I'm pretty sure that some mornigs' piss has an alcohol content high enough to make it flamable, hence the icon.

Anonymous, just in case ...

Just think, a urine/hydrogen powered Porsche would literally be a penis extension.

So "Drink and Drive" will be the new slogan then?

Childhood experiments with 240V AC and a bucket of water always went better after you'd taken a slash into the mixture. A much more vigorous reaction. But Ker-ist, what a stink. Also it's best to turn the juice off before topping up..

Why is this new world so retarded? What kind of ethics approval application do you have to fill in to use someone's wee? It was probably their own wee anyway. Policy makers use some bloody common sense, not every experiment involves torturing puppies!

PS. Health and Safety jobsworths can get fucked too.

“It took us some time to get clearance to work with human urine - which held up publication of the research,”

So, if publication was held, the information leaked to the press, then? They couldn´t hold it any longer?

coolest things I've ever heard.

One of our lab assistants was caught drinking the 100% ethanol from the solvents cupboard. Still, should probably still be able to power a car with it.

Now, ain't that a pisser !!!!

It sounds like binge drinking might have a beneficial side effect after all!

I wonder though, does all the weewee produced in one day provide enough hydrogen resource to replace all the petrol used in the same period?

And will the water companies suddenly diversify into fuel station forecourts? They are the ones, after all, who have access to the relevant raw materials!

....at it's best (again), & I'm not taking the - Michael!

Beer icon, because I'd better re-fuel!

Even on the incorrect assumption that a pint of beer results a pint of piss, which in turn makes hydrogen equivalent to a liter of petrol, most 8000 miles a year (say 45 litres of petrol a month) people would need to double or treble their beer consumption.

In fact there's about 18g (1.8%) of urea in a litre of urine. As the good lady was talking about electrolysing dissolved urea and not, presumably, breaking down the water, it looks like an 8000 miles per year driving habit will will call for at least a 150 litre beer throughput per month to keep the car running. Cheers!

Mine's the one with brewery shares in the pocket.

"But occifer, I ran outta fuel and was jusht trying to fill up the tank... *hic*"

So can we expect angry motorists to protest about beer taxes?

"..hydrogen can be extracted from urine through electrolysis at a fraction of the cost of producing hydrogen from water."

I'm prepared to believe that this is true, since pure water is a very good insulator and you'd need a high voltage to force current through it to release hydrogen at one electrode (and oxygen at the other).

However, for commercial hydrogen production using electrolysis, you'd use a salt solution (which is very cheap) and is a much better conductor of electricity. You'd get chlorine at one electrode (that you can sell), hydrogen at the other electrode (that you want) and you leave behind a solution of sodium hydroxide (that you can process and sell).

What she's found may be true, but urine is not nice stuff to collect or work with and it would be expensive to collect in large, pure quantities, so I don't see how this will have any commercial value as an industrial process. It may get her a research grant from somewhere though, which is an good result :)

But how *much* less energy is needed?

And of course the obvious question.

Why did no one explore other sources earlier?

"Presumably, then, there’s more to the process than just handing a beaker to a lab assistant and looking the other way."

You have no idea. Here in the US at least if you want to do experiments on/wth human subjects (under any circumstances) there's a f*ck-ton of paperwork and red tape to get through before they'll even *think* about letting you do it.

And for good reason; it's intended to keep researches with dubious ethics from going all "Island of Dr. Moreau" on folks.

Wow, that's a relief.

... but has anyone read the name of the researcher?

Dr Botte !

Is it April 1st in Italy?

The harvesting of animal dung on a commercial scale for both fuel and the manufacture of gunpowder.

In fact with modern rules getting rid of pig slurry and cow manure seems to be getting trickier. So farmers might be quite cooperative on this.

Now if it were found that dietary changes which lowered CO2 emissions also raised Urea levels they'd be on a real winner.

And I'd like to commend Reg Hardware readers on their restraint before anyone mentioned this was all done by Dr Botte. If it had been co-authored by a Dr Butt as well I would have been very suspicious.

So, we have a slighlty more efficient way of getting hydrogen. Slightly.

All it requires is

A) manufacture of urea on a large scale, no doubt cancelling out the enegry benefits

B) using special toilets that separate #1 from #2 (piss is actually very bad for the environment and I remember hearing about toilets that did seperate it but..

B.2) You'll need new pipes going from ALL TOILETS to your friendly, local electrolysis centre. PLUS the infrastructure needed to get hydrogen out to fuelling stations.

or

C) you electrolyse the piss in the car, which means all the disadvantages of carrying heavy batteries with all the disadvantages of carrying a heavy combustion engine plus the disadvantages of not having any hydrogen infrastructure should you run out of piss. Fucked if you run out of battery though.

So, in conclusion kids, stop messing around with hydrogen as an alternative transportation fuel, it's a waste of time and money. Could be useful for hydrogen for dirigibles though, they won't need the equivalent of a petrol station anyway.

Harry King! (a.k.a. King of the Golden River, a.k.a. Piss Harry)

CHILDHOOD experiments. I found that AC didn't work. Makes a hell of a mess though, and even more of a mess with certain bio-additives.