In the Future, You’ll Fuel Your Car By Pissing in the Gas Tank

Soon, we won’t have to whore our national security interests out just to get oil from Saudi Arabia, natural gas from Canada, or electricity from Electrijikistan.  We’ll be able to power our cars for free, using nothing but a liter of Sprite and ten minutes!  Urea, the compound in our urine, may be a more effective fuel source than water in powering fuel-cell cars, which have proved resistant to consumers because we like Escalades and because fuel-cell cars kind of suck, in terms of running cheaply.  Pee may change that:

Because urea’s four hydrogen atoms are less tightly bound to nitrogen than the hydrogen bound to oxygen in water molecules, it takes less energy to break them apart: Just 0.037 Volts need to be applied across the cell, against the 1.23 Volts needed to break down water.

This means the energy balance of urea-derived hydrogen could be considerably better from start to finish than projections for other so-called pathways for obtaining the highly combustible gas.

Fuel stations could conceivably broker deals with sanitation plants to get that sweet liquid gold much cheaper than that other liquid gold (…oil).  And that’s truly relying on a renewable American resource: the desire to consume food and drink excessively for no reason and then expel it from our bodies.

Source: Green Car Reports.