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Could salt water fuel cars? · Stuff You Should Know

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
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  Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
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  Speaker 1: from house stuff Works dot Com? Brought to you by
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  Speaker 1: consumer Guy at Automotive we make garbine easier. Hi, and
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  Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer
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  Speaker 1: here at how Stuff Works dot Com, with me as
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  Speaker 1: always as my trustee edit Tricks. Candice Gibson. How's it going, Candice?
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  Speaker 1: I gotta say I envy you a little bit there, Candice,
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  Speaker 1: I haven't been so fabulous lately. My wallet keeps shrinking
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  Speaker 1: and shrinking. Have you been to the gas pumps lately? Yeah?
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  Speaker 1: I know what you mean. Those numbers keep climbing. But
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  Speaker 1: it's not so expensive to feel my car because I
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  Speaker 1: drive any seven. Well, I drive a big old Honkin
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  Speaker 1: Volvo and it uses gas like you would not believe. Uh.
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  Speaker 1: Let's think about this though. I mean, what if you
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  Speaker 1: could put something else besides gas in your car to power,
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  Speaker 1: you know, like sand or air, something that would be nice,
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  Speaker 1: would be nice? What about saltwater? What do you talk about?
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  Speaker 1: That's crazy? No, it's not crazy. Really. Have you heard
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  Speaker 1: of this guy named John Kansias. You have okay, so
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  Speaker 1: you have read the article. That's great, Thanks for that.
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  Speaker 1: All right, well let's tell the people out in podcast
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  Speaker 1: LAMB what we're talking about. This guy named John Kanzius
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  Speaker 1: is this retiree in Florida. He's a retired radio broadcast engineer,
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  Speaker 1: and he came up with this thing called a radio
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  Speaker 1: frequency generator RFG is right, and basically what it does
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  Speaker 1: is it takes radio waves and condenses them into a
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  Speaker 1: beam and it's got all that has actually three applications
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  Speaker 1: that they found so far, but one of them came
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  Speaker 1: about when Kansias was tinkering with trying to desalinate water,
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  Speaker 1: salt water, which could solve the global thirst crisis, right, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: because not everyone has access to clean water, actually to
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  Speaker 1: the tune of about two billion people, I understand. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Uh So he was trying to desalinate water using his
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  Speaker 1: RFG and he had the little box trained on a
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  Speaker 1: test Cuba saltwater, and he noticed that it sparked, which
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  Speaker 1: is fairly unusual for water. Water does and burn. On
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  Speaker 1: the contrary, water actually puts out fire exactly. So Kansis
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  Speaker 1: has a little bit of this mad scientist spent to him.
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  Speaker 1: You know, he's a very curious fellow, and he likes
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  Speaker 1: the paper towel and turns the RFG facing the test
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  Speaker 1: tube agin and he touches the paper towel to the water,
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  Speaker 1: and rather than the paper towel being put out by
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  Speaker 1: the water, the paper towel exactly it basically it caught
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  Speaker 1: the water on fire. And on fire it was. It
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  Speaker 1: was burning it about three thousand degrees fahrenheit. It was
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  Speaker 1: a pretty serious flame. Actually, yeah, so well, how does
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  Speaker 1: this convert to fuel for our cars? Well, I'll tell you. Basically,
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  Speaker 1: what Kanzius did inadvertently was to separate water into its components,
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  Speaker 1: you know, hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecules. Basic science.
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  Speaker 1: We're all there, and we've known for a while that
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  Speaker 1: you can use hydrogen as fuel. You can create an
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  Speaker 1: electric charge from it, or you can burn it in
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  Speaker 1: a combustion. Is hold on because hydrogen fuel is potentially dangerous, right,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, look at the Hindenberg that exploded. Actually, the
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  Speaker 1: Hindenberg has been kind of latched onto by people who
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  Speaker 1: aren't all about hydrogen e g. The big oil companies. Uh,
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  Speaker 1: that's that's kind of a fallacy. Actually, the Hindenberg explosion.
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  Speaker 1: It was a blimp held aloft by hydrogen. The static
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  Speaker 1: spark caught the hydrogen on fire um and thirty seven
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  Speaker 1: people ended up dying. The problem is is thirty five
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  Speaker 1: of those people died by jumping to their deaths. Most
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  Speaker 1: of the people, actually all of the people who are
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  Speaker 1: on board the passenger compartment who stayed aboard, landed safely
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  Speaker 1: and unharmed. And that's because hydrogen is actually the most
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  Speaker 1: lightweight of all the elements, and so it floated upwards.
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  Speaker 1: It's lighter than air exactly, and it burned upward actually
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  Speaker 1: too away from the passenger compartment. That's not to mention
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  Speaker 1: that the Hindenberg's outer skin was coated in a rocket
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  Speaker 1: fuel and a really highly flammable Yeah, that wasn't too conducive,
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  Speaker 1: it was. So the Hindenburg is probably not the best
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  Speaker 1: thing to point to to say hydrogen fuel's dangerous, right,
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  Speaker 1: It's it's not that dangerous. The problem with this type
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  Speaker 1: of hydrogen fuel, salt water fuel, essentially, is that it
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  Speaker 1: has a negative net energy ratio, and so to create
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  Speaker 1: this type of salt water fuel, you're actually putting in
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  Speaker 1: more energy than what you're getting out exactly, and what's
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  Speaker 1: the point. I mean, speaking strictly from an energy standpoint,
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  Speaker 1: you might as well just use the gasoline that you
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  Speaker 1: get this gas gallons worth of energy from, rather than say,
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  Speaker 1: using a gallon to get a half a gallon's worth
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  Speaker 1: of energy from. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense.
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  Speaker 1: You can't get something from nothing, And Cansius isn't the
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  Speaker 1: only person to run into this stumbling block. Hydrogen could
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  Speaker 1: be a really legitimate fuel. I mean, it packs a
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  Speaker 1: real punch and its emissions are nothing but water vapor essentially. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: so it's probably the cleanest burning fuel. I mean, the
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  Speaker 1: only other thing that's cleaner is electricity, and if you
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  Speaker 1: follow electricity back to its origin, electricity is created by
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  Speaker 1: burning coal. So really hydrogen would be cleaner. But there's
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  Speaker 1: that negative net energy ratio and keeps stopping up. When
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  Speaker 1: are we going to figure this out? I don't know,
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  Speaker 1: but I've written a couple of articles on it so far.
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  Speaker 1: One is a good salt water fuel cars and the
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  Speaker 1: other is is hydrogen fuel dangerous? And they're both pretty interesting.
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  Speaker 1: You can read on both on how Stuff Works dot
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