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I remember hearing stories when I was young about cars that ran entirely on water and I was fascinated by the idea. However, after a lot of thought and learning about thermodynamics I realized that it had to be a load of hogwash. There are a lot of people trying to make claims that simply are not possible and a lot of other people who are quick to claim things are impossible when they have no clue what they’re talking about.

First, you cannot get more energy out of a system than you put in without losing something. In other words if you use electricity to break water into hydrogen and oxygen, and then burn it, then you’re putting in energy from the batter and producing power from the engine. Not only that but the engine loses quite a bit of that energy as heat. Because the battery is charged by the alternator (which is run by the engine… which in this case is run by the battery), the battery will run down. It’s basically like trying to recharge an electric car by running it. It simply won’t work. This might work if the water was broken outside of the vehicle and the gas was burned in the vehicle. Basically a station would make the fuel and your car would consume it. That might be thermodynamically possible, but it’s still not very practical.

Now there are kits you can purchase that claim to increase your fuel efficiency by using this process as an additive to your air intake. The battery is now used to break water into hydrogen and hydro-oxygen, but instead of being used purely as a fuel, it is used to increase efficiency. This works by piping these highly flamable gasses through the air intake. Some claim that this can drastically increase your fuel efficiency, with some claiming to reduce your fuel consumption by 60%. I find that to be highly unlikely but I do think it is possibly to increase fuel economy in this way.

What is happening is actually very simple. You’re just making a chemical battery. Yep, that’s it. Your alternator uses energy from your engine to recharge the battery. When the battery is fully charged this energy is completely wasted, it goes nowhere. Alternators are designed to provide much more than enough energy to recharge the battery so this can be quite a bit of lost energy. In these systems, it simply takes that extra energy to break water. You’ve then stored that energy, which would have otherwise been wasted, in these gasses. Those gasses are then fed into the fuel system and burned. All the energy is still coming from the gas. You’re just recapturing otherwise lost energy and feeding it back into the engine.

I’ve also heard of engines that use water directly for combustion and work in combination with gasoline. Basically, they combust fuel in the engine and use the residual heat to combust water in the next stroke. It hits the hot cylinder and simply turns to steam. This reduces the temperature of the engine, making it run more efficiently and reclaims some of that heat energy to produce power for the engine. This has shown a lot of promise, but I’m concerned that the water will damage the engine. Also, if the water and steam isn’t completely ejected from the cylinder, it will make the combustion of the gas less efficient and cause the engine to chug and knock.

All in all, this has led me to believe that water can indeed be used as a fuel if it is produced outside of the car, it can be used to increase the efficiency of your gas by reclaiming otherwise wasted energy from your alternator, and it might be useful for generating steam power alongside gasoline. It’s possible. But I don’t know if all the scam artists out there selling kits are really telling the truth. This might be something worth looking into though.

Just me musing some stuff over. What are your thoughts?
Type to you later,
~Nathaniel