New fuel of the future....sea water???

[Shadowwing]

Wow. Sea water may have a potential as the future fuel.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070910/ap_on_sc/burning_seawater;_ylt=Aq25Nw_yDk57TwU1sybC6has0NUE

What do you think of this?

[Moai]

I just saw this on the yahoo homepage a few minutes ago. It's a neat idea, but it seems that they haven't found just how useful a fuel it is yet, though.
I'm getting this eerie vision of huge machines, emptying the ocean...

[Jonny Dark]

cooool!

[Slash]

Lets hope this scientist doesnt die along with all his research in a freaky car accident not at all related to exxon/mobil.


This is seriously awesome news tho, hopefully the burning produces more energy than what it takes to keep the radio waves running. And with enough surplus to actually be useful. Maybe we'll see the beginning of the end of fossil fuel dependency?

[JAG.]

interesting discovery.. very unexpected. but yeah its a concern that we may dry up the oceans with that bit.. too early to tell - JAG

[Rhynome]

I wonder how much energy to takes to power all the equipment to allow the water to burn. In other words: just how efficient is it?

[pyrohex]

It's okay, with global warming, we'll need to empty the oceans a bit.

[Joshua Fountain]

Wow.

*shares with chemistry peoples he knows*

[0kelvin]

It's an interesting effect, but I doubt it will ever be a plausible fuel source. It's likely just separating the hydrogen from the water, and the hydrogen is what's burning. No matter what method you use to do that, the energy required to break water's chemical bond will always be more than you get back by burning it. Those are the laws of physics.

I've never heard of extracting hydrogen from water using radio waves, so that's pretty interesting. But his cancer research sounds more interesting to me (of course, I know much less about cancer than I do physics, so it might be the same kind of thing that merely sounds plausible).


Eric