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The Return of the Water Engine
01/07/2006 . Source: Mark R. Leeper 
A friend has said that she recently had seen a news item talking about a water-powered car. She thought that she had seen the item on CNN news. At first I had wondered if it was an April Fools joke, but she had seen it in May, not on April 1st. My friend insisted that she had seen the story and she later pointed me to a reference to it. It did indeed seem to claim that there was a car with a water engine. Water-powered cars are part of our folklore. One of the most popular urban legends is that somebody once developed a car that would run on tap water. The legend is that the big money interests - usually either the automobile companies or the oil companies - heard about it and realized that their days were numbered. (Why it would be a threat to the automobile companies, I am not sure. For them it would be just a new type of engine that would sell very well. But usually they are blamed rather than the oil companies.)
In any case, the legend says that the evil capitalists bought up the rights to the engine and/or terminated the inventor with extreme prejudice. They liquidated him. To avoid the consequences of the discovery it was hidden and hushed up, not unlike the Ark of the Covenant at the end of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. There was a David Mamet play about urban legends in general and this one in specific. The play was called simply "The Water Engine."
I told my friend that a water engine is probably impossible. There is just about nothing in the universe as chemically stable as water. To get useful power out of water you would have to reduce it to a more stable state. There is just about nothing that you can make out of hydrogen and oxygen that is anywhere nearly as stable as water is. Water that is the ambient temperature has almost no more energy you can squeeze from it chemically.
The last remaining way to get energy from it is to drop it. In fact, though we do not think of that way, much of our households are water-powered. We just do not see the water. It is way off somewhere falling on the blades of turbines. They convert the kinetic energy into electricity and the electricity carries the power to our homes. Of course, not all electricity comes from waterpower. Some comes from burning coal; some comes from nuclear fission. But it seemed to me if a car was to be water-powered it would be in a roundabout way through turbines and electricity.
Powering a car is perfectly possible using water through the process of electrolysis. You may remember from your high school chemistry a funny-looking device that a tank of water at the bottom and two tubes sticking up at the top. (You can see one at http://tinyurl.com/kgxax.)
You turned on the electricity to this thing and the water level dropped a little over time. Then your teacher took a match and held it near the stopcock at the top of one of the tubes, opened the stopcock and there was a small explosion. (High school chemistry teachers love those small explosions. They are very dramatic for a class. Filmmakers know the same principle, though they like bigger explosions. Big explosions in chemistry class are frowned on by the school administration, or we probably would have had more of them.
But I digress.) In any case that explosion comes from hydrogen that had to be bribed with a lot of energy to separate from oxygen (the content of the other tube). It sits in that tube, rich in energy but pining for its lost oxygen. When it gets near a flame, which is just rapidly oxidizing, it jumps a chance to combine again with oxygen and release the energy it held. That it does and if humans get in the way, Oh, the Humanity. But a car that runs on this energy is not running on water, it is running on electricity. It is just uses the water, or rather the hydrogen created from it, as a way to store energy.
Well, I dug a little into the news story and I found they really are calling this engine "water-powered," as I had to admit to my friend. But that is a misnomer. Anyone expecting to run his or her car exclusively on water is in for a rude surprise. It is actually another electrical powered car and it will require a lot of electricity, assuming it really works. According to what I read the car runs on a controversial gas called Aquygen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquygen
Apparently you give it water and with a lot of electricity you create--not hydrogen, as I suspected, but - something called by the lacklustre name of "Brown's Gas" that is also combustible. Water is just the energy storage medium. It is like the old steam locomotives were not really powered by water but by the burning of wood, even though you did put a lot of water into them. Room- temperature water is pretty darn stable. You can add energy to it to perturb it from its H2O-at-room-temperature state and it will try to go back, releasing that energy stored in it. Ways to perturb it include heating it, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen, putting it in a condom and taking it to a high window of a hotel, or (apparently) turning it into Brown's gas.
If this all works--and I suppose it might--you would have a car that is sort of powered by water. At least it is powered by a process that requires water, as did the old steam locomotives. That is not what a physicist would call powered by water. That is still a thermodynamic impossibility. But you could look at it that water is a requirement of the process that creates the power.
Incidentally the claim has been made that a hydrogen-powered engine is less polluting than a gasoline engine. Again this falls to a maybe-it-is, maybe-it-isn't sort of area. Yes, the engine itself is less polluting. But if burning coal generates the electricity it uses, it is still not a very clean process. Now I vote for the guy who runs his car on the old oil that McDonalds has used to make French Fries. There is someone out there with an engine that runs on used cooking oil. It not only runs on a waste product, which is essentially free, but it smells like cooking French Fries.
Info on the frymobile is at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11809771/.
Mark R. Leeper
© 2006 Mark R. Leeper
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