Barnum’s Maxim strikes again
As P.T. Barnum famously said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”. Sometimes the scams are old and well known, but some con artist will resurrect them and try to cash in before people get wise.
Take, for example, this video, which my friends at Panda’s Thumb were dissecting a few months ago. The credulous Fox news station reports this “great invention” as a “miracle” that can solve the energy crisis. This “inventor” is proclaiming that he has “discovered” a new form of dihydrogen oxide (they claim it’s HHO, not H2O) by separating hydrogen from the hydroxyl ion by electrolysis. The video then breathlessly describes how hot this gas burns through various objects while allegedly it is not hot to the touch. Then the “inventor” shows off his hybrid car which runs on a mixture of this “miracle gas” plus regular gasoline. The video footage concludes with various people trying to help him get a patent on his “invention” and the possibility of him testifying before Congress about his “miracle discovery.”
I know TV news is famous for not spending any time with fact-checking or asking real experts, especially since they run on a tight deadline and don’t like the facts to get in the way of a good story. But surely they could have consulted with someone who could have told him that this is a famous scam that comes out every few years (especially when people want stories of easy energy sources). They could have even done a bit of research and Googled “Brown’s gas” to find out the entire history of the scam. Odds are that this con man will get someone to spend money to invest in his “invention” and then the whole thing will quietly disappear before it goes to the Patent Office, where it would be recognized as the age-old con that it is. (If he does get before Congress, someone should inform the Chair of the Committee so they can really grill him, not buy into his fairy tales as they so often do with other garbage told in hearings).
So what’s the story? If you’ve taken any chemistry, you probably did an experiment with hydrolysis, where you separate water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity. Once the hydrogen has been separated this way, it indeed burns very hot. But it’s not a source of energy, or a “solution to the energy crisis”. The laws of physics have not been violated or circumvented. In order to make the reaction happen, you have to put energy into the system to break up the water molecules. Study after study has shown that energy you get out of burning the resulting hydrogen is less than the energy put into the hydrolysis reaction in the first place, so it’s a losing proposition. You can think of the reaction like a battery—you put energy in to store it and can retrieve some of the energy at the other end, but with some net loss of energy. In other words, it is an energy storage system, not an energy source. As demonstrated by perpetual motion machines, you cannot get perfect efficiency, and there is always some loss of energy somewhere in the system, so the system is not a real solution.
In thermodynamic terms, when we burn a complex hydrocarbon like those in gasoline or other fossils fuels, we break down a long-chain hydrocarbon into small molecules like carbon dioxide and water (if combustion is complete). We get a lot of energy out of this reaction by releasing the energy of those many bonds in the complex hydrocarbon. By contrast, if our “fuel” starts as water, and we break it up, and then it returns to water, there is no difference in energy between the bonds of the starting material and the final product. Thus, there can be no net gain of energy—just temporary storage in another form with more energy consumed to break those bonds than we gain by burning it and re-establishing those bonds.
One of the people who wrote comments on the page where the YouTube video is posted said “remember, you need water & electricity Only!” (sic) and “no crude oil required.” And where does this person think electricity comes from the first place? Most electricity in this country is generated by burning oil, gas, or coal. Only if we generated electricity exclusively by wind, hydroelectric, solar, or nuclear, then there would be no oil, gas, or coal required. Nor it is necessarily cleaner than other forms of combustion. You may not get the fumes of acetylene in the burning process in your welding shop, but somewhere down the line a power plant has generated plenty of pollutants to create electricity to break up the water molecules in the first place.
