Don't know what happened to Fred Sparber's SS "light switch plate"
electrolyzer, but here is a simple one being built and used in
automobiles by many tinkerers. It is said to be especially
effective with biodiesel:
http://waterpoweredcar.com/hydrobooster2.html
and using the same Home Despot type switch plates - but there are
other design on the net, some a cross between the JC tubes and the
BG plates, some said to be better than this.
You can do the math on this crude device and postulate that if the
assertions were both an accurate portrayal of fuel savings (about
15%) AND if this were required by government on every new car
(professionally built version), the savings on imported oil would
amount to tens of billions of dollars on a nationwide basis....
Why didn't Detroit come out with an improved version of this a few
years ago ... <rhetorical question>
Those billions which coulda-shoulda stayed in the good old USA is
money which as of now - goes to our "friends" in the middle-east,
but somehow ends up in roadside bombs, killing our young men who
are fighting there ... ? Go figure.
Now if you had this hydrobooster device (professionally built
version) running on a biodiesel plug-in hybrid... could you get to
the elusive 100 MPG ... <rhetorical question, the answer of which
is 'yes'>
Jones
Oh ... as to where all that biodiesel can come from ... Maybe not
the Sonoran desert alone (how ya gonna flood that much land), but
what about the shallow waters in the Gulf of Mexico? Methinks we
explored some of these pro-and-con considerations for using ocean
algae a while back.
I suspect the nay-sayers may be more amenable to that
alternative - as time goes by. Even if it takes 10 times more
ocean than the 15,000 square miles of desert, that is only a tiny
fraction of the available resource. Plus we can convert the old
oil platforms into off-shore diodiesel factories <g>
"NREL's research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of
biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land
(200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly
500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they
will be, with several research groups and companies working
towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we
found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would
need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quad! s
(one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce
that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square
miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert
in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles. Enough
biodiesel to replace all petroleum transportation fuels could be
grown in 15,000 square miles, or roughly 12.5 percent of the area
of the Sonora desert
(note for clarification - I am not advocating putting 15,000
square miles of algae ponds in the Sonora desert")
