The Oil Drum Australia has a great post this week about tidal power construction all across the world, including the attractive ‘Energy Island’ concept pictured. The article talks about tidal, ocean current and wave projects from the UK, US, New Zealand, Taiwan and Canada, amongst many others. The UK could potentially derive 25% of its power just from wave energy, not to mention its huge resources of tidal power in the Severn Estuary and on the coasts of Scotland. Also discussed is OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), which creates power from the heat differential between warm surface water and cold deep water.
In other news, Oil has never been higher priced in history than it is today, at $102.08 a barrel. Looks like we’re going to need a lot of this alternative energy supply. One of the projects mentioned at the bottom of the Oil Drum article is for floating islands of power generation producing hydrogen to fuel passing ships. Neat.
The original “Mad Max” was about a post-nuclear war Australia, where the war had been caused by countries vying for dwindling oil supplies. But what if the same could happen, only the precious substance was water? 
Anyone who has been following the recent missions to Mars are familiar with the ongoing speculation about if and how much water might exist on the Red Planet. This is an extremely important question, because the presence of easily accessible water would mean that future manned missions to Mars could use that water to produce fuel once they arrive – rather than having to bring it with them. 