If you look up “Brown’s gas” on Google, it’s a scam that goes back over a century. In its most recent incarnations, it was called “Brown’s gas” after a Bulgarian con artist named Yull Brown who tried to promote it in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, and conned a number of gullible investors (see here for details). It is also known as “HHO gas”, the name given it by fringe physicist Ruggiero Santilli. It has re-emerged many times with slightly different names and guises, but people (and newscasters) get fooled over and over again. Although the video seems impressive, it is full of lies: HHO burns VERY hot, and you cannot put your finger in it unless you want instant third-degree burns. According to my sources at Panda’s Thumb, it burns so hot that the metal quenches in air and hydrogen is introduced to the metal at the cutting point. This makes the metal really brittle and thus is not as good as a cut made with an acetylene torch.
Thus, another scam re-emerges. The internet is full of YouTube videos which make the same outlandish claims, some of which are slickly produced commercials for gullible investors (such as this one), and others which are very low-tech. But they all repeat the same lies. The reality: HHO gas is not as good as most other gases for cutting and welding, and HHO gas is not a “new source of energy”. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. Caveat emptor!
I have often wondered why this process is not considered as a storage device for large solar arrays in sunny climes. Many articles I have read have suggested molten NaCl as a way to store excess energy to be used when the sun is no longer shining. Would hydrolysis would be even less efficient?
Hydrolysis has numerous problems in comparison to heat storage in molten salt. With hydrolysis you need a reservoir, the electrolytic cell, and the compressed gas storage for the H2 and O2. You will need compressors to get the desired pressures and ‘strippers’ to remove the water content from the gas streams. On the compressor side if we compress the H2 and O2 to roughly 150 times atmospheric pressure then the storage tanks only need a volume roughly 7 times that of the reservoir. Large high-pressure gas storage tanks are rather impractical so the likely storage scenario is temporary geological storage (which the gas industry has been doing for well over 40 years) which means we need to compress and strip the gases and pump them down into the reservoirs. When we bring the gases back up we need to strip them yet again. The compressors generate an incredible amount of heat so we need (more) huge heat exchangers. SO: a practical solar plant using H2/O2 storage will need to be located somewhere with 2 large geological storage formations beneath and the plant must produce enough excess power to operate the pumps and heat exchangers. Heat storage with molten salt is much less hassle in comparison and I’d guess that there is less inefficiency as well.
Hydrogen, as the smallest molecule in existence, bleeds through the walls of even a steel tank, meaning you can’t store it indefinitely. It is also extremely reactive, meaning dangerous. The high pressures required, and the risk of spectacular explosions are the reasons hydrogen/oxygen are not used this way. Molten salt does not require pressure, and has no risk of explosion, which is why it’s the preferred method currently.
And I see Madscientist wrote a more detailed explanation already. I should read ahead before I post…
I learned 15 years ago in high school chemistry that water is one of the lowest energy molecules around, chemically speaking. The whole reason hydrogen gas goes “boom” is because of the large difference in chemical energy between H2 and H2O. The only way water is going to be an energy source is if you can do nuclear fusion on the hydrogen atoms.
If only people could be bothered to pay attention in science class. (Sigh).
Hydroelectric plants work well too. It’s a pity they can’t be built just anywhere.
I’ve said it before: journalists don’t know anything about anything. They think they’re cynical and wise in the world, but they’re the most gullible people you’ll meet. Fact-checking in any daily news medium is pretty much non-existent, and most reporters lack any science background to give them a “gut check” on claims like this.
Of course in a Fox news affiliate…
It all comes down to education. Educated citizens, which are a requirement in a democracy, should be able to spot this scam instantly.
PT Barnum actually never did say “There’s a sucker born every minute”:
http://www.historybuff.com/library/refbarnum.html
Oh, well, another popular misconception shot down. At least it INVOLVED Barnum, and Barnum was well known for being a huckster and con man. I guess we gotta call it “Hannum’s Maxim” now…
Great story! The sources for it are suspiciously lacking though.
I put in all the video links from which it came, and the commentary on the web that documents the story behind the “Brown’s Gas” scam. The rest is just stuff about general chemistry I learned in college 40 years ago, and still remember and keep up with in my capacity as a scientist. Is that what you meant?
I thought that John was referring to the Barnum story lacking referrences.
