There are too many of us humans on this planet, and we are using up energy resources at a frightening rate. What we really need is population control to reduce our numbers to around half what they currently are. Limit families to no more than two children. That would mean less polution, more untouched rainforests and other natural resouces, and cheaper housing for everyone. We need to manage ourselves better.

Now I am just waiting for the flack to start flying :=).

One things for certain - the oil supply will run out at some point - then what do we do?

There are other ways to produce oil, but can we produce enough of it?

Here's one way to do it using a process known as Thermo-DePolymerization (TDP)...

Turkey Fuel? Factory to Turn Guts Into Crude Oil

Hydrogen-powered engines are a reality already. And they feed on?... Yes, water!
Of which we have more than plenty.
So in the long run, who needs fossil-fuel?

As an afterthought: most of my Guinness is also water. Perhaps I could piss in my tank and still drive home when I get one of them hydrogen cars??

The problem isn't about fuel or raw materials disappearing really. It is about the cost of everything going through the roof. Fuel cells and other fancy toys are nice but the truth is we can't afford them (yet).

Hydrogen generation uses electricity. And that electricity generally comes from, wait for it - fossil fuels...

Hydrogen cars just move the oil usage and the pollution further down the line. Its still there.

It all comes down to survivial. No one should be "worried" about running out of oil - it happens, sooner or later is irrelevant. As a species, humans will get along just fine without oil. We can be prepared for it beforehand, for sure, but even if we aren't, natural selection will force us to survive without it.

IF all the oil in the world instantly dissapeared today, the planets would not stop turning and people would not stop living. Many would die, but in the end the human race would/will survive, and still come out on top.

Where is the option:

• Not afraid, as there will be alternate fuel sources though the fuel supply won't last for more than ~60 years?

At least that was that latest estimate I heard about the norwegian oil fields, meaning that the oil will last a bit longer but not too much...

I can't vote in this poll. There isn't a 'Oil doesn't matter, we have other means' option.

As has been said, Hydrogen engines, and thus water fuelled cars, have been available for a while. Since 1935 in fact! (and they worked pretty well even then apparently). In fact, 1935 is also about the date that the 'electrolytic carburettor' was patented in the US.

In the case of a car, the initial energy would come from a car battery, or an initial resevoir of Hydrogen gas. Yes, somewhere along the line, electricity. Not as much of a problem as you might think though. An alternator of apparently 2-3 times the normal size (according to the 1935 designs) would provide enough electricity to run the electrolysis of the water. The great thing is, that 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen can be burned to reproduce the original one part water. It's ALMOST lossless. Of course, there is loss, but that would be reduced as designs improve.

Hydrogen can also be used for heating, and fluorescent lighting (bombarding certain inert gases with hydrogen causes them to glow), and even sound reproduction.

The only real reason that we aren't using this technology at the moment is likely to be down to the oil companies. Aside from the obvious fact that they'd loose money, there's a more serious issue. The worlds economy is largely oil fuelled, and if the oil industry suddenly failed, well, many largescale things could easily take a pretty serious turn for the worse, like entire countries for example.

Oh, and another interesting innovation - frictionless bearings - which could revolutionise all sorts of things, is currently owned by the Ford motor company, but they don't use it. Why are they sitting on such a usefull thing and not using it? well, you tell me.

ok, rant over. lol

The world sucks. There's nothing I can do about it, but ranting sometimes makes me feel better.

Wow Spike, you just invented the perpetual motion machine!

Has anyone considered the increased oil usage that is the result of China and India's booming economies? That will surely bring the end of our oil reserves sooner rather than later.

Spike> The thing about hydrogen is that it takes a bit of energy to produce it. So even though the end-product is pollution free, the making of it is not.

Or rather, there's one way to make it with seawater and sunlight, but that one is extremly slow... I know there's one more way, but can't remember what is is right now.

The second problem is that if you're going to be running on Hydrogen (ignoring the explosion danger like Hindenburg) is that it requires many more gallons pr mile compared to gasoline or diesel. Thus you'll either have to have a large increase in gas stations, or perhaps find a way to produce the hydrogen needed in the car from a water reservoir...

