Cars running on water powered engines have been an urban legend for the past 40 years. It is well know that we can use electrolysis to break the oxygen and hydrogen bond in water. This produces two separate gases (pure Oxygen and pure Hydrogen) both of which are highly volatile, each making a great fuel source. If only we could build a car with a converter plant built in, then we could run the car on a clean source of fuel and use an alternator like device to power the electrolysis device for infinite fuel. Fill up the tank with water and you get free gas forever.

Not how reality works

I hate to burst your bubble, but all the energy you could potentially get from burning the gas, you would require to separate it in the first place. You aren’t really creating power, you’re just converting it from one form into another. The other downside is that there is always ‘bleed off’ or power that escapes in combustion that doesn’t get used in actually improving your speed. Typical cars with gas combustion engines waste over 90% of their energy in heat rather than converting the chemical into mechanical energy (aka most of the gas is heating up the engine rather than make you go forward). So even if we are using an infinite source of water, we would be spending more energy creating the gas than the gas would yield in real work.

There is still hope: The river farm

This is far from a dead end technology. Water cover 75% of our planet, and rivers have been flowing for the past 4 billion years. We currently have the technology to create and safely store oxygen and hydrogen gases. We just have to scale it up in the form of a ‘river’ farm. Beside any river (ideally one flowing year round) we could have a series of hydro turbines to generate electricity. These would then be used to power hydrogen and oxygen production facilities, which happen to acquire their raw resource (water) from the same river.

Pros and Cons

Pro: Water is more abundant than land. It is infinitely sustainable.

Pro: Energy Centres can be set up anywhere there is a river. We don’t need to expend a great deal of resources to ship crude oil overseas and have accidents which cause massive damage. Any country with a river can generate it’s own power and fuel.

Pro: it is a completely Green energy source (maybe a little blue). The waste produce is essentially water vapour which has a zero carbon impact on the environment.

Down side 1 Safety: Oxygen and hydrogen are extremely volatile gasses. In the Vietnam war, gasoline was detonated as a “fuel air explosive” and the result was just one step below a nuclear explosion. Though fossil fuels relatively safe in a liquid form, hydrogen and oxygen would be shipped out in pressurized metal canisters. Any accident involving a ruptured container would be both spectacular and deadly. On the other hand it wouldn’t be any more dangerous than propane fuel, which everyone uses for their BBQ… and as we do know how to safely manage these fuel sources, it shouldn’t be a big stretch to use oxygen or hydrogen any differently.

Down Side #2: Infrastructure. Currently our society is set up to use fossil fuels. Cars, trucks, plains, generators, lawn mowers, everything is running off gas. Further more our economy is gas based. Changing over to a different fuel format would completely change the game for people who are already established an economic empire based on fossil fuels. It is far easier for them to purchase and table alternative fuel systems rather than allow the technology to get a foothold and then need to compete with them. If you are winning the game, why would you let a competitor in? Unfortunately while it makes their individual lives better, it also means that ALL HUMANS pay for it in the future, with the survival of our species in the balance. Before you get too much on the case of ‘rich fat cats’ think about it from your own point of view. Would you be willing to give up masses of wealth you took a life time to accumulate… to help out something as abstract as ‘the future of humanity?’

Below is a link to a guide on how to build: