We’ve all heard the hype for the new horizons of hydrogen full cells, the process of burning hydrogen to create energy with water as a byproduct. George Bush has allocated over one billion dollars for research into hydrogen fuel cells. It seems just grand, once earth’s crude oil supply is exhausted the entire country buys new space age looking hydrogen fuel cell cars, hydrogen fueling stations go up on every corner, and instead of $3 a gallon for gas we pay $3 a liter for hydrogen. Quite the profitable “Jetson Family” utopia. Problems arise when you begin to think of the cost to the infrastructure, the safety of having the equivalent of a bomb in your trunk, and the question of where to obtain all of the new world order hydrogen prophesied by Bush’s manifest destiny Energy Bill.

Hydrogen full cells are simply a storage device, like a battery. Hydrogen would go into the fuel cell of an automobile, but where does it come from?

Currently there are two popular ways of creating hydrogen, electrolysis and hydrocarbon cracking. Electrolysis is the process whereby electricity is added to water to release the hydrogen-oxygen molecular bonds forming H-H-O from H2O. In the 19th Century, Michael Faraday discovered that, in the electrolysis process, a positive anode will release oxygen while the negative cathode releases hydrogen. He also found that the electrolysis process is only 25%-40% efficient, meaning that 3 times the amount of electrical energy is used to create the hydrogen compared to what is released. About 4 percent of the hydrogen gas produced world wide is created through electrolysis.

However, hydrocarbon cracking accounts for over 90% of the world’s hydrogen production. This is the process whereby hydrogen is cracked away from the hydrocarbon bonds of petroleum, natural gas, and coal to form simpler molecular bonds. Many times hydrogen is the byproduct of an oil refinery’s major petrochemical process of “steam cracking” which is used to create additives for gasoline.

Inventors for the last twenty years have discovered many viable methods for creating vast amounts of hydrogen from water. They are simple answers and none of these methods require the need to spend a billion dollars. What is most astounding is that existing automobile engines could work well burning hydrogen with very little alteration and no need for an external support infrastructure like the one now provided by gas stations, and which would be required by hydrogen fuel-cell technology.

Using hydrogen to supplement normal gasoline can reduce exhaust emissions of internal combustion engines and improve fuel economy. Hydrogen fuel injection systems work by injecting hydrogen as a combustion enhancement into the intake manifold of an internal combustion engine to achieve these benefits. A small amount of hydrogen added to the intake air-fuel charge enhances the flame velocity and thus permits the engine to operate with leaner air-to-fuel mixture than otherwise possible. The result is lower pollution with more power and better mileage.

Many products are already available. Do an internet search for hydrogen fuel injection and pretty soon you will find oxy-hydrogen electrolysis kits for cars and trucks.

The only problem with hydrogen fuel injection is the inability to create enough hydrogen on demand to solely power an automobile. However, recent innovations in this area are showing great results. Recall that ordinary water is actually a “battery” containing vast amounts of energy. The amount of energy in a water molecule has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of energy it takes to break down that molecule. If we can find an economical means to break down the water molecule, our energy problems are over.

In World War II, the military used Ferrosilicon to quickly produce hydrogen for balloons. Their chemical reactions used sodium hydroxide, ferrosilicon, a small amount of electricity and water.

The video below shows a great science-fair like example of the potential energy ferrosilicon and salt release when mixed with water. The beauty of readily available ferrosilicon is that it costs only 50 cents a pound and releases huge amounts of hydrogen when mixed with water.

An innovative company, Rothman Technologies of Toronto Canada, holds a patent on a process shown to create a lot of hydrogen gas by using water, salt, and an inexpensive metal alloy (again possibly ferrosilicon). According to Rothman Technologies, their system will create ten times more hydrogen gas than normal electrolysis.

Click on a link below to watch a video demonstrating how Rothman Technologies runs a small engine off of the hydrogen gas created in their unique electrolytic process.

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Play the Rothman Technologies video in Modem Quality or High-Speed Quality.

Hydrogen gas is a wonderful solution to our energy problems. But now let’s introduce another piece to the puzzle, our absolutely most favorite technology of 2007, Brown’s Gas.