Sorry for the ambiguity. I was indeed referring to the PT Barnum story in John’s link above.
Yeah, unfortunately that story involving the Cardiff Giant is boooooogus.
Did Barnum ever say “There’s a sucker born every minute”? Almost certainly not. It wasn’t in his multi-volume autobiography, and no one, even his many enemies, attributed it to him during his life. For a shameless self promoter that’s almost impossible to believe if he had actually said. Probably the closest thing he ever said to it was, “Every crowd has a silver lining.”
The real source of the quote is a con man who was running, IIRC, bank scams of some sort. After he was arrested reporters asked him if ever worried about running out of victims, and they recorded his answer as, “No, more are born all the time.” Years later the quote was made more pithy and attached to Barnum for probably the same reason all quotes seem to migrate to famous people who didn’t say them.
I guess we’re all suckers for something, a con man just has to find out what that thing is.
@John K
“The only way water is going to be an energy source is if you can do nuclear fusion on the hydrogen atoms.”
Actually, not so much. Regular hydrogen is a pretty poor fusion fuel due to the very low cross section/ long reaction time of the first step in the Proton-Proton chain. The slowness of this reaction (~millions of years) is why the sun is still in its main stage. (The sun still produces a lot of energy by virtue of having LOTS of hydrogen so a low probability of an individual P-P event is offset by lots of opportunities for an event.)
For viable fusion power generation, you need other fuels like the hydrogen isotopes deuterium & tritium. (Regular hydrogen might be usable as a fusion fuel with Boron-11, but that’s 3rd generation fusion power at best, and we’re still in generation zero.)
Interesting.
I don’t pretend to know all that much about nuclear fusion. As far as I know we cannot even create a controlled enough reaction to make it a viable power source outside of a massive explosion. Clearly the technology is nowhere near creating any kind of nuclear fusion power plant right now.
The point being that all water really has to offer is nuclear energy, and even that is far beyond our reach right now. The chemical reaction the con men are pushing makes no sense at all, even in terms of very basic chemistry.
I like to say that humans have been utilizing fusion power for all of their history.
I like to say that solar, wind, hydroelectric, fossil fuels, etc all trace back to solar fusion.
Then I like to say that all of that plus tidal, geothermal, fission, etc all trace back to gravity. No gravity, no fusion, no heavy/metal element (beyond Helium) nucleosynthesis (& no fission or radioactive decay of heavy elements), no tides, no gravitational accretion, etc.
The gravity of the situation is clear.Fusion has been dealt a crushing blow!
Well gee, its like this. After I read of a NASA report in the 70’s I wanted to burn a mix of h2 and oz just to see if I could make it work. The NASA report said it would burn a very lean mix of gasoline. I backed off because h2 is very explosive and I was fearful of blowing up my car’s intakes. Years later I was shown a big Caddy that (he said) had a very leaned out carburetor. He was giving away plans and it was making h2 and ox in thec car. I could not know if the 30+ mpg was true. I was always going to work on it later, but new EPA rules ban all lean burn motors because they burn too hot and make too much smog. With water injection it could be made to work. At a cost, And with EPA approval on every thing its used in. I think that would mean no refills of water.
OOPS!! “burn a mix of h2 and oz” NO, NO, NO. My fingers should have hit h2 and water. Con men have been pushing Brown’s gas for many years. Its what you get from water. The thing is that welding shops once made their own gases that way. Usually it burns too cool to mess with. But boy do they have a sales pitch.
For home hobbyist use, a “brown’s gas” torch seems like a fairly good proposition. If only they would promote it on the basis of safety and convenience, instead of the nonsense “cool tip” business and so on. (Of course the tip is cool, you’ve got an expanding gas leaving it. The heat is where the flame is pointing.)
I’d quite like a cutting torch that didn’t require me to store large tanks of flammable gas.
