By Atty. Antonio P. Pekas
Now that vehicles have to fall in line to get gas or diesel fuel, we are forced to recall our stupidity as a nation. For many years already, we had been talking of alternative fuels particularly bio-fuels—alcohol in lieu of gasoline or biodiesel as replacement of diesel fuel from OPEC juice or from other sources like Russia or Canada, etc.
Actually, the gasoline you are now buying from the pumps is diluted with 5% alcohol from plant sources such as corn. Diesel fuel being sold in gas stations is diluted with about 10% coconut oil. These are the results of our humble effort not to be totally dependent on the Arab nations and to save on costs of importation.
Yet we could have done better. Thus, I say it again, these are results of our stupidity. We realized this again of late when the Iranians started bombing oil producers like Saudi Arabia and others allied with the US and Israel and oil tankers transporting oil through the straight of Hormuz. So much so that some vehicle owners and taxi drivers even had to line up overnight to get filled up in the pumps.
Had we tried harder over the years to find cheaper ways to come up with biodiesel or alcogas (alcohol and gasoline) we should be producing all our oil needs by now. Actually, some of the old traditional diesel engines can actually run on coconut oil but it would be very expensive so other cheaper sources were suggested like sorghum. The manufacturing process though would, however, have to be further debugged.
As to alcohol, the traditional gasoline engines can actually run on alcohol but there are still problems here and there that have to be solved such as its bad effects on engine spare parts such as gaskets and some critical metal parts.
With further experimentation by our brilliant engineers and scientists, we could have perfected the production of a viable alcogas or biodiesel.
But with our ningas cogon attitude and the willy nilly attitude of our politicians when it came to exerting effort for our welfare, we are still stuck in our primitive ways.
**
