With oil from the wreck of the Deepwater Horizon rig con-inuing to flow into the Gulf )f Mexico and the direct cost of cleaning up the worst environmental disaster in United States history well over $2 billion, it’s clearly time to find new solutions for our energy needs.
Part of the problem is that the decision to continue relying on oil has always been , portrayed as the lesser evil of a difficult choice between continuing on along the profitable path of “business as usual” and that of sacrificing profits to develop expensive new alternative technologies. This is wrong.
Environmentalists and business lead-ers should never have been at odds over this issue. Those who are not convinced by evidence of global warming should be inspired by the need to power our ever-developing world in a safe, reliable way. The failures of the attempts to repair the leak demonstrate that the oil industry has reached the limits of its engineering.
Though many are arguing otherwise, a planet-wide switch to alternative fuels is possible. Researchers and scientists have made huge advances in the fields of wind, solar and bio-fuel technology - technologies that are already in use, as can be seen by the wind farms sprouting up around the World.
One Virgin-backed start-up business, Gevo, uses the fermentation of sugar cane, grain crops and sugar beets to create isobutanol, an environmentally friendly fuel that can be used to power existing models of automobiles without any modifications. In future, we hope to switch to more planet-friendly plant biomass. Ours is just one of the many start-up companies in this field working on technologies that may someday help to replace oil.
One of the biggest obstacles alternative energy companies face is that of scale. If we are going to succeed, governments around the world have to find ways to support the building of a new infrastructure - especially adapting refining plants and creating cost-effective distribution systems.
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