How much energy is stored in borax element?

[hkBattousai]

One of my friends is insisting that a car can go 19000km with only 1kg of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borax" , and only one tea-spoon of borax can extract as much energy 100 tons of coal does.

Is that true?
Does borax contain this much of chemical energy?

 

[uby]

There has been some chatter about sodium borohydride as a hydrogen source for fuel cells. That's about the closest thing I can think of that your friend may be referring to.

 

[Borek]

Borax is not an element, it is a compound. Boron is an element.

When speaking about chemical energy there are no materials with so high energy density.

I don't remember details, some claim boron can be used as fuel in nuclear devices (it is used in all existing reactor designs as a neutron absorber, but that's a different thing). No idea if there is serious physics or crackpottery behind.

Then, there were BORAX reactors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BORAX-I