The old welders used a small tank of water with a grinder full of carbide crystals on top. The carbide & water form acetylene. The only problem was that sometimes a crust of spent crystal would form on top of the water, and sometimes, the pressure of acetylene underneath could reach the critical point of instability, which is only 15 psi for acetylene. Steel tanks of oxy/acetylene are actually much safer.
H2/o2 torches are used for jewelry work, since they burn clean, and leave no sooty residue.
Even a dumb history major like me knows enough to scoff at Brown’s Gas! A couple semi-tangential points, tho:
“…energy you get out of burning the resulting hydrogen is less than the energy put into the hydrolysis reaction in the first place, so it’s a losing proposition. You can think of the reaction like a battery—you put energy in to store it and can retrieve some of the energy at the other end, but with some net loss of energy. In other words, it is an energy storage system, not an energy source.”
I hear this argument used a lot against legitimate alternative energy systems. But loss of energy isn’t in-and-of-itself a deal-breaker. The point is not to generate new energy, but to get energy into a usable, transportable form. Your battery analogy is quite apt – we all use batteries every day in portable electrical devices without worrying about the net loss that goes into it. Same concept, just larger scale. Obviously there’s a point where the net loss becomes cost-prohibitive, but the fact that there is some net loss isn’t an automatic disqualifier.
““no crude oil required.” And where does this person think electricity comes from the first place? Most electricity in this country is generated by burning oil, gas, or coal.”
Actually almost no electricity is generated from burning crude oil. (Wikipedia says the US is 45% coal, 23% natural gas, 20% nuclear, 7% hydro, 4% renewables, and only 1% petroleum. I thought the coal share was more like 60%, but it’s been a few years since I looked at this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation) Almost all the oil we import or produce goes into transportation, ie – your gas tank. So the commenter in the video is technically correct. If the goal is to wean us off our dependence on oil, then Brown’s Gas would seem to do the trick.
If it, you know, actually worked…
Here is what I think happens when h2 and gasoline is burned in a I.C. motor. A lean mix of gasoline will miss because the gasoline is spread out. h2 burns so easily it could act like a big sparkplug and ignite the lean gasoline mix. It could make any motor a high MPG lean burn motor. But lean burn motor burn too hot to pass newer EPA regs. I think they could be legal with a lot of work and money, maybe. Is it worth it? Is it new, no!
BMW had a combustion motor running on hydrogene in some vehicles in the last few years (one among likely others).
The problem is storing enough gas (after being produced by sufficiently cheap primary energy sources like solar or hydro power)
I used to have a shop in the early 1990s converting vehicles to run on propane and NG. While propane is extremely feasible due to the low pressure it can be stored at as a liquid, NG like hydrogene demands pressures at above 2000psi and tanks that are accordingly heavy and expensive, low fuel vs weight efficiency.
Hydrogen has very little power. It is very dangerous to store.
I know this is tooting my own horn, but I came across and wrote about these HHO generators a couple years ago on my own blog. There’s a bit more information there for anyone interested:
A Skeptical Look at HHO Generators
Sorry–my blogs here started last March. Glad to see that others have found it interesting! And, apparently, a scam that never dies..
No need to apologize. I was just trying to give people more information. Besides, I’m sure this website gets a lot more visitors than mine, so you’re getting the information out to more people.
Hydrogen used to be talked about a lot as a clean fuel for cars. Whether used in a fuel cell or an internal cumbustion engine, the exhaust product is water! This used to sound like a pretty good idea to me. But “Car and Driver ” columnist, Patrick Bedard has written a couple of devastating columns on it’s practicality. One of them is online:
http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/the-case-for-nuke-cars-its-called-hydrogen
If any of the hydrogen-savy commenters here can find some holes in it, I would like to know.
Apparently, H2 has a very high energy to mass ratio, which makes it a good fuel for spaceships.
This oxyhydrogen gas (Brown’s gas) has been used by welders in “water torches” for a long, long time. Nothing new here.