Comments on: Can saltwater be burned as a fuel?

By: The New Environmentalism

The New Environmentalism — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 12:06:16 +0000

[...] child YouTube – Saltwater into fire 2 (John Kanzius) IC please take time to read this… Is It Getting Warmer? Can saltwater be burned as a fuel? __________________ "The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who [...]

By: Is It Getting Warmer? » Windmills and Economics

Is It Getting Warmer? » Windmills and Economics — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 12:39:35 +0000

[...] on writing this. I found the entry because he comments on the “burning saltwater” story that I also commented on. His point is that it will take energy to create hydrogen from saltwater and that energy may be [...]

By: guthrie

guthrie — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:57:02 +0000

Well, I’m a little trigger happy on this because several forums I pop into, unsuspecting science illiterates have posted this very video (and others like that one on Fox News where the guy was melting metal with hydrogen produced from electrolysis) and myself and others spent several hours educating them about the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

The thing is, I don’t see why this should be any more efficient than electrolysis anyway.
plus the problem with hydrogen is storage. It seems battery technology is improving much more than H2 storage just now.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:50:21 +0000

I probably should have said that this was likely an energy losing proposal. Frankly, I thought that was obvious from the video.

I have no doubt that more energy is put into the water than taken out. Most (all?) operations to extract hydrogen from water fall into this category. The interesting thing about the discovery is that it may (or may not) be more efficient than other processes after further refinement. I believe that the use of hydrogen in moving vehicles is incredibly important and any method of extracting it deserves large amounts of resources to develop the technique to ascertain its commercial potential.

By: guthrie

guthrie — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:26:12 +0000

I’m afraid you’ve fallen for another scam. The simple fact is that he’ll have used more energy to get the hydrogen out of the sea water than he’ll ever get by burning the hydrogen afterwards. Are there any efficiency figures attached to this?

The simple fact that it is glowing bright orange indicates that the Sodium atoms are being excited and thus plenty of energy is being wasted.