A booming segment of the Perpetual Motion Machine industry is capitalizing on the hype over the "Hydrogen Economy" with claims to produce Hydrogen for impossibly low cost.

2005-05-15

Alternate Energy Corporation on diet, drops sugarcube

Alternate Energy Corp is a publicly traded company (symbol is ARGY) with too good to be true claims for a Hydrogen from water as they say through a "green" system at a price competitive with the fossil fuel kWh cost of energy.

One of the more inanely worded claims they have made for their process has been removed from their FAQ, but can still be found at their old site, that
To look at another example: A sugar-cube sized piece of our material, combined with the required chemicals and water will produce enough hydrogen to fill a cubic area the volume of a football field three (3) times.
Maybe they were unable to get the rules of football changed to give football fields a defined volume.

Anyway, what volume of Hydrogen could a sugarcube sized piece of their fuel produce? Of course, they don't say what their fuel is, and have managed to avoid patent applications publishing. But we can't be far off using Al. Assuming that a sugarcube is 1cc, to what height could reacting it with water fill a football field with H2?

The Webelements Periodic Table shows 10.00 cc as the molar volume of Al. So 1 cc of Al would be 0.1000 mol. Assuming complete combustion of Al in water, we have 2Al + 3H2O -> Al2O3 + 3H2. So 1 mol of Al would yield 1.5 mol of H2; 1cc of Al would yield .1500 mol of H2. The ideal gas law calculator shows that at STP, one mol of H2 has a volume of 0.022413 cubic meters. So 1cc of Al would yield 0.003362 cubic meters, or 3362cc of H2. An American football field is 160 ft by 320 ft, or 4,756.636 square meters. The H2 yielded by a cc of Al in water would fill a football field to a height of 0.00007068 cm. Reality is a factor of a million off from any plausible interpretation of ARGY's claim. When a company makes a mistake that big, it's not enough to remove it form their FAQ, they ought to issue a correction.

Update
As recently as last November, AEC was saying
To look at another example: A sugar-cube sized piece of our material, combined with the required chemicals and water will produce enough hydrogen to fill a cubic area the volume of an imaginary cubic football field three (3) times.
Is "imaginary cubic football" a Canadian game?

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