Nikkei and Reuters report about an announcement by Japanese company Genepax of a car that supposedly runs on only water. One litre will keep the car running at 80 km/h for about an hour, reports Reuters.

Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa is quoted by Reuters as stating that the car requires no external inputs but water. As long as water is available, it will keep running.

Reuters states things a bit differently:

Though the company did not reveal the details, it “succeeded in adopting a well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA,” said Hirasawa Kiyoshi, the company’s president. This process is allegedly similar to the mechanism that produces hydrogen by a reaction of metal hydride and water.

The uncritical reports by these two sources barely scratch the surface of this story. Hydrogen is not an energy source, it’s an energy carrier as there are no natural sources of it on earth. It always has to be produced through physical or chemical processes that require external energy input of some source, either fossil natural gas or coal or biomass or electricity generated from some source.

The Genepax website does not shed much light on how the hydrogen is produced for their fuel cell. The description of their technology on the company website consists of all of two sentences and one diagram of a fuel cell.

If you produce hydrogen in a chemical reaction of metal hydride and water, you use up not only water, but also metal hydride. Typically, metal hydrides take a lot of energy to produce. Substances such as alkali metal hydrids or aluminium that easily release hydrogen when reacting with water consume huge amounts of electricity in their manufacture — hardly a case of “no external input”.

The car uses a 300W fuel cell, presumably only to supplement a conventional battery, as 0.3 kw is far too little drive a car. That fuel cell sells for about 2 million yen ($19,000), almost enough to buy a Toyota Prius (the base model of which costs 2.3 million yen here in Japan).

Even if the “hydrogen generator” could produce hydrogen indefinitely with no external input (otherwise known as a perpetuum mobile), 300W is not enough power to keep even a small car running at 80 kp/h. It would take at least tens of kW, or the output of maybe 50 of these fuell cells. The concludion is that the demo car ran on a set of batteries previously charged from the mains grid, with no assistance from the Genepax fuel cell that was either significant or sustainable.

While we are not sure about all he facts behind the announcement by Genepax (such as whether they happen to be selling stocks to science-challenged would-be investors right now), we’d suggest taking any of their announcements with considerably more than a pinch of salt.

The domain genepax.co.jp was registered only on May 8, 2008, a mere five weeks ago. That seems awfully recent for a company that claims to have spent years developing this technology.

Whichever way you look at it, the story quickly falls apart, but the journalists hardly seem to notice. With rising fuel prices people will be interested in such “news” and that seems to be all that matters.

• New Fuel Cell System ‘Generates Electricity with Only Water, Air’ (Nikkei)
• Water-fuel car unveiled in Japan (Reuters)