Canadian inventor patents way to make hydrogen fuel
Last Updated Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:48:06
SAINT JOHN, N.B. - A New Brunswick inventor thinks he has found a new, cheap way to produce hydrogen gas. If he's right, we may someday use old pop cans to help fuel cars.
Hydrogen gas is often touted as the fuel of the future, but freeing up the gas can be difficult and expensive. The fuel is also difficult to store and transport.
Car makers are interested in the technology's applications
Jim Andersen of New Denmark, N.B., may have come up with a solution. Andersen says he can make lots of hydrogen gas by mixing caustic soda, water and aluminum over a wide range of temperatures.
"We use pie plates, aluminum foil, car block wire that is coated, pop cans," said Andersen. "All we have to do is shred it and put it in our process."
The discovery flies in the face of what chemistry textbooks predict will happen.
Since Andersen never finished high school, he had trouble convincing the patent office he was right.
With the help of chemist George Jenkins at the University of New Brunswick, Andersen got the U.S. patent and the attention of auto makers developing hydrogen-fuelled cars.
Scientists knew metals can produce hydrogen, but the reaction normally stops. In Andersen's invention, corrosive sodium hydroxide acts as a catalyst that doesn't break down so long as more water and aluminum are added.
Jenkins says the invention solves the problem of having the hydrogen where you want, when you want it.
"With our system, all you'd have to do is move the aluminum around," said Jenkins. "If you had water, you could make it wherever you wanted to, so you'd have hydrogen on demand, on site."
The inventor says the product is also of interest to the aluminum industry, which is looking for some way to recycle old pop cans.
Written by CBC News Online staff
Recycle and make Hydrogen!
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Guest
Pappy - If this inventor is on to a hydrogen source of energy that you and I can make for ourselves in our own garages, you can bet that he'll soon be found dead, from 'mysterious causes'. If he actually has this process of making hydrogen fuel down to an art, he needs to release his method for making it 'all over the Net' right now, because he'll be dead before the PTB allow him to make any money from it - especially if said powers might lose trillions of future dollars because of his invention.
Last edited by Guest on 02-15-2004 03:37 AM, edited 1 time in total.