Summary of roundtable discussion

Summary of Roundtable Discussion

Four topics were discussed during a roundtable discussion. The first topic was about bio fuel, followed by green chemistry, RFID chips and carbon capture and storage technology. Below is a summary of the main points that were covered.

The first topic discussed was about bio fuel as the future alternative to fossil fuel. The moderator started with a brief introduction of bio fuel and ‘for’ group stated reasons as to why there’s a need to look for alternative energy source. The ‘against’ group rebutted stating that the economic cost and environment cost is not worth to invest in developing bio fuel technology.

The second topic was green chemistry where the ‘for’ group explained the usefulness of the technology and listed a couple of examples which it could be used. i.e converting plastic bottles into carbon microsphere. The ‘against’ team rebutted pointing that the technology still need further research and finances, not worth for Singapore to invest especially in times of global economic crisis.

The third topic was installing RFID chips in human beings. The usefulness of the chip was presented such as able to locate people during disaster or to find the locations of wanted people and to have them captured. However, the opposing team argued that moral issues were at stake as not everyone want to themselves being to be track down at any time with a click of a button as some of them want to have their privacy to themselves. The cost of the technology was considered also and not every country has the money to adopt this technology.

The last topic was carbon capture and storage technology. The advantages were discussed by the ‘for’ team and the main benefit was to be able to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. But the opposing team argued that for that benefit to happen, the technology has to be implemented in a large scale and not just a nation only.

E-Portfolio 4

E-portfolio 4

My group topic for roundtable discussion was to identify a technology or a set of technology which certain groups(e.g companies, governments or citizen groups) have either fully resisted or opposed only partially adopted in recent years and why do we think such technologies should be adopted or not to be. Bits of discussion was done and my group decided to talk about biofuels.Some reading was done over the internet.

The first article was taken from The Straits Times, Jan 8 2009. It talks about the first flight in US to use biofuel. Although biofuels were used in the flight, conventional fuels were used at the same time. The reason being was that the first flight was meant to be a demonstration flight to prove that biofuels could be used in airplanes. It also talks about the possibility of one day planes would used biofuels to fly. But in order to that to happen, there must be a large scale production of the biofuels such as using second-generation biofuels. This website is a good example as to briefly explain why there is still not much push into replacing traditional fuel with biofuels.

The second article was from a British website ,http://biofuel.org.uk/. General information about first generation of biofuel can be found from this website. Although not much information about the advantages and disadvantages of using biofuels were mentioned, the process of making of biofuels was mentioned. Thus this website does not provide much information needed to support the use of biofuels.

The third article is relevant as it does answer some of the issues of using biofuels as an alternative energy. It tries to balance between the use of biofuel based on their pros and cons. It gives the reader an idea on what kind of questions to ask about the use of biofuels and it can be relevant to the topic question.