About this whole mess
The only useful point of http://www.truth777.netfirms.com/Conspiracy/carwater.htm was that if you run your ordinary gasoline engine, there's quite some unburnt fuel that's being passed through the engine just to keep the valves from melting down. If you add more air than necessary for your fuel to burn (so called lean mixture), almost all of it will be subjected to combustion, but it burns so hot that the valves start glowing and eventually they melt, and since they are so hot they induce predetonation and your engine is ruined.
By inducing some water into the intake, one can run very lean combustion cycles, i.e. where practically all fuel is being combusted, while keeping the temperature low enough not to ruin the engine.
And if you wonder if/how fuel is added just to enrich the mixture to keep preignition and valve meltdown from happening, ask anyone who has ever developed fuel ECU software. Essentially, in your run of the mill car, when you floor the accelerator the throttle is fully open and the mixture will be made way richer than needed (it's single to tens of percent, depending on compression and temperature of your engine). Rich means that there's more fuel than necessary oxygen in the mixture. So by definition not all of your fuel will burn, some of it will just go to the exhaust for no good reason.
Everything else on that page is pure bull you know what. If you think it's not, it means you don't understand high school physics/chemistry. That's all there's to it. If you really do believe there's something there, try to understand it -- and try long enough that you'll eventually comprehend it's bull. I.e. as long as you think as it's not bull, you don't know what you're talking about.
This whole thread has been plagued by things that are order of magnitude off. A typical car alternator produces 100A continuous output at about 11V. That's 1.1kW, or 1.5HP, and that only assuming that the alternator is 100% efficient. They typically are nowhere near so efficient (ever wondered why a loaded alternator is so damn HOT?). If you do actually get 1.1kW of electic energy out of your alternator, you're more likely putting about 1.2kW (1.6HP) of mechanical energy into it. So if your alternator is fully loaded, it's robbing your engine of 1.6HP mechanical output. On an average car in average conditions, you're constantly putting about 0.8HP into your alternator whenever your engine is running.
1.1kW from the alternator translates into about 3kW of heat energy from burning gasoline. Now get to back home and try running a 3kW kerosene heater in your bedroom. You'll be roasted in no time. And that much energy is only necessary for running electric loads in your car!
That's only to show that electric energy from the alternator is nowhere near free, and that "100W" people are talking about is probably not enough to keep your car running. On my '93 Volvo 940, keeping the engine running with headlights on (I always keep them on), radio on reasonable volume and blower at low, there's about 0.4kW being sucked from the alternator :)
Now, as far as "H2 from fossil fuels has no sense", it in fact does. Let me tell you why.
First of all, pollution control in a coal-fired plant is centralized and it can be way better than economically viable car can handle. The exhaust from a properly managed coal-firing-plant should be way cleaner than exhaust from your average US car. I.e. 1.1kW of electricity from coal is way cleaner than your 1.1kW that the alternator provides you. It's also lot cheaper in that coal is more readily accessible, and we have way more (10 times +) energy stored in known coal deposits than in known oil deposits.
Secondly, H2-powered car will be safer in an accident than a car with a tank full of gasoline, should a tank leak/fire occur. A gasoline tank rupture always puts all that gasoline under your car, so as to roast you in no time should a spark occur somewhere. An H2 leak will always end up getting that H2 as fast away from your car (i.e. UP) as possible. That's grade school physics/chemistry people, and you should REALLY know better in that respect.
Now, even if you just ran your car on electrolysis-produced H2, it burns really clean, so it doesn't pollute like gasoline does. And you forget about diesel, and especially off-road diesel (construction equipment etc) that really pollutes horribly. The pollution produced by coal-burning electricity generation needed to get you that H2 can be reduced, in a centralized and controlled fashion, way more than the pollution from your car's exhaust.
And then, there's more to H2 production than electrolysis only. Even if we forget all "soon-to-be" methods (bio-based), there are some good ways to utilize that heat from coal burning. As all of you should know, water will break down into H and O if you just heat it up
enough. Since heat is abundant in every power plant, nobody forces you to actually electrolize cold lake water. More likely the water will be superheated first, and only then electrolized. That way the energy expenditure needed to break it down is shifted from low-efficiency electricity to almost-100% efficiency heat. Basically, instead of putting 1kWh of electricity needed to break x amount of water into H2 and O2, you put say only 0.2kWh electricity at 40% efficiency and 0.8kWh of heat at almost 100% efficiency.
And so on :)
Cheers, Kuba
