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ON Dec. 17, 2007, Sen. Aquilino Pimentel delivered a privileged
speech that began by asking if we were, all of us, “suckers” or
more kindly “plain happy-go-lucky people” and ended with a
“sigh of regret” that “public corruption goes on its merry way
and public service deteriorates by the day in this land… so cursed
by acrobats masquerading as government officials.”
What did we do to deserve this outpouring of
senatorial scorn? Twenty-one years ago, a bureaucrat in a government
department turned down a request for support by an Ilonggo inventor
of a vehicle that he claimed used water as fuel. Four years ago,
another inventor was denied help by the same department for a
turbine that used ocean tide to generate electricity. In both cases,
Pimentel was the sponsor.
Though tempted, I’ll refrain from making
comments on Pimentel’s prose style and logic. I shall confine
myself instead to the machines that failed to win approval from the
Department of Science and Technology (DOST).
I agree with Pimentel’s main—if indeed that
was his main—message: that we do not give enough support and
recognition to Filipino inventors.
Giving more money to DOST will not necessarily
work. Being a government office, it’s constrained in its use of
funds by strict disbursement and accounting rules. Inventions or
technical innovations are better dealt with in private transactions
between the inventor and a risk-taker, in the expectation of profit
by both.
In much the same way as large corporations are
not the ideal incubators of ideas that lead to “breakthrough”
inventions, governments and their departments are not easily moved
to action by the importuning of an inventor who in most cases is an
engineer who lacks the persuasive skills of a salesman.
Indeed, Ray Kurzweil, the legendary American
inventor, in his essay Kurzweil’s Rules of Invention (Technology
Review, MIT, May 2004), codified them into three steps. The first is
to write an advertising brochure. The second is to use this brochure
to recruit intended users and the third is to “engage in some
fantasy” like explaining to an indifferent audience how “you
solved the challenging problems underlying your new invention.”
Inventions are responses to market needs that
attract venture capitalists.
Our industrial base is too narrow and our
industrial capability too puny for potentially large projects like
Daniel Dingle’s water-fueled car or Isidro Umali Ursua’s
tide-driven turbine. They could have won support in industrialized
countries with large communities of scientists, engineers,
technologists and entrepreneurs.
Take Dingle’s car. It’s not possible that it
uses H2O from the faucet as the fuel. But hydrogen, if combined with
oxygen in the right proportions, can explosively activate a piston.
To obtain the hydrogen from water the process known as electrolysis
is key. To put all this together into a device that can drive an
internal combustion (IC) engine is a huge technical problem.
It might be that Dingle was able to solve it. If
so, he should talk to Ford or Toyota and not to DOST.
Hydrogen fuel cell cars are now being designed,
developed and tested in Japan, the US and Germany. Perhaps by the
middle of the century they might be on the market but unless their
price is competitive with gasoline IC vehicles, it would take many
more years before they become a people’s car.
It’s not true, as Pimentel said, that a
hydrogen fuel cell car is environmentally benign. The production of
hydrogen results in large emissions of CO2 whether in factories or
on board vehicles.
As regards Ursua’s turbine, the basic idea is
not novel and has been on the drawing boards and work benches of
engineers in many developed and developing countries.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said, in
its Scenarios of the Evolution of Renewables to 2030, that tide and
wave today generates less than one percent of electricity (TWh) that
could go up to 25 percent by 2030 or a rate of increase of 46 times.
For this reason, it’s being looked at
seriously in many countries but daunting technical problems in
hydrology, metallurgy and turbine design have to be solved and
economically overcome.
Certainly this is a technology that we should
consider along with geothermal, wind and solar but perhaps not for
baseload power yet.
Instead of going it alone, as Pimentel seems to
be suggesting, DOST should collaborate with other countries,
particularly with South Korea, that’s doing the R&D with funds
provided by its Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST). DOST and
MOST can work hand in hand more readily than with a private sector
partner. In this venture, Ursua could be the country’s project
leader.
I am amazed that Pimentel with his staff and
access to information could have mustered the chutzpah to stand
before his peers to spout factoids.
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