Fill It Up with Water?

By Dennis Barker

Posted Sept. 5, 2008, at 1 p.m.

It was June 2008, the eve of summer vacation season, and gas prices were north of four dollars a gallon. A company in Japan, Genepax, made headlines when it announced it had produced a car that runs on nothing but water, plain water. News footage showed the boot-like and small electric vehicle motoring around Osaka, water being funneled into a grey box in the back seat, and of course people taking photos.

The excitement about the car was very understandable. After all, who wouldn't be interested in swapping water for gas as the way to run their car?

The basic idea behind a water-fueled car is to tap the inherent energy in water. As we all know from our high school science classes, each molecule of water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The atoms are held together by chemical bonds.

When separated hydrogen and oxygen atoms are combined, energy is released (mostly in the form of heat). This energy can then be converted to mechanical energy to power a car. Additionally, some approaches to water-fueled cars seek to use the separated hydrogen as a source of energy.

So what's holding back the water-fueled car? "Water is not a fuel," says Theodosios Korakianitis, a leading alternative-fuels researcher at Queen Mary University of London. "It is impossible to [power a car on water alone] unless you bring energy from an external source to split the water. That can be an electric outlet or a stored source."

In many real-life cases, when you factor in inefficiencies of a complete system (and the laws of thermodynamics), it takes more energy to split the water molecules than you get back when they recombine. In other words, you get out less energy than you need to put in.

This hasn't stopped people from trying to develop such a car. In fact, the concept of a water-fueled car has been around the block many times. Automotive lore tells of a man in Dallas in 1935 who reportedly ran an engine for several minutes on water. A Filipino inventor named Daniel Dingel says he designed a "hydrogen reactor" that uses a car battery to split water molecules and produce hydrogen to power his Toyota Corolla — but he never explained how the battery causes the necessary chemical reaction to yield energy.

Perhaps the most famous story involves Stanley Meyer, an Ohio inventor who claimed in the 1980s to have developed a "water fuel cell" that split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas and then used the hydrogen in a standard engine to produce net energy. Meyer demonstrated a dune buggy he said could run from Los Angeles to New York City on 22 gallons of water. Most scientists who dismissed his fuel cell said if it worked as described, it violated at least two laws of thermodynamics. An Ohio court found Meyer guilty of fraud in 1996 after he was sued by two investors. But to this day Meyer has his staunch supporters who say his technology indeed worked.

That brings us to the latest venture in the field: Genepax. Genepax does not get into details about its proprietary technology, but says its Water Energy System generates power by extracting electricity from water without requiring an external catalyst. The basic power system inside the car is similar to a standard fuel cell, but at the core is a unit that breaks down water into hydrogen and water through a chemical reaction. Skeptics wonder how that chemical reaction is initiated, but those details have not been revealed. It's all based on "a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water," CEO Hirasawa Kiyoshi said. The company says it has filed for patents.

Until that "well-known process" is illuminated, most auto tech watchers and scientific types are skeptical that Genepax has found the secret of transforming water in the tank into wheels in motion. They doubt that water alone is the energy source, and question how it's all being done without some external force cracking hydrogen out of the water in the generator. A columnist for Popular Mechanics tossed off Genepax's claims as "rubbish."

Even if Genepax technology doesn't result in cars that run on tap water, the dream of a water-fueled car will live on. The Web has no lack of sites that herald claims of lone inventors who've discovered how to replace gas with water.

As long as it's theoretically possible to extract energy directly from H2O, someone somewhere will be working on ways to do it cost-effectively under the hood of a car. After all, as many water-fuel believers like to point out: They all laughed at Tesla when he pioneered work involving transmitting electricity wirelessly — a technology that is getting increased attention these days.

Bio: Dennis Barker has been writing about science and technology for more than 20 years. During that time he has served as an editor at several leading computer and technology industry publications.

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