Water, Part 2

Hopefully I have gotten your attention by now. With the first installment I showed a rather simple illustration to prove that a
 difference exists between the amount of energy required to electrolyze a  given quantity of water and the amount of energy which is given off when  the products resulting from said electrolysis are burned together.
As I  said it is not much of a difference but it is a difference and the fact  that the higher amount of energy appears on the side of what is released  by burning it means that here we have the basis of a whole new, free source of fuel to power our world.
      The first objection that usually rears it's ugly head at this point  is that the information I have presented thus far violates the
Second  Law of Thermodynamics. You are absolutely right. It does seem to but  upon further consideration I realized that it DOES NOT violate the Second Law as we understand it. The problem seems to be a misapplication  of the second law in this case. A misapplication which has gone  unchallenged for a long time now. I am going to explain why this is so  through the use of an analogy and hopefully I can do it clearly enough so that we don't have to digress into pointless arguments over it's
validity.
       The first question that I had to ask was; if this is impossible then  how can any system work? I decided to compare the use of water as a fuel  source with the use of fossil fuels. Both are available in large  quantities in a natural (raw) state on this planet. Water as water which  usually contains varying amounts of diverse pollutants in both solid  form as particulates and in solution. Crude oil is available in a thick  sludgy form (most commonly) which also contains various pollutants. The chemical formula for water is H2O and the chemical formula of gasoline for example is C8H18.
      What do we see in common so far? It can be argued that these are two  totally different compounds and that is true but please follow along for  a bit. Both of these compounds are without doubt Hydrogen compounds  aren't they? Water is hydrogen with oxygen and gasoline is hydrogen with  carbon.
      Another similarity is that both of these substances have to be changed or "refined" from their natural state into something that we can  best utilize as a fuel. Crude oil into gasoline and various other products and water into hydrogen and oxygen gasses.
      So with that in mind we have to first think about exactly what we need to do to get crude oil from it's resting place under the earth to the gas pumps at our local convenience store. First we have to set up drilling equipment to sink a hole into the earth, down to where the oil is. Once that is done we have to pump the oil up and transport it to a refinery. At the refinery we have to cook it to separate the various grades of fuels that we will use. Then we have to transport these finished products to distribution centers and finally deliver them to your local retail outlet.
        During this whole process we have obviously used an incredible amount  of energy, haven't we? Imagine that we could do all of these things at  one site. Then imagine that there are ways to convert the products of  the burning of this fuel (gasoline) i.e.: C8H14->Carbon Dioxide, Carbon  Monoxide and water back into gasoline. After all you end up with all of  the original components, just mixed into different compounds so you should be able to remanufacture gasoline from exhaust gasses just by
taking O2 back out of the mix, right <grin>? Actually though, why not? And what if you did find a way to do that? I guess that it would THEN violate the second law of thermodynamics wouldn't it? After all it doesn't take more energy to produce gasoline than is given off by burning it does it? If it does than something is very wrong here!
        Or conversely, what if you took raw water and "refined" it into fuel  gas H2 and oxidizer O2 and then burned them together to produce energy  and instead of condensing the resulting exhaust gasses you just vented  them into the atmosphere and pumped some more raw water out of your  well? That way an H2O fuel source WOULDN'T VIOLATE THE SECOND LAW UNDER  THE RULES APPLIED TO CRUDE OIL WOULD IT?
 End of part 2