Boffin predicts pee-powered cars Forget chicken-powered cars - a researcher has discovered that the key to hydrogen-powered transportation lies in taking the piss - quite literally. Dr Gerardine Botte, an Associate Professor from the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering department at Ohio University, has discovered that hydrogen can be extracted from urine …
...but if you take out the hydrogen are you not left with something that could be NOx or carbon monoxide? Not really a great improvement over gas-guzzling cars really!
Hopefully someone who studied chemistry past GCSE will be able to put straight my naive view of chemistry - I understand QCD but say 'carboxyl functional group' to me and I'll look blankly at you.
Why is this new world so retarded? What kind of ethics approval application do you have to fill in to use someone's wee? It was probably their own wee anyway. Policy makers use some bloody common sense, not every experiment involves torturing puppies!
PS. Health and Safety jobsworths can get fucked too.
It sounds like binge drinking might have a beneficial side effect after all!
I wonder though, does all the weewee produced in one day provide enough hydrogen resource to replace all the petrol used in the same period?
And will the water companies suddenly diversify into fuel station forecourts? They are the ones, after all, who have access to the relevant raw materials!
Even on the incorrect assumption that a pint of beer results a pint of piss, which in turn makes hydrogen equivalent to a liter of petrol, most 8000 miles a year (say 45 litres of petrol a month) people would need to double or treble their beer consumption.
In fact there's about 18g (1.8%) of urea in a litre of urine. As the good lady was talking about electrolysing dissolved urea and not, presumably, breaking down the water, it looks like an 8000 miles per year driving habit will will call for at least a 150 litre beer throughput per month to keep the car running. Cheers!
Mine's the one with brewery shares in the pocket.
"..hydrogen can be extracted from urine through electrolysis at a fraction of the cost of producing hydrogen from water."
I'm prepared to believe that this is true, since pure water is a very good insulator and you'd need a high voltage to force current through it to release hydrogen at one electrode (and oxygen at the other).
However, for commercial hydrogen production using electrolysis, you'd use a salt solution (which is very cheap) and is a much better conductor of electricity. You'd get chlorine at one electrode (that you can sell), hydrogen at the other electrode (that you want) and you leave behind a solution of sodium hydroxide (that you can process and sell).
What she's found may be true, but urine is not nice stuff to collect or work with and it would be expensive to collect in large, pure quantities, so I don't see how this will have any commercial value as an industrial process. It may get her a research grant from somewhere though, which is an good result :)
"Presumably, then, there’s more to the process than just handing a beaker to a lab assistant and looking the other way."
You have no idea. Here in the US at least if you want to do experiments on/wth human subjects (under any circumstances) there's a f*ck-ton of paperwork and red tape to get through before they'll even *think* about letting you do it.
And for good reason; it's intended to keep researches with dubious ethics from going all "Island of Dr. Moreau" on folks.
A bloke standing on the side of the road, todger in hand, taking a slash into his ccar's piss tank.
A boon to the worlds exhibitionists.
But this also raises an interesting question? How would a woman fill the tank (or empty the tank as it were)? Prop one leg up on the side of the car?
The harvesting of animal dung on a commercial scale for both fuel and the manufacture of gunpowder.
In fact with modern rules getting rid of pig slurry and cow manure seems to be getting trickier. So farmers might be quite cooperative on this.
Now if it were found that dietary changes which lowered CO2 emissions also raised Urea levels they'd be on a real winner.
And I'd like to commend Reg Hardware readers on their restraint before anyone mentioned this was all done by Dr Botte. If it had been co-authored by a Dr Butt as well I would have been very suspicious.
So, we have a slighlty more efficient way of getting hydrogen. Slightly.
All it requires is
A) manufacture of urea on a large scale, no doubt cancelling out the enegry benefits
B) using special toilets that separate #1 from #2 (piss is actually very bad for the environment and I remember hearing about toilets that did seperate it but..
B.2) You'll need new pipes going from ALL TOILETS to your friendly, local electrolysis centre. PLUS the infrastructure needed to get hydrogen out to fuelling stations.
or
C) you electrolyse the piss in the car, which means all the disadvantages of carrying heavy batteries with all the disadvantages of carrying a heavy combustion engine plus the disadvantages of not having any hydrogen infrastructure should you run out of piss. Fucked if you run out of battery though.
So, in conclusion kids, stop messing around with hydrogen as an alternative transportation fuel, it's a waste of time and money. Could be useful for hydrogen for dirigibles though, they won't need the equivalent of a petrol station anyway.
1) northern monkey, from the paper you can see that the products are Nitrogen gas (N2) and potassium carbonate (KC03) and hydrogen (H2)
2) frank ly, clfrom the paper you can see that it needs 0.37 volts to get hydrogen from Urea, as opposed to 1.23 to get hydrogen from water. If we ever started using hydrogen to power cars then there would be no market for the enormous amount of chlorine and hydroxide that would be produced from electrolysing brine (in my opinion at least). On the other hand, electrolysing urea means that you are removing a polutant from the environment as a side effect of producing hydrogen. Collecting the urea is also fairly simple, you would just need to install a pipe into every house in the country to collect the waste, and transport it to a collection facility, you could call the pipes "sewers".
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