That's 100% what the Hindenburg was.

As far as Tesla tech, I remember something about the energy being transmitted through the earth. Perhaps that would make it safer, perhaps it would have murdered soil organisms and created a desolate wasteland of a planet. Considering who's running the show, I lean towards the former.

I'm sure it's possible to make the process cheaper or more efficient than it currently is, but it really is impossible to get more energy out of burning the hydrogen than you put in to separate it from the oxygen in the water.

Hydrogen cars may turn out to be better than electric cars but they suffer from the same basic problem, they just store energy from another source, rather than produce it on site like a gasoline engine.

Cool invention in the link. It uses the most common elements on Earth. No rare earth bullshit.

I don't think it has a positive energy output, though. Probably not even better than electrolysis when all inputs are considered. Ferrosilicon is made in arc furnaces that use a fuckload of electricity and I suppose it is spent in the process.

Still, nice battery. Beats carrying a Hindenburg in your trunk

You still need to put more energy into any system that splits hydrogen and oxygen than you get back out of it. If it took less energy to split oxygen from water then it would convert all of our oceans into a giant bomb.

When you stick two hydrogens to an oxygen, energy is released. It takes the same amount of energy (and some extra due to inefficiency) to pull the hydrogens back away from it. It's another variation of a perpetual motion machine.

The whole thing comes down to precisely that, you have to get energy from somewhere. Theoretically if nuclear fusion becomes a thing then hydrogen fuel cels can become practical until you can run enough copper to deliver electricity directly for all the things that want electrical juice as a power source.

The answer to the solar power thing to run electorlysis is something like this: Solar panels are only 20% efficient and electrolysis is 70% efficient. So just thinking about raw numbers, with solar power you would extract 20% of that 70% by the time you are done.

The math isn't on our side here.

None of this changes the actual math of the chemical process. You have to add energy to the chemical bonds to break them apart. I suppose people are trying to make the point that the process is either cheap enough or it doesn't take very much energy to do so.

The problem, as a generalized problem, is that if anyone ever figures out how to break h2o bonds for less energy then you get out of that reaction, all water on earth becomes a bomb. Can someone perhaps figure out a catalyst or a catalyzing agent that fiddles with the bonds in such a way that it reduces the energy required to break the bonds? Yes. However, the problem is the law of conservation of energy won't allow you to split those bonds with less energy than is in that bond triad so you will first need to spend energy making the catalyst and THEN you will need to spend energy applying the catalyst to water to split the atoms which in totality as a system will always require more energy than the energy that is holding those atoms together.

It's not automatically obvious and I have been on the side arguing for this stuff. I used to think that permanent magnet perpetual motion machines were possible and had an offset design that I thought would work. Then it dawned on me is that perment magnetic fields are symmetrical and you could never actually create a perpetual motion machine because of that symmetry. The reason that symmetry prevents perpetual motion machines is that energy isn't actually thing, energy is just a potential or a differential between one state and another that is stuck somehow and once it is unstuck the "energy" can be harnessed as the stuck system rushes to get back into equilibrium.

Anyway, the problem here is the law of conservation of energy. In order to break the bonds of h2o you will always need to add more energy into that system than you get out which means you will need to find energy from other places in order to break those bonds because those bonds are in the lowest energy state possible, as far as we understand physics. Which always bring up the question of wouldn't it just be cheaper to use that energy we are putting into the system directly and use that energy to move cars. Which we do through carbon fuels.

Where the splitting of h2o makes sense is where the total cost of the final system is somehow less than the cost of inputting energy into splitting h2o. For example, space travel is so costly that a hydrogen cel is totally worth the total cost to produce it (including splitting h2o) that you can make it work.

// EDIT: just checked out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqOHVN2pPi8

Again, I don't think the math actually works, but I have an open mind and would be happy to be proven wrong.