Could this be a feasible fuel system?
"Energy gained needs to be greater than the sum of lost energy in all steps"

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm 
 Perpetual motion machines 
http://news.sciencemag.org/chemistry/2014/01/rhubarb-battery-could-store-energy-future 
 Flow battery, which works.

1) You cannot win (First Law of thermodynamics from Noether's theorems and the isotropy of time) 
2) You can only break even on a very cold day (Second Law of thermodynamics from Carnot cycle and the law of large numbers). 
3) It never gets that cold (Third Law of thermodynamics.   If there were an entropy difference at absolute zero, T = 0 K could be reached in a finite number of steps. However, at T = 0 K there is no entropy difference, so an infinite number of steps are needed).