The world is in a critical situation both with global warming and the price of fuel. The obvious solution that is emerging is electric cars. That will, of course, mean a lot of people in the oil, fuel and, internal combustion industries will be put out of work. This means so many millions of workers that it could do major damage to the global economy.
There is a way for the existing industries to possibly save themselves. How about tinkering with the combustion process itself?
We have seen how utterly inefficient a car engine is:
https://markmeekprogress.blogspot.com/2012/03/greatest-waste-of-fuel-and-energy.html?m=0
My idea of tinkering with the combustion process is called "Gamma Burning". The bonds that hold atoms together as molecules contain energy, the bonds can also be broken by energy. If the molecular bonds release more energy when the bonds are broken than it takes to break them, the material will burn because the breaking process will be self-sustaining.
Most fuels that we use are based on carbon atoms that were put together in plants by the energy of sunlight. When the fuel is burned, and the molecular bonds broken, the solar energy that originally put the molecules together is released. When hydrogen is used as fuel the atoms are diatomic and the energy comes from breaking the bond between them. The energy for the bond actually came from the supernova of the star that preceded the sun. Some of the matter thrown outward by the supernova fell back together to form the present Solar System, the sun and planets.
Burning fuel gives us energy by releasing the energy in the molecular bonds of the fuel, but the heat of combustion is a very crude and inefficient way to release the energy of those bonds as we see in the link above.
What if there was another way to release the energy in the molecular bonds? Suppose that we could use gamma rays, which are the shortest wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, to snap the bonds and release their energy? This would be far more efficient than the crude combustion that we use now. Some of the released energy would go back to generate more gamma rays, and continue the process.
My concept of Gamma Burning is described in the following link:
https://markmeekprogress.blogspot.com/2009/06/gamma-burning.html?m=0
But one thing that we must not forget about the burning process, and Gamma Burning will not solve this, is that we are permanently creating water at the expense of oxygen in the air, as described in the following link:
https://markmeekprogress.blogspot.com/2009/06/hydrogen-peril.html?m=0
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