Brown’s Gas is a mixture of di-atomic and mon-atomic hydrogen and oxygen gases, normally assumed to be in a 2:1 atomic ratio, the same proportion as water. Brown’s gas is Oxyhydrogen produced in a common ducted electrolyzer. When ignited, this mixture combusts to form water, making 142.35 kJ (34,116 gram calories) of heat for each gram of hydrogen burned: that is 286.97 kJ/mol of enthalpy. Brown’s Gas has the benefits of being able to weld many dissimilar metals, cut thick steels, will cut iron 30% faster than acetylene, can change temperature when flame is applied to different materials, melts titanium rapidly, one liter of water makes 1860 liters of Brown’s gas, standard electrolysis yields 340 liters of gas per kilowatt-hour, and best of all, when used in a car, Brown’s gas combusts and emits water vapor as the only effluent in its exhaust.

Water fuel in action:

Some people in the field of Brown’s Gas lay claim to free energy, also called zero point energy. They propose that it is possible for more energy to be created through burning Brown’s Gas than what is put in to the system to produce the Brown’s Gas. Finding truth in this is daunting because no one seems to be giving up there secrets. One innovator of water-fuel technology, the late Stanley Meyer, claims that his electrolysis process, using ½ (half) amp of electricity to generate a specific wavelength, creates several hundred times more hydrogen than standard electrolysis.

His story can be seen in the following 2 videos:

And for you gearheads, here are instructions for how an “anonymous” guy converted his 1978 Chevy Camaro with stock 350 engine to run solely on water.

This last November Popular Science published an article about inventor John Kanzius who was building a machine to cure cancer with radio waves when his machine inadvertently made saltwater catch fire. Radio station antennas, he knew, can turn a bystander’s metal eyeglasses toasty warm. If he could seed a person’s cancerous cells with nanoscopic metal particles and blast them with radio waves, perhaps he could kill off the cancer while sparing healthy tissue.

The saltwater phenomenon happened by accident when an assistant was bombarding a saline-filled test tube with radio waves and bumped the tube, causing a small flash. Curious, Kanzius struck a match. “The water lit like a propane flame,” he recalls.

Here is a link to the Popular Science article, and here is a video about John Kanzius’ discoveries.

Comparing the Technologies
To be complete, let’s look at all three types of hydrogen-fuel solutions — fuel cells, pure hydrogen, and Brown’s gas — and see how they work relative to oxygen production or consumption:

Fuel Cells: This method uses oxygen from the atmosphere to complete the burning of the hydrogen in the fuel cell. What comes out of the tail pipe is oxygen and water vapor, but the oxygen originally came from the atmosphere, not from the fuel. And so the use of fuel cells neither takes away nor contributes to the oxygen content of the air.

Hydrogen: This fuel is complete in itself. It does not need oxygen from the atmosphere to burn, which is an improvement over fossil fuels in saving the oxygen in our air supply. In fact, when hydrogen burns perfectly, nothing at all comes out of the tail pipe. If salt and metal alloy are used to create hydrogen, then there will be residues of that in the exhaust, but hydrogen fuel does not contribute oxygen to the atmosphere.

Brown’s Gas: This is the most perfect fuel of all for running our vehicles. Like pure hydrogen, it is made from water, i.e., hydrogen and oxygen, but it burns in the combustion engine so that, depending on the setup, it may actually release oxygen into the atmosphere. In that case, what comes out of the tail pipe is oxygen and water vapor, just as with fuel cells; but the oxygen comes from the water that’s being used to create the Brown’s gas fuel. Burning Brown’s gas as fuel actually adds oxygen to the air thus increasing the oxygen content of our atmosphere.

The environment is experiencing tremendous problems at the moment, and one of the most serious of these is that we are losing our oxygen. The oxygen content of the air is becoming so low that it threatens our very existence in some areas. The normal oxygen content of our air is 21%. But in some places it is only a fraction of that. In Tokyo, Japan, for example, the oxygen content of the air has dipped to 6% or 7%. If it reaches 5%, people will begin to die. Tokyo has begun placing oxygen disbursement centers on its street corners, so that people can get emergency oxygen if they need it.

Brown’s gas, created through an electrolytic process, actually may contribute oxygen to the air supply, rather than leaving it the same (as with fuel cells and pure hydrogen), or consuming it (as with fossil fuels). It is for this reason that we feel it will be the future technology of choice for running our vehicles.