Thursday, June 12, 2008

Water Is The New Oil?


If you've been paying attention to politics and the rising gas prices you have heard presidential candidates push their platforms of trying to find alternative energy sources to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Well the man in the above clip has created a technology that fuses hydrogen and water to create HHO, which is capable of running a car at least 100 miles off of 4oz of water. Sounds too good to be true, right?

Well it kinda is. It is no secret that alternative sources of energy have been around for decades. Countries like Brazil have been 100% oil independent for years and run their vehicles off of corn-based ethanol. We too could go that route, but our political, economic and practical circumstances and interests may prevent that from happening before consumer tensions force action.

It seems that our political and business relationships with the oil-producing nations of OPEC hinge on our dependence to their product. What would happen if we stopped doing business with nations such as Saudi Arabia because we no longer need oil? They would surely become our enemies as their petroleum supplies are largely our only reason for befriending them in the first place. Not to mention we'd destroy their economy. The region would destablize and we'd have a huge crisis in the Middle East which would ultimately threaten our security.

The other problem is that we'd have to convert the millions of cars that we currently use into HHO cars, which is very impractical.

...but with gas prices rising to ridiculous levels, we may have no other choice. Prices won't go down until we decrease demand and show that we are ready to move on.

1 comment:

Jermel said...

This whole energy crisis is a lot more complicated than most will admit. There are alternative sources of energy out there but none are as cheap and easy as coal, oil, and natural gas. Corn can be used for ethanol, but you can make ethanol more efficiently by importing sugar cane. Of course the farm lobby made sure there's a restriction on sugar cane imports. Plus when you grown corn for ethanol you increase the price of other crops that have to compete for the same farm land. Essentially we're going to have suffer for a while before we get through this. We'll have to build smaller cars, smaller houses, and more efficient products, all while developing alternative energy sources, and this is very costly, which is why we can't do it immediately. Thus we will have to deal with high gas prices for some time. And no presidential candidate can do a damn thing about that. Economics cannot be controlled by the government. All the government can do is move money around through taxes and subsidies. Damn I almost sound like a Republican.