Water, Part 2

Michael S. Johnston ( (no email) )
Sun, 28 Nov 1999 19:46:17 -0500

Hi All,
Hopefully I have gotten your attention by now. With the first
installment I showed a rather simple illustration to prove that a
difference exists between the amount of energy required to electrolyze a
given quantity of water and the amount of energy which is given off when
the products resulting from said electrolysis are burned together. As I
said it is not much of a difference but it is a difference and the fact
that the higher amount of energy appears on the side of what is released
by burning it means that here we have the basis of a whole new, free
source of fuel to power our world.
The first objection that usually rears it's ugly head at this point
is that the information I have presented thus far violates the Second
Law of Thermodynamics. You are absolutely right. It does seem to but
upon further consideration I realized that it DOES NOT violate the
Second Law as we understand it. The problem seems to be a misapplication
of the second law in this case. A misapplication which has gone
unchallenged for a long time now. I am going to explain why this is so
through the use of an analogy and hopefully I can do it clearly enough
so that we don't have to digress into pointless arguments over it's
validity.
The first question that I had to ask was; if this is impossible then
how can any system work? I decided to compare the use of water as a fuel
source with the use of fossil fuels. Both are available in large
quantities in a natural (raw) state on this planet. Water as water which
usually contains varying amounts of diverse pollutants in both solid
form as particulates and in solution. Crude oil is available in a thick
sludgy form (most commonly) which also contains various pollutants. The
chemical formula for water is H2O and the chemical formula of gasoline
for example is C8H18.
What do we see in common so far? It can be argued that these are two
totally different compounds and that is true but please follow along for
a bit. Both of these compounds are without doubt Hydrogen compounds
aren't they? Water is hydrogen with oxygen and gasoline is hydrogen with
carbon.
Another similarity is that both of these substances have to be
changed or "refined" from their natural state into something that we can
best utilize as a fuel. Crude oil into gasoline and various other
products and water into hydrogen and oxygen gasses.
So with that in mind we have to first think about exactly what we
need to do to get crude oil from it's resting place under the earth to
the gas pumps at our local convenience store. First we have to set up
drilling equipment to sink a hole into the earth, down to where the oil
is. Once that is done we have to pump the oil up and transport it to a
refinery. At the refinery we have to cook it to separate the various
grades of fuels that we will use. Then we have to transport these
finished products to distribution centers and finally deliver them to
your local retail outlet.
During this whole process we have obviously used an incredible amount
of energy, haven't we? Imagine that we could do all of these things at
one site. Then imagine that there are ways to convert the products of
the burning of this fuel (gasoline) i.e.: C8H14->Carbon Dioxide, Carbon
Monoxide and water back into gasoline. After all you end up with all of
the original components, just mixed into different compounds so you
should be able to remanufacture gasoline from exhaust gasses just by
taking O2 back out of the mix, right <grin>? Actually though, why not?
And what if you did find a way to do that? I guess that it would THEN
violate the second law of thermodynamics wouldn't it? After all it
doesn't take more energy to produce gasoline than is given off by
burning it does it? If it does than something is very wrong here!
Or conversely, what if you took raw water and "refined" it into fuel
gas H2 and oxidizer O2 and then burned them together to produce energy
and instead of condensing the resulting exhaust gasses you just vented
them into the atmosphere and pumped some more raw water out of your
well? That way an H2O fuel source WOULDN'T VIOLATE THE SECOND LAW UNDER
THE RULES APPLIED TO CRUDE OIL WOULD IT?
End of part 2
MJ

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