But yeah, it (or something like it) will happen one day. The question of when it'll happen though...


BTW: how do you know Ford has (a working) frictionless bearing? Wouldn't mind learning a bit more about that...

I'd be very happy to use bio-diesel, but as it costs more to produce than ordinary diesel it isn't very widely available. The UK government does give it a tax break, but that just makes it the same price as ordinary and no extra margin for the producers so no profit incentive.
You can make a sort of biodiesel cheaply at home and just pay the duty on it, but the taxman is very picky about the quality and how you make it. Then again at 30-35p/litre instead of 80-85p/litre homegrown sounds good.
It also uses waste oil from chip-shops and restaurants instead of from crops grown just for fuel. It is also greener as it stops people from just dumping the used veggie oil.

To me, this is the single most disturbing facet of the energy crisis. In the new global economy, former 3rd world nations now have a fledgling middle class that will be buying cars and lawn mowers and leaf blowers and the like. Also include in this the oil that will be consumed in these regions for production of plastics and transporting all the doo dads that go along with new found 'prosperity' these fledgling consumers will want and you have an energy AND CO2 crunch that will have us all walking to work and gasping for breath.

The oil companies will say there are reserves for another 100 years up until all the wells run dry because of one simple fact- The moment the public (and their stockholders) find out the true extent of their oil reserves, the stocks of these heretofore Wall Street darlings will plummet like an oil-coated sea gull.

Royal Dutch/Shell caught cooking the books

You would have thought if a person was paying over $5.00 a gallon, that there would be a big move toward an alternate source of fuel. You might find these prices somewhere in Europe. Perhaps in Europe they just have more trains.

I firmly beleive that by the time that supply forces the price up high enough, that there will be alternative fuels in place. It is money and supply and demand that will force the change. However, industry resists change and the Oil Industry will fight hard before it lets go.

There were some people saying it takes a lot of Electricity to make the Hydrogen the way the industry wants to use it. I beleive they supercool it to get it into a liquid state. This might not be the most economical method and form of use for hydrogen.

As goes the hydrogen thing - electrolysing salt water releases a lot of nasty crap. Electrolysing fresh water would be a bad, bad idea as it uses a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of... electricity to purify water. Desalinisation of salt water also uses lots of fuel, and the water will still have minerals in it that could damage the car.

Hydrogen cars ain't going to happen with all the problems needed to make it. The only "clean" way to make lots of hydrogen uses natural gas and steam, the first can be used as a direct fuel anyway.

I see a lot of energy waste in the USA.

For instance we have a lot of land fills in the USA and the standard practice is to burn off the methane. You can not see this during the day but usually there are pipes coming up from a land fill and they burn off the methane. You could easily use the methane to run a power plant. I think there is a power plant in Japan that uses this process.

If you are paying $5.00 for a gallon of gas then you are basically paying $3.00 in taxes and handling fees. I feel your pain. I realize there are locations where people like paying over 60% of their income on taxes and government waste, either that or they are just use to it. I know when I traveled through the northern part of Canada up near Alaska, that the cost of Gasoline was really high also.

The method to produce hydrogen may vary based on what you are making it from. It might be there are better ways to breakdown water or other elements than what we have currently thought of. We use Oxygen for a lot of differnet purposes like medical, so we must be getting pure oxygen from somewhere. It might also be that science will come up with a better solution for an alternate fuel.

This leads me to another story. I was reading a magazine article at a website www.homepower.com and they have a website dedicated to the topic of solar power. They had one article one time where someone had developed their own home brew system for separating Oxygen and Hydrogen from water using a solar panel for the electrolysis. It presented some obvious problems. First of all you have to get rid of the oxygen which is a very volatile gas. A plant might be able to use the Oxygen to run a power plant and actually make more electricity than they use to separate the hydrogen from water.

The whole point is that other scientific discoveries and techniques often are developed that may be of some use to us when intelligent people work on a problem like this together.

I have watched how Oil refineries are constantly burning off excess products and have wondered if all that energy can be harnessed to make electricity. Perhaps we just need a little more intelligent engineering.