When I first saw this drop I went down so many rabbit holes...so much sauce in this post alone....😉
(media.greatawakening.win)
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And where does one get sulfuric acid and pure aluminum? I mean, they aren't that hard to get, but they take energy to create those things. Again, any chemical engine is just another form of battery. That doesn't mean you can't get more energy out than you put in, but if you go back in time, you will find the energy came from somewhere else, and was just stored in the chemicals for later use.
I am not suggesting there is no merits to such a system. I am not saying hydrogen is useless. But to suggest it is somehow better than hydrocarbons (i.e. more chemically efficient, more reliable mining or extraction source, etc.) just isn't in line with chemistry. If there was a huge pile of pure Al and a gigantic bottle of H2SO4 sitting around and you had no better use for it, creating an engine to create electricity from H2 is probably a pretty good idea. But there is nothing there that is better than a gasoline engine for the same purpose (chemically speaking).
What IS better is using H2 (or rather D2) for fusion. Cold fusion has tons of evidential support (at some point I will do a proper write up for that). That is a real suppressed technology. Then we aren't talking about chemical energy storage but nuclear energy storage. That's a whole other ball of waxy atomic particles.
I do understand what you are getting at, kinda. But this is not a chemical engine. It is a hydrogen extraction method which the gas is then used to run a converted gas/diesel engine with. Clean burning. Also we are using scraps here, my first run of it I used a bunch of crushed cans. Pure aluminum is not required and sulfuric acid is cheap, get it from restaurant supply for cleaning drains. The system he had (mine is smaller) held about 5 gallons, and when he ran his 1935 ford truck off it, he only had to fill it every 8 months or so. The main issue was the conversion in the engine in the truck where the heat of the hydrogen was burning out parts. Back then we did not have the composite materials we have today that can withstand such heat.
If you were running a truck off of hydrogen for 8 months either you were never driving it or it was not using chemical energy. It's pretty much that simple.
As for the rest, a "battery" is something that stores energy for later use. We use the term to mean something that stores chemical energy in such a way that when released charged particles will move between two nodes, thus creating a current. But really, a battery is any storage of energy. In the case of stored chemical energy, it really is just like a battery (electric) except it doesn't have a path for charged particles to flow and thus is really a heat battery (or photon battery, depending on how you look at it).
He was running hydrogen into the intake, where you would normally put gasoline. He was working on techniques to mix/spray oil lubricants in the process. He was burning up rings, valves and all sort of stuff. So I do expect that having to fix the truck all the time meant he was not driving it constantly. He was aiming for combustion energy. I think your description of chemical energy includes combustion, is that correct?
Yes. "Combustion" means to start a chemical reaction using an input of heat as a catalyst (and keep the reaction cycle running by a high heat chamber). No matter how you slice it, there is only so much energy stored in a chemical bond. Its pretty much the exact same amount of chemical energy for any given bond.
In the case of using hydrogen as a combustion fuel that would be (almost certainly) mixing with oxygen which would produce water. I have given the amount of energy in such bonds (i.e. H2 + 1/2 O2 = H2O = 232 kcal/mol). It's a perfectly acceptable amount of energy, but its not meaningfully different than in hydrocarbons. There aren't really any chemical bonds that are meaningfully more than hydrocarbons. I'd have to look it up, but I think all chemical bonds are in the 50-150 kcal/mol range (a single O-H is half of the above, i.e. 116kcal/mol).
Chemical energy is chemical energy. There is no secret sauce in chemical energy. Not to say there aren't some processes that are better than others, but its not OMG, its more like, "This is 10%/20%/30% better or worse than that one," etc.
While hydrogen as a fuel source is perfectly viable, and it may even be suppressed for oil, it isn't a game changer by any stretch, at least not in a chemical process.