Question: do you think that the rebellions in the middle east will cause the fuel crisis to come to a head, and your work and others like it will gain more investment to find an alternative or will it be too late?

Suze Kundu answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Heya 🙂

I think that it will highlight the fact that these oil-rich countries have a real political hold over other countries. The annoying thing is that this is the very reason that many companies and countries are reluctant to accept any viable alternatives, such as hydrogen for water splitting, as each country could be fairly self-sufficient.

In an ideal world, people would stop and think ‘OK, hang on a minute, if they keep doing this, we’re going to have to change something, rather than being held at ransom for petrol’, but I think that most people either don’t know what other options there are out there, or are scared that moving to an alternative energy system would mean a lot of changes, and a lot of money spent on new engines, new energy delivery systems, etc. It’s a it like when they started changing TV output from analogue to digital. The change forced people to go out and buy a digibox, even though they had a perfectly good TV (even if, like me, they couldn’t get Channel 5 back then!). It’s a difficult time for everyone, with the economy being so bad at the moment, so people would think twice about spending money until they really understand the situation. I guess that half of my battle is to make people more aware of this, which is something that I can at least start in younger kids when I do school demos and explain what I’m working on.

What do you think will happen as a consequence of the situation over in the Middle East?