Rhosty, I suggest you reread what I've written more carefully.

I specifically said "I'm not saying diesel engines couldn't run on Australian light crude; I'm saying they couldn't run on oil that's too light to refine." In other words, if an unmodified diesel engine can run on it, it's not too light to refine.

I DIDN'T MAKE THE ABSURD CLAIM that ceramic fuel cells can't run on methane. Of course they can. But they don't have polymers in them for the simple reason that polymers can't withstand the high operating temperatures. Whatever you saw flex in the Bluegen fuel cell was either a ceramic or a metal. And I expect you have seen ceramics flex before and not realised it. Specifically you've almost certainly seen glass fibres, which can flex because they're very thin. I expect the Bluegen fuel cells included some very thin ceramic components. Or maybe what you saw was metallic. But it certainly wasn't a polymer.

"Methane is mostly hydrogen with a few carbon atoms included in the methane molecule."
If you're not lying about your background, you know that's not true.

Most fuel cells work by letting hydrogen ions through. They can't let methane molecules through (indeed they can't let carbon atoms through in any form) so they can't run on methane. But solid oxide fuel cells (including the Bluegen ones) let oxide ions through instead, so they can run on methane.

Are you overestimating our ability to extract oil without spilling it? Or do you just think the spills don't matter?

With the arguable exception of some of the trade deals Australia has made, we have never lost our economic sovereignty.

Around 95% of corporate australia is now headquartered offshore, Adian, and as the first consequence the tax they used to contribute to consolidated revenue goes elsewhere.

And the reason PM Howard gave as his reason for introducing his GST.

Moreover, many of our iconic industries are now in foreign hands and more and more of our manufactured goods are entirely source offshore.

Our big four banks are controlled by foreign hedge funds, and domestic and exponentially growing foreign debt is at record highs!

You may consider that economic sovereignty? however I don't!

I'll concede that thin glass fibres flex, else there would be no optic fibre roll out.

You go too far when you infer that I lie.

If you understood just one thing, you would understand that when a crippling injury costs you your career and your marriage, all that you have left to confer any self esteem, is your integrity!

Please don't ever impugn mine ever again.

You remind me of a famous visiting American marine biologist, who made the news during the late seventies?

She examined our reef and told us, that our fragile reef, was just too fragile to tolerate exploration or mining.

Now given the way the reef can and does repair itself after cyclone damage or the work of the crown of thorns starfish, the reef is just not that fragile or in that much danger, save from the exponentially growing threat of atmospheric carbon and the consequent acidification of our oceans, the lungs of the world.

Hence the need to choose fuel types, regardless where we get them from, which produce far less.

Of course I would prefer alternatives, but that road is stymied by a lack of funding; and that funding is stymied by belligerent greens and their par for the course obsessions.

THey went into the same mendacious moribund meltdown, when "we" were going to drill in Bass Strait. With all sorts of dire (cry wolf) warnings of harm to the marine habitat!

As history demonstrates, the actual experience has been precisely the opposite.