasibility.
Its a good science trick,but may be there is some future in it after all. So its obvious that radio waves can break down water using a catalyst(like in this case with salt), so why not try a different catalyst that can break down water under a different electromagnetic frequency? What about sunlight, its an electromagnetic wave, not only visible light, sun does produce em radiations of a wide spectrum. How about we have a setup which breaks down water through sunlight to produce hydrogen.Such a technique will certainly be more efficient cost-wise and energy wise than producing hydrogen through electrolysis with energy from solar cells. Hydrogen has a great energy density, and its an ideal fuel for IC engine or a an electric motor running through fuel cell.
As an after thought the RF electrolysis of salt water may not be what it seems. The burning flame had a bright color(hydrogen doesn’t usually produce a bright flame), could be the sodium(assuming its a salt water as in NaCl solution) from the salt. So this process might be separating the salt as well, and as I remember separating salt into its constituent elements takes more energy than breaking up water.
Hi guys, I have no doubt I am the least educated person responding to all this.
I hope all of you that say we can’t use saltwater for fuel will check out the dozens of people already doing just that.
From a complete novice, it looks to me like the saltwater reacts with the type of metal container you store it in and somehow seperates the hydrogen with a chemical reaction. Not that simple I’m sure but there are many videos of people showing exactly how this DOES work. I have no doubts this technology will just get better but for now, there are at least a dozen videos on youtube.com with people already running their cars on saltwater
Hi Gopi,
You have a good idea there. There are a lot of researchers working on developing a catalyst that can use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. In this case of course the energy source is the sun, not the water. But it’s a perfectly rational approach!
Paul,
In your example people are not using saltwater as a fuel. Saltwater is not the energy source in those cars.
When you say that the water reacts with the type of metal container, which separates the hydrogen and oxygen, there the METAL CONTAINER is the fuel, and it is being used up for every drop of water you turn into hydrogen.
Most “cars running on saltwater” stuff on youtube refers to electrolysis, where the fuel is your car battery. I think a lot of it is just fraud, too.
Hi RH,
No disrespect intended but when you discouraged people not to research free energy or perpetual energy, I think you were way out of line. I honestly don’t begin to understand all of your scientific claims of why using the hydrogen from salt water will not provide enough power to fuel our cars. What I do know is that there are at least a dozen videos on youtube.com of people doing eaxctly that. They are not constantly blasting their containers with radio waves. Some are using plastic containers, some metal, so we know it’s not just a reaction between the container and the salt water. I can’t say I’ve researched all the claims and suspect some of them may be frauds but what seems obvious is this technology is somewhat in it’s infancy and has huge potential. To tell people not to waste their time on this research is like saying don’t wast your time trying to go to the moon, it can’t be done.
Another thing you can find on youtube are a variety of Tesla related Free energy projects that are already working.
Please RH, I understand you might not find proof in your equations but just ask the people that are actually doing these things how they work instead of claiming they don’t. I mean seeing something work is pretty much believing it works for me. Just check out what new types of magnetic motors are being created by students. Granted, I can also be gullible but I can’t believe that all these people are frauds.
However it is or isn’t supposed to work, I don’t know, but I’ve seen their claims put to the test and they do work.
I honestly believe the reason we still use oil is because money and power have bought and hidden the tecnology we already have for free energy.
Tesla was sensored for a reason. His ideas are being proven today.
Hi Paul,
The real problem is that you, by your own admission, are not qualified to evaluate technical claims. You say that you’ve “seen their claims put to the test,” but you actually haven’t. You’ve seen videos on youtube, which are not credible, and even if you’d seen it first hand, you don’t have the background to understand whether they have actually been “put to the test.” As you said, you “don’t begin to understand” the science behind these explanations, so how can you say that you really are seeing saltwater used to produce hydrogen with a net gain in energy? Thermodynamics isn’t rocket science, but it does take a few years of college-level study to understand it well enough to be able to use it, or to be able to evaluate the devices of people who claim to do the impossible.
You say that you can also find Tesla free energy project videos on youtube… Let me tell you that you can find videos of flying saucers, bigfoot and ghosts on youtube as well. These people are not necessarily all frauds. Some of them genuinely believe in what they are saying, but they are ignorant of what they’ve really got. I suspect most are frauds, however. The net result is the same: the internet is full of incorrect information, and it gets repeated by hopeful people who are unqualified to tell whether they are seeing something real. You are doing yourself a disservice if you take “getting a education in science/engineering and then critically evaluating technical claims so that you are able to understand how a device actually works” to be equivalent to “watching videos on youtube.”
