Thursday 12 June 2008

Alternate Energy Source

OK now the fuel price has increased to a drastic level, at least to us Malaysian. What do we do now?

Everybody can go on the street to protest on the 12th of July this year. But this is not the ultimate solution. Fuel is the limited natural resource that cannot be produced in the laboratory. Hence the price can only go up with time.

So what is the solution? There are many solutions, each targets on different industries.

Being a small-fly like citizen of this country, our immediate impact is on the petrol price. From the previous RM1.92 to the current RM2.70, a shocking 40% hike.

The immediate thoughts popped up in my mind was to think of an alternate energy source for my six-year old car.

I started googling on the web. There were thousands of discussions about the so-called hydrogen cars. There are many enthusiasts actually trying to turn their petrol-powered cars into water-powered cars.

Is this feasible?

The idea is to use electricity to split the hydrogen and oxygen atoms apart from the water molecule - the process called electrolysis. Since both hydrogen and oxygen are highly flammable, they seem to be able to replace fuel to a certain extent. Also, since the hydrogen is produced on-demand, the risk is reduced to minimum, you wouldn't see a big explosion when your hydro-car crash.

The inconvenient part is that, the hydrogen gas generated need to be generated and accumulated to reach a certain pressure before it can be pumped into the engine effectively.

What about the impact to the environment? The only by product it produces is the water vapour, therefore it should be much more friendly than the petrol based car. The water vapour may also increase the humidity of a city in long run.

Maybe a petrol-water hybrid engine is more likely to happen in the near future, whereby the water energy is used as a supplement to the petrol when driving on the highway.

Let's see.

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