I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the oil companies have perpetuated the fallacy that our cars need their product to run for a very long time. Its important to note that most of the original automobiles ran on much more natural fuels than petroleum. Mr Diesel (the creator of the diesel engine) ran his first engine on peanut oil and until he conceded under pressure from the oil companies, all of Henry Ford's cars ran on ethanol (grain alcohol fuel).
Our cars all use what are called Internal Combustion Engines. There are two types of these engines: ones that need 3 things to run and ones that need 2. The ones that need 3 things are your standard engine. They need air, a fuel and a spark. When the air and fuel mixture is right (not to rich, not too lean) and the spark happens, vroom! You have a functional engine. The other type uses more controlled fuel and doesn't need the spark - the fuel explodes from pressure alone. These engines are commonly known as diesel engines.
Now you've all heard the stories of people running diesel engines on vegetable oil, or oil from a deep fry machine at a restaurant. This is called biodiesel, its not a myth, you can even buy it at the pump now in many places. I've run my 1984 Mercedes-Benz diesel on this with no conversion at all.
So the question is, if diesels can run on this great fuel, what about gas engines that most of us drive? Well, they can run on all sorts of things. Many gas stations for years now have been providing Ethanol or Methanol blended gas. What this means is that they blend about 10% Ethanol or Methanol into the gasoline to improve its power and give it a cleaner burn.
How do they do this? They do this by making the gasoline more stable. The more stable the fuel is, the more likely it is to ignite at the correct time, and burn more completely. This is, of course, a simplification, but it is essentially why these blended fuels exist. The reason they add these grain alcohol blends is because the cost of oil is forcing refineries to make gas with a lower and lower octane rating. The lower the octane rating the less power the gas has and the worse it burns when your engine is hot. Back in the 1960's premium gasoline had an octane rating of 107. Now its 93 at best. This means that the fuel you put in your car is simply inferior to what it used to be. There are a lot of ads these days about cars being able to drive 500 miles on a tank of gas. In 1941 Nash named their one of their cars the Nash Rambler 600 because it drove 600 miles on a tank of gas (25.8mpg).
It would seem like I've digressed, but this all comes full circle with the question of what can we do to make modern gas more stable and burn better? What can we add to the gas to improve it? Ethanol and Methanol are definite possibilities, but why should we spend all the energy of growing crops, using fuel to harvest them and transport the grain and refine it when there is something far more abundant that can be used to achieve the same goal: water.
The thought of burning water seems crazy, as it did to me the first time I heard of it. But then I had the logical thought... what does water consist of? Well, Hydrogen and Oxygen. When you run your car, the two things that are the active fuel are the gasoline and the oxygen in the air. Well sheesh, water is rather amazing when you think of it. it contains two things that can be used as fuel, but in its natural state is safe and easy to transport.
The question is then how do you separate the two and how efficient is it to do so? A lot of people have asked the same question over the years and as it turns out it depends on how much hydrogen you want. If you want to run your car on only hydrogen, then there's a bit of work involved and some tuning you need to do on how your car mixes its air and fuel. If you want to put a moderate amount of hydrogen into your car to improve the quality of its fuel and lower its emissions then its actually very easy.
Without getting into the technical aspects, what you want is not exactly pure hydrogen, but something known as HHO, or Brown's gas (also known as Rhodes Gas, Greengas, and Hydroxy). This gas can be extracted from water by a number of methods. Believe it or not, most cars can be easily converted to accept a boost from HHO converted from water right in the car. There are a lot of great resources out there to do this and get more out of your car, lower your fuel cost, and benefit the environment.
