WeAreTheKey

http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20056/
"Coskata of Warrenville, IL, a new company that claims it can make ethanol from wood chips, grass, and trash--including old tires--for a dollar a gallon. That's significantly less than it costs to make the biofuel from corn grain, which is the source of almost all the ethanol made in the United States."

Ethanol on a big scale
"the first large-scale study shows that switchgrass yields more than five times the energy needed to grow, harvest, and transport the grass and convert it to ethanol. The results could propel efforts to sow millions of hectares of marginal farmland with biofuel crops."

I listened to Coast to Coast AM last night, and they had a guest on discussing many different aspects of using alcohol as a fuel, how you can buy conversion kits for a few hundred $, so that your car can run equally well on alcohol or gasoline, and many other things.

Apparently, there are many different kinds of plants which can be grown as a crop on as little as ONE acre, which could provide enough clean-burning fuel to last you all year AND have a surplus to sell to your neighbors. One of the best sounding plants was Cattails! Those swampy plants apparently can pump out the alcohol massively, and pretty much anyone with a little bit of land can build their own distillation tanks, plant some of this stuff, convert their cars, and stop giving money to the oil companies!

Also, there is almost no wear & tear on vehicles running on alcohol, and a car could easily go for 500,000 - 1,000,000 miles. Next to zero air pollution, AND it burns cooler than gasoline so our cars would stay cooler and oveheat less.
AND the money from locally-grown fuel would circulate back through our economies instead of disappearing into a foreign bank account, never to be seen again.

The best part is, it doesn't rely on an industry to manage, it can be done on a local scale by many, many people all across the country, and it costs much less than gas to fill your tank!

The book is a little expensive, but here's the guys website if anyone's interested in learning more about this. I think it's a great, revolutionary idea, and combined with modern solar power, I think we'll have all the energy we need!

www.alcoholcanbeagas.com

Wow! Assuming his facts are true, it sounds like the most reasonable transition from where we are now. People wouldn't have to spend money to buy new cars, but simply convert their current engines. And I assume the current fuel station pumps would have no trouble pumping alcohol fuel. Therefore, there would be very little change in infrastructure that would have to be implemented. Save the planet, become fuel-independent, and still drive our cars! It almost sounds too good to be true.