Engineering
Josh Brock
ENGR 102 sec. 005
02-Sep-2008
The Next Biggest Engineer Achievements
In the last century, our engineering ancestors made huge leaps in the advancement of man kind. We progressed from lighting our homes with oil lanterns to stepping foot on another celestial body! The engineers of my generation, in my opinion, have great shoes to fill, and less natural resources to do it with since we have consumed a great deal of this worlds hydrocarbons. This is the basis for my three picks for the next big engineering achievements. First, we must make Hydrogen economically friendly to produce. Second, be able to produce synthetic oil on a large scale, and third, create much more energy efficient and economical solar panels.
Oil will, inevitably, one day no longer be cost efficient enough to drill for and refine. This will lead to a problem seeing how almost anything that is used for transportation today runs off an oil byproduct. There are many alternative fuels being researched now. Ranking among the top of the list is biofuels such and biodiesel and ethanol, and hydrogen. Hydrogen seems to be the most logical answer to our growing energy problem. It can be produced from water, which is abundant all over our earths surface, and the only byproduct is water. Biofuels would be my last pick, as the only country with the capabilities to grow enough bio material is the United States, and right now we are considered the worlds food bank. Prices on food would come up dramatically and we would sink into another depression. Starvation in countries that depend on our food supply would sky rocket. Hydrogen is safe, energy dense, and won’t diminish our food supply. Should the western world find a safe alternative to oil in the form of hydrogen, our dependence on OPEC would no longer be a problem, and the political instability in the Middle East would no longer be a threat to the western world. The war on terror might theoretically be over should we find an...
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