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So yesterday, the bushy browed Chancellor of Great Britain delayed the proposed fuel duty hike until October. This is obviously a political decision that Brownie tried out previously and found it worked to avoid a political crisis, even though the nations coffers are worse than empty. Todays leading politicians are in a difficult position now, spouting an excuse called global warming and green issues that people used to laugh at 10 years ago as a reason why people must pay through the nose for petrol and fuel in general. Meanwhile they manage a decrepit fiscal policy that has seen Britain go from briefly in the black to a spiralling pair of deficits for 10 years and it is the tax-payer that has to fund it all.

Enough, of the political moan, we have a creeping fuel crisis in Britain and it looks like a tunnel with no light at the end of it. Oil company explorations are just not as fruitful as they once were, discoveries of oil and gas reserves are becoming rarer and more difficult to reach. Britain now imports more oil than it exports, North sea reserves are dwindling. It is only oil exploration technology that has stopped the world grinding to a halt for the last 10 years or so. When i was growing up during the 1970's fuel crisis, when petrol hit the alarming price of a pound a gallon!, the pundits claimed we only have about 20-30 years of oil left and then we will have to use something else. As a small child i didnt care much for the scaremongering, my imagination of the 21st century was of a tech world with flying cars and frequent trips into space for everyone! As an adult some 30 years later i find it, somewhat frustrating that my visions of the future were probably 200 years premature.

Is there ever going to be a solution to our ongoing fuel crisis in the UK and in fact almost everywhere soon as demand just keeps outstripping supply and new energy discoveries?. Whatever the solution is, it will need to be a resource that is incredibly abundant, almost limitless and used to create energy in a way not tried in a commercial way before.

When i was at secondary school, i didn't learn an incredible amount that i hadn't read or seen elsewhere, but one science experiment in school always stands out as a possible solution in my mind. I believe i was probably about 14 years old and an experiment with water was shown to us. Water we all know is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen and all you do is run an electric current through the water. Its called Electrolysis if my memory serves me right. The experiment showed that after a short period of Electrolysis, a chemical reaction would occur and the water would be split into hydrogen and oxygen. You could prove it by holding a match near the water and you would get a big 'pop' as the hydrogen exploded as it neared the flame. Voila! you have explosive energy from water.

I would very much like to know why this cannot be developed to avert the British fuel crisis. Surely it doesn't take a Shell or Exxon to modify the internal combustion engine to run on water and explode hydrogen instead of gasoline or diesel. We all know when you have an engine running, it creates its own electrical supply with a generator. So in theory, you could have an engine running self-sustained as long as it had water to use as its fuel source.

I'm not an engineer or scientist, but to me the theory of water-fueled/electrolysis, doesnt sound any more far fetched than the existing technologies we already use everyday. All you need is an controlled explosion to drive a piston and ultimately any engine, why not use hydrogen from the most abundant resource on the planet.?

I'm hoping that somebody can tell me why this wouldn't be possible to achieve, else i will be forever thinking that really the whole thing is a conspiracy between governments and their biggest tax-payers, the oil companies. No government in the world is going to want to see the biggest providers of their bulk revenue, go obsolete overnight. The collapse of BP, Shell, Esso and Exxon would have catastrophic results for anyone trying to balance a huge deficit. Maybe this is why, British people have to endure crippling energy costs for life and the fuel crisis will be with us for every generation to come.