General: High Price of Gas

We had that idea here Bill, all very good, but nowhere enough people bothered to actually do it. I believe it was a one day a week boycott on one particular oil company. It had no noticeable effect. I hope you guys have a little more guts not to give in and just give up and pay up. The high grade fuel for my car costs about £1.20 a litre. I'll let you work out what you would be paying per US gallon at our prices.

Interesting Ivan. There have been numerous systems to make internal combustion engines work incredibly efficiently, Made to run on just tap water by a simple high speed electrolysis. Most of them proved beyond doubt to work and then quietly disappeared. I found out why and where they went. It's obvious really, the inventors were paid off by the oil companies and the designs stashed away "for the future" As gas/petrol becomes more and more scarce, I bet we will see these ideas and designs slowly being introduced by oil companies. I also bet some dye or tracer will be added to the water used by motor vehicles, to make sure the fuel tax man and lets call them the liquid fuel companies get their cash. Does that sound cynical, well yes it does. If you were making millions of Dollars from oil, then some little bright guy comes up with a simple idea that could make you go bust over night, what would you do?

These things never work because the suppliers rarely have any real impact on the price of gas.
In the UK, gas sells for about £1.10 a litre, of which the product itself costs £0.25, £0.06 is the charge from the supplier (Exxon or whoever), and the rest is fuel duty and sales tax (VAT). I.e., only 5% of the cost is actually controlled by the supplier, the rest is controlled by the market and lastly, and most significantly, the government.

Yet another reason why I still don't drive...

Thank god I live 4 minutes from a train station (planned, naturally).

Sorry coyote - I'm not having a go at you; the skeptical mind takes over... but I have always been taught that it's not possible for a system to produce energy out of nothing, and since water doesn't spontaneously release its energy it's theoretically impossible for such a system to exist. The article is interesting but I'm not quite convinced; I'm not a physicist either so I'm not sure why, but it seems to smell of a hoax.

Either way we still don't have a commerciably viable system for generating large amounts of power which doesn't use fossil fuels or is too large and unwieldy (e.g. nuclear) to put in a car. As Spode says, take an electric train whose power is provided by a nuclear or renewable energy source; much cleaner...

Posted By: Lolly

As Spode says, take an electric train whose power is provided by a nuclear or renewable energy source; much cleaner...

.....in the short term.

That is possible Mike, but as Lolly says - the power required for the split in the first place, uses more than you gain from fusing them back together.

Now, I do vaguely recall reading in New Scientist some time ago, that they had found a way of splitting the water using a vibrations to literally shake the elements apart. However, I can't find anything to back up my claim at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting

This might come in handy though.

Yes Pete, you do this: [*url = http etc the actual url ]HERE[/url]

Leave out the asterisk at the beginning, that's just there to stop it working so you can see how it's done. the word HERE can be anything you like, CLiCKY maybe. Post if it doesn't make sense.

A very interesting topic.

Fossile fuel is getting more and more expensive, and the alternatives are not as supported as they should be.

You mentioned hydrogen, but hydrogen is a bit tricky. First of all, it's not a source of energy, it's just a carrier. It must be produced first, and as that is done most likely with an electrolysis, it takes energy (that could be renewable energy, but in fact, in most cases it is not, up to now.). I have seen a chlorine-alcaline-electrolysis (I hope that was correctly translated), and it needed a terrible amount of electricity (that electrolysis was used for the production of hydrochloric acide and sodium hydroxide, hydrogen is also created in that process).

The other problem is how to store the hydrogen. Metalhybride buffers are used in the new, fuel-cell driven, german submarine, but they are heavy and expensive. Pressure bottles don't work for long, because hydrogen gets lost even through a steel mantle and also makes the steel weak by taking off carbon.

Hydrogen is also very dangerous, because it is explosible in almost any mixture with air ( from 5% volume up to 75% volume). Even the smallest leak and... boom.

The next question is, how to use the hydrogen. Combust it in a standard combustion engine or use a fuel cell to get electricity? Both methods have andvantages and disadvantages.

Another possibility would be the use of bio fuel like Methanole or Ethanole (for drinking AND driving ), or non-fossile oils from plants. But the harvesting and the destillation procedures need... energy, so it's not really efficient.

But we'll have to start somewhere. Doing nothing is definitely the worst case.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/04/08/fuel-cells-due

How expensive is your mineral water?

But I agree that petrol was cheaper than it should have been. And our car industry still builds cars with a much to high consumption, because most of the customers don't care about the price of petrol even if they complain about it all day long.

Depends where you get it though. Actually petrol is closer to £1 per litre and at supermarkets mineral water is a similar price.

Mineral water is a silly idea. Tap water is much cheaper and better for you (it contains vitamins and minerals, some of which are added, like fluorine), and mineral water is an awful waste of packaging too.

I know - you mentioned it in your other post. What I've never understood is why manufacturers feel the need to put water in transparent bottles. Surely everyone knows what water looks like?

My wallet is taking a beating. paid for $40 worth of gasoline and it only filed the tank just above half way.