Make Your Own Diesel

This video shows how an American bloke has his diesel engine running on any oil, check it out. I'm placing this here to motivate my fellow Kiwis to get in touch with their elected representatives, insisting they stop messing about, and treat the current fuel situation as the real crisis that it is.

Here's how the government can do this:

1. Get the mechanical and chemical engineering departments of New Zealand universities together to sort out what works best, quickest, ignoring environmental, health and safety, just how to get enough diesel to power emergency response, trains, ferries, farms, hospitals and key transport and agriculture;
2. Mobilise the NZ Army engineers;
3. Using existing emergency legislation, grab all those elements needed to feed NZ's own set-up; 
4. Cease exporting oil in the immediate sense.
5. As a side project look at all wood waste and how much of it can be quickly turned to ethanol;
6. Treat LPG as like 4 and 5 above;
7. Then roll this out; what is created is a system of liquid fuels which can all run engines of differing types whether it be fuel oil, diesel, petrol etc.,
8. You've got 60 days.

Cook Strait Tunnel

How about this idea for a New Zealand Cook Strait road tunnel:-

The route: in the below illustration, the approach over land from the South Island is from Picton to just before West Head (subject to survey ). 

Possible methods of construction:-

My idea would differ from the above illustration. I would both tether the tube to the bottom and where this is not feasible, due to depth, use submerged buoys; the tube would then hang below.

Power for the tunnel could be generated by tides both ways, turbines could be mounted on top of the main tubes carrying services. I would have three tubes; one dedicated northbound, the other dedicated southbound, with a service tube carrying maintenance, power and cabling. 

There is no rail tube, sorry, there just isn't enough rail freight for it to be viable. Rail could use skeletal trailers to bring their freight by road, maybe allowing road trains, they'd then transfer their loads back to rail. 

The service tunnel, however, could replace the main inter-island power cable, carry fibre optics, along with the tidal electric generation turbines.

The big cost is in the engineering of the tunnel tubes, and the approaches by road through the Marlborough Sounds and in the North Island. There I'd have the road going north, coming out at Porirua, and another coming in the back of Wellington at about Karori. The Porirua link would speed traffic north to Auckland faster.

Think of the efficiency gains this would generate for the New Zealand economy and the employment it would create.