Transport

Thank you for reading Henson Innovation's first ever blog post, welcome!

Today I would like to talk about the issue of the persistent use of finite resources to fulfil our transportation needs here in Ireland.

TLDR; Petrol/Diesel = Finite resource, Lithium Ion batteries = Finite resource, Hydrogen/Water = Abundant resource. We need to do it ourselves.

Oil gave birth to the industrial revolution which brought our civilisations on in leaps and bounds, and created a knock-on effect which led to all the wonders of the modern world. It seems we may be on the cusp of a truely great global human civilisation, however there is a lot of red tape in our way.

There are too many of us now with too much need of transport for us to burn oil to get from A to B, oil is polluting and finite.

There are too many of us now to use electric vehicles powered by polluting (during fabrication and disposal), finite precious minerals (lithium ion batteries).

It does still makes sense to use oil to make plastic, a highly versatile material which can be recycled again and again, but until a sustainable battery technology is invented (one that does not rely on a finite resource), we cannot rely on this technology to power our transport.

The Japanese (arguably todays master craftspeople by excellence) are investing not in electrical vehicles, but in hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles. These vehicles basically use water as fuel, and last time I checked the planet was 71% (and rising) covered in water, compared to precious minerals which exist in relatively small quantities.

So how to pivot towards hydrogen? Well a device exists that can be fitted to the injectors of most vehicles on the road that will allow them to run on bioethanol or biodiesel. This will get as much value out of the oil powered cars already on the road as possible while a hydrogen fuel cell infrastructure is being built and reducing transport emissions by 85% in the meantime.

I did correspond with Minister Ryan via email on this issue, he said this:

I'm paraphrasing!

So it looks like it's up to us, the general public and the private sector. Let's do this!

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