Please help me determine how this mystery chemical is reducing carbon emissions
My chemistry is not good enough to solve this problem, and it's driving me crazy.
At my job, a sales agent approached me to be their representative in my area for their product. It's a product that when mixed with diesel or gasoline it reduces carbon emissions in the vehicle to almost 0.
Now this seems impossible to me. The burning of hydrocarbons necessarily creates CO or CO2, and the CO can be converted to CO2 in the catalytic converter by oxidizing it.
In the test results, CO dropped to almost 0, and CO2 stayed the same or went down (also my own calculations show the change in CO2 was not statistically significant with the small sample size - 3 before and 3 after tests on 3 cars).
I've seen the test results (yes, they could have been faked, but they filmed the testing process). My buddy also personally tested it on his car and got the same results?
Anecdotal evidence shows that the car's mileage is the same.
Can anyone point me to somewhere to try and figure out what is going on here? It sounds too good to be true, and as such, there is no way I'm going to recommend my company represent this product until I know what's going on.
I really appreciate the help. This will help me keep from looking like a complete fool in the case there is something fishy going on. This is the only forum I could find that might be suitable to asking this question.
EDIT:
Here are the mean test results (ppm). 542
Some of them have high variance. The only statistically significant changes are CO reduction in all cars, and all changes in the first car. The NOx, CO2, and CxHy changes in car2 and car3 are not significant.
Before After
CO CO2 CxHy NOx CO CO2 CxHy NOx
Car1 3491 9.4 0.39 46.7 <PHONE_NUMBER>
Car2 164 11.5 0.13 2.7 <PHONE_NUMBER>
Car3 2868 11.1 0.18 14 123 10.9 0.06 39.3
I'm suspicious this may just be ethanol, but the manufacturer swears it isn't.
The advertised ratio is 1 oz to 12.5 gallons of fuel which is less than 0.1% (I believe they used double that in the tests). Too low to be ethanol anyway, right?
SUPER EDIT:
I have confirmed that I was originally mistaken in that all measurements are ppm. I received a new copy of the original results, and CxHy and CO2 are indeed measured in percent, rather than ppm. It was incorrectly rewritten in the report. The numbers are the same, though. 542