Hydrogen A Go-Go
The world's smallest oil refinery sits in a first-floor lab at MIT. Called a plasmatron, it looks a bit like a spark plug that ate too much. And what an appetite it has! MIT researcher Daniel Cohn has fed the plasmatron gasoline, diesel, even canola oil. Eagerly swallowing anything that burns, the device lets go with a belch of electricity that turns the fuel and surrounding air into plasma, a hot collection of charged atoms and electrons. What comes out is a hydrogen-rich gas that burns far more cleanly than garden-variety gasoline.
Cohn and his colleagues are betting a version of their device would work wonders on the family automobile. Tucked beneath the driver's door, a soup-can-size plasmatron could siphon off a fraction of the fuel traveling from the gas tank, refine it in just a second, then send it to the engine. Together, the charged-up gas ...