I stand by what I said. If you are a bright, technically skilled person, don’t waste your time chasing perpetual motion machines and free energy devices. You will waste your life and your talent, when you could be working on something that would actually make people’s lives better, and make the world a better place. Dream about Tesla’s free energy all you want, but when you have time in your life to do something, do something that makes a difference.
There has been a lot of stuff written about magnetic motors but the reality is there is not enough rare earth magnets being produced to ever make a magnetic motor anything other then a science project even if it can be proven to work, which hasn’t happened yet.
There have been many attempts at a perpetual motion machine over hundreds of years but no one has yet been able to build a verifiable machine.
You don’t get something for nothing in this world and that includes free power. Even solar power costs money and energy to build and install solar cells. Wind and water based generators also convert mechanical energy to electrical energy but ther is always losses involved.
I think it’s great that people are researching these things but I think at best we will only be able to convert excess energy, like collecting solar power and storing it in batteries or using that power to convert water to Hydrogen for later use. That’s what makes sense. Trying to find loopholes in the laws of the physics is best left to those people who actually understand these things.
The real test of any free energy scheme is this, would you invest your money in any of these “technologies”? If so perhaps you’d also be interested in some lovely oceanfront property available I have available in Arizona.
Here’s another thought. If you had just invented real free energy would you be telling everyone about it and risk losing everything to big business, or would you protect it with your life, show only those people who could prove it and make them sign a Non Disclosure Agreement before seeing it, patent the idea worldwide, which would cost millions, and then approach big business once you know that they would not be able to steal your idea. Hmmnnn
I’m all for the next breakthrough in the science of energy but let’s wait ’til it can be proven.
Hi BH,
I’d just add to your closing line (for the sake of the free-energy enthusiasts out there):
Let’s wait until it can be demonstrated in a lab, with real scientists and engineers watching, rather than just text and video on the internet.
Everyone needs a briefcase containing Carl Sagan’s baloney detection kit…
I find it interesting that those people who want to blindly believe this stuff are so upset about those of us that want real evidence of it working. This is not a witch hunt, this is a discussion.
Magnetic motors don’t work. Those that do “work” only work for a short amount of time and the results are not independently reproducible. Unless of course you believe the “inventor” and skip all that useless math and physics stuff.
I am skeptical of any unverifiable claim, especially of free power, net increases in power or alternative energy. That doesn’t mean that someone may find a new way to create alternative power. If they do and it can be scientifically proven then I’m 100 percent behind it and it will change the world. If they can invent a method of energy conversion that’s more efficient then what’s currently available then that’s terrific. All they need to do is prove it to the scientific community.
If someone can do this in their garage then I’m pretty sure that big business will also be able to do it, and they will find a way of making money off it. That’s called capitalism, and it’s not yet gone out of style.
What I have seen so far is lots of claims with no empirical evidence to support those claims. No practical devices, just lots of claims and people looking for money to “develop” or sell their ideas or kits. If the idea works why do you need more money? There are people and large organizations throwing billions at any real alternative energy devices. Do you really think they would skip an idea that would revolutionize the whole concept of energy? I don’t think so. As an inventor if I was approached and offered untold amounts of money for my idea I would tend to take the money. Only a fool would turn it down because if they did and decided to give it away, whoever wanted it would get it anyway and find a way to make money off it.
Linux is a free operating system for the PC but most people who use it buy a commercially packaged version because it’s simple and easy to get running and they don’t have the skills to do it themselves. The rest of us buy Windows or Apple operating systems. There are many things that are available for free but we prefer to pay for packaged convenience. Do you really think energy is so much different? You could create free power by hooking up your bike to a generator but I don’t see too many people doing that. Much easier to flick a switch.
It seems that those people who want to believe in this kind of stuff are willing to put aside all practical thinking and trust someone they know nothing about and something they can’t truly comprehend based on information they have read on a web page or saw on a video. Well if you believe it, good for you, the hoaxers and scammers of the world need people who are willing to blindly accept anything they hear or see based on no real information.
Science is all about explaining how things are possible. What’s going on and how it’s going on. Any real practical alternative energy process will have to be verified scientifically in order to be accepted by society. That basic concept will never change.
I am not against any claim, I just want them to prove it.