Sand into Fuel, Reality or Fiction?

[G. David Felt]

G. David Felt
Staff Writer Alternative Energy - www.CheersandGears.com

 

Sand into Fuel, Reality or Fiction?

 

We have all dreamed of the ultimate dream, how to drive the auto's we love without having to pay through the nose for fuel. Especially for performance, premium fuel can really hit the wallet and many of us have been forced to decide, our dream auto, or commuter car?

 

Lately, I have noticed many Motley Fool stories about unlimited free fuel from sand. There have been other web sites and like the Motley, they are all long speeches without getting to what this new fuel is or how to make money on them. Most people today want you to get to the point so these monotone 15 min speeches loose interest after 3 minutes.

 

Dr. Peter Plichta, a German who studied and received degrees in chemistry, physics and nuclear chemistry in Cologne Germany.  This interesting man looked at how we could use long change silanes which uses hydrogen and oxygen to burn and produce energy. He released a book in 2001 Benzin aus Sand.

 

 

The amazing thing is how he says we need to revolutionize our thinking of how we power things. This fuel is more stable and better for use in Space Exploration as well as in autos that would benefit from using turbine or Wankel motors.

 

The Doctors web site is in German here. 

 

His paper on converting Sand into Fuel is found here if you can read German.

 

Lucky for us, another individual Sepp Hasslberger who has a passion for technology has written a much more detailed overview here. He gets into the chemestry of burning silanes and how this can be done.

 

Check it out, then sound off. Does this seem feasible? Should we be looking at making a radical change that could bankrupt the existing oil companies and OPEC moving to a cleaner, much less expensive fuel? I will say people mention that this would be free, but there is always a cost to converting a substance into fuel.

 

[El Kabong]

If I understand correctly, silane is basically a laboratory-prepped hydrocarbon that substitutes a silicon atom for a carbon atom.

IMO it's probably better to get energy from sand the Alberta way

[Suaviloquent]

There's plenty of debunking done that shows synthetic fuel while clean-burning always takes more energy to produce than can be released in the chemical reactions that convert it back into oxides...

 

Heck I remember watching a Nature of Things episode (CBC) where one of the guest speakers in that episode said that fuel extraction industries while looking dirty are way more cleaner than making synthetic fuel.  

[El Kabong]

It's the same problem we have with hydrogen. Yes it burns all but perfectly cleanly, but where do you get it from?

Water molecules or hydrocarbons. And yes, it takes more energy to do than it produces.

In a perfect world we would have sustainable fusion. But we ain't there yet.

[Guest Si Curious]

I also stumbled onto this potential fuel from one of those ultimately annoying Moneymatters vids. However, I gathered enough clues from it to stumble onto Hasselberger's blog before losing my mind to the incessant blather. Very interesting but sounds like a complicated reaction to produce the more stable long chain silane oil - meaning a net energy sucker. Research did lead me to REC Silicon, which produces silane gas (the dangerous kind) for the photovoltaic industry as a currently possible investment.

[Guest Randall Tomes]

It's the storage attributes that make this interesting if this new patented refining process is real that makes a high potency but storable fuel like diesel fuel while being non-pollutant.  Hydrogen is similar but too dangerous and complicated to store in gas tanks for cars.  So this isn't like hydrogen. From what I have read it is very compact also which would make is realistic to store in an average gas tank. Yes, it does take more energy to make that it produces, but that is a good thing as it keeps it grounded in reality and physics. Solar farms and windmills could sit and crank out almost endless supplies of this storable fuel and be far more making billions of laptops batteries trying to achieve the same with electricity.  So if silane fuel thing is real, then this could change things bigtime. It's safely storable in containers and with high potency with compact storage which makes this completely different than hydrogen fuel and different than electricity with lacks high power storage capacity. 

[Guest Ron Corces]

Actually, people may have missed the point of how this could be useful. For example, solar energy can be used to convert water (very abundant) into hydrogen gas (by electrolysis) and hydrogen gas can be cleanly burned to produce electricity, to power internal combustion engines, in gas turbines, etc. So, the main problem with solar and wind and tidal electricity generation is that these relatively clean sources of energy cannot produce power at all times ... So you need to store the energy when it is abundant; to use when it is not available.

If this process is very efficient, then it could produce fuel using ( for example) excess energy from the sun, to be used anywhere. I don't see the advantage to this over electrolysis to create hydrogen. Is it more efficient than electrolysis? That is the question.

[Guest Joeyzazza]

If only Scotty could come here from the future and give us the key to sustainable fusion...

[Guest Sir Gareth]

Luckily I invested in the new carburetor scheme that the "big three," in collusion with "big oil," had been keeping off the market for decades.  

 

I'm speaking about the 200 mpg carburetor that revolutionized the auto industry back in the 70s.    

 

I'm now literally rolling in billions of dollars that I don't even know how to spend due to my instincts for early investing in "can't lose" energy ideas like the 200 mpg carburetor that is now ubiquitous throughout the world.   

[Guest Guest]

Funny, yeah where's that 200 mpg carb? Guess the oil companies put a squash to that. There have been brilliant ideas for decades, but big money won't allow them to come to fruition

[Guest Michael]

Just like the once mighty IBM squashed tiny Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s. If there is significant economic value here, even big oil can not stop it.

[G. David Felt]

Just like the once mighty IBM squashed tiny Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s. If there is significant economic value here, even big oil can not stop it.

You must have drank the wrong kool aid as MSFT squashed IBM which sold the OS to MSFT that began the crazy computer revolution. Also in the 90's IBM had to be rescued as the stock was crashing and the current CEO had to be replaced by someone that could mentor and grow people.

[Guest Franksw2]

It wasn't a carb that got 200nog, it was a Honda cvcc that big oil and and their winches like the Bush family that ran them out of the US until it only got 32mpg. Seems like Honda is still the most fuel efficient even after40+ years.

[Guest arightwing loon]

Just like the once mighty IBM squashed tiny Microsoft in the 1980s and 1990s. If there is significant economic value here, even big oil can not stop it.

You must have drank the wrong kool aid as MSFT squashed IBM which sold the OS to MSFT that began the crazy computer revolution. Also in the 90's IBM had to be rescued as the stock was crashing and the current CEO had to be replaced by someone that could mentor and grow people.

Pretty sure Michael was being facetious.

As

[Chris Skinner]

At first I was excited about this hydrosilane fuel. I thought this more energetic form of combustion using nitrogen might be an actual energy source. But upon closer inspection, it appears to only be an energy dense carrier of energy rather than an actual source. You have to put enormous amounts of energy into separation of silicon from oxygen. Same goes for hydrogen. You will eventually wind - up with the same initial ingredients of sand, water and nitrogen gas after it's all over with.