Ah, you saw that title and instantly thought of people wearing Armadillo hats and putting tin foil in the roof of their vehicles/homes “to keep the spy signals out” didn’t you? Admit it. Culturally we’ve been conditioned to associate that topic with such people. Heck, it was even on an episode of the X-Files. I won’t go into the conspiracy theories of who is behind that conditioning. As always, just follow the money.
I need to take this moment to point out you thought the exact same thing about the government monitoring your phone calls and tracking all of your personal data. It was just “those people” who believed such things, then came Edward Snowden.
Things are only impossible until they are done and the evidence is presented. In the case of the water powered car, all of the tech is now in place, just waiting for an group of engineers with funding to assemble it. The final technical hurdle to creating a water powered car was solved by a college Ag department trying to make cheaper fertilizer.
The $3.75-million pilot plant uses electricity from a nearby 1.65-megawatt (MW) wind turbine to separate hydrogen from water, and N from air. The gases are compressed and stored in banks of cylinders, then combined using a catalyst in a 25-gal. Haber-Bosch chemical reactor to form ammonia (NH3).
Honda will be shipping a fuel cell vehicle in 2016. Toyota is already selling them in California. The current problem is how to create a hydrogen infrastructure so they can be fueled anywhere in the country, or so we are told.
Consider this. Scale down the publicly available research done by that Ag department adding a 10 gallon water tank and a small hydrogen separation unit to a larger vehicle, like an SUV. Now, instead of needing a hydrogen distribution infrastructure, a vehicle owner parks in their garage, connects a garden hose to the tank and a standard extension cable to the car. Overnight it tops off the hydrogen tank. One could make it a direct process without the tank, but the tank gives a vehicle the option of using “extra” electricity from the power control unit to process any water still in the tank. You just have to be sure to drain it before pulling out of your garage in the winter.
As a writer, it is your job to see the possibilities of something and chart a path to achieving those possibilities. Yes, someone, perhaps a great many will think you are crazy, that it “can’t be done.” I’m certain a great many people thought Jules Verne was insane when “20000 Leagues Under the Sea” came out too. Not so much today.
