Luxury Hydrogen Fuel Cell Boat Draws Electricity From Sea Water

In the race to develop useful alternative fuels, researchers and scientists are leaving no potential source of energy overlooked. That includes drawing power from the sea, and while tidal generators and wind farms are already being installed, a luxury boat maker thinks it can build an hydrogen fuel cell boat, drawing power from the very sea water itself.

France-based Luxury Sea, a builder of opulent boats and watercraft, claims to be building a boat whose 500 horsepower engine will get powered by hydrogen fuel scraped from sea water. The boat, called the MIG 675, is 22 feet long and 8 feet wide, utilizing an aluminum hull with room for three people. The proposed top speed is 70 mph, with a cruising speed of about 45 mph.

Rather than utilize a hydrogen fuel tank to store fuel, self-taught inventor Angi Le Floch claims that a generator produces 50,000 volts of electricity right from the water itself. This is enough electricity to power all of the on-board systems, and produce hydrogen fuel for the engine. The planned price of this boat is about 250,000 Euro (about $325,000 U.S.)

There are precious few details about this supposed hydrogen generator, which means of course that I am skeptical that this is anything more than a marketing ploy. But if somebody could really figure out how to scrape hydrogen from seawater in a cost-efficient way, it could completely change sea shipping forever. Then again, the video above has no sound, which is quite suspicious, and the lack of details in unsettling. Since there is no source of pure hydrogen, it must be split from other atoms (like water) which is an energy intensive process. If Angi Le Floch’s hydrogen generatordoe what it claims, which is extracting hydrogen directly from seawater, it would be a game changer like no other.

After all, sea traffic is among one of the heaviest polluters on the planet. If we could bring that pollution down to zero, we would take a major bite out of global emissions of all kinds. I bet it would also save shipping companies hundreds of millions of dollars in the long run. There’d be no need for refueling, and in essence it sounds like a perpetual motion machine, at least as long as you’re in the water.

So ya, like I said, lots of skepticism here, and scaling technology up from a luxury boat to a super freighter will take lots of time and money. At the end of the day, this is probably just another feel-good luxury boat with little or no basis in reality.

Source: PES Network