Metro News - Newspaper Online - formerly Toorak Metro News Victoria au newspaper Melbourne south eastern Bayside Melbourne

The current energy debate is one that probably should have begun when Henry Ford started mass producing motor vehicles and when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb around the early 1900s. Given that we have a growing number of people owning cars in more places around the world and a finite resource in oil, it was inevitable that a crisis of various forms would eventuate.

Of all the technological challenges that we face in the world today, how we resolve the energy crisis, and maybe also how we deal with cancer treatment, could be our biggest challenges. As far as the fuel issue is concerned, the question we have to grapple with is whether there are alternatives to resources such as oil and coal and how far we’ve advanced in finding it. The short answer is: yes, there are alternatives, but how close we are to making them a reality is dependent on who you ask.

One of the major options in alternative energy for cars is a hydrogen fuel cell. A fuel cell converts the chemicals hydrogen and oxygen into water to produce electricity. So essentially you are making energy where the only by-product is water, which doesn’t harm the environment.

This process has the potential to be up to 80 per cent efficient, meaning 80 per cent of the resource chemicals can be converted into energy. Compare this with petrol for your car, which is only about 20 per cent efficient. Hydrogen fuel cells were one of the energy sources for the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, so it’s not a new concept. Also as hydrogen and oxygen aren’t limited to a few regions of the world like crude oil, political conflicts over this important resource can also be eliminated.

What are the current issues with fuel cells? Well, while 90 per cent of our universe is made up of hydrogen, currently it’s not readily available in any sort of useful way to allow us to use it in this technology.

Also current methods employed to extract hydrogen don’t give a pure form, meaning that the energy efficiency drops to about 30 to 40 per cent. This also increases the cost of the cell. Oxygen is of course readily available in our atmosphere.

A recent discovery on the rings of Saturn, of all places, could be the major breakthrough for this technology. Scientists have discovered that as water comes off the rings, the hydrogen is lost from it, leaving the oxygen.

The method is called electromagnetic bipolar separation; a method used in the laboratories and can be employed deep in earth’s core using the earth’s own electromagnetic field. If the method can be perfected, it can separate hydrogen from water almost free. If hydrogen can be obtained free of cost, we can have abundance of energy with almost no cost and then the resultant water or steam is totally pollution free.

In short if we could harness hydrogen energy, we could have very cheap fuel, remove fossil fuels like oil as a source of global conflict, and we could clean up our environment. If this is the end result then we should all lobby for it to happen now.

Chris Jacob is a director of Computer Troubleshooters Bayside

(www.ctsbayside.com.au)