Transportation & Energy...

The theme at this year’s North American International Auto Show in Detroit was green, green, green. Everyone has a concept car that runs on electricity, or it’s a plug-in hybrid, or you can fill the tank with long-lasting, eco-friendly pixie dust. Any of these would be improvements over our current gasoline-fueled cars, but none of the models seen in Detroit will debut before 2009, if ever.

GM is making more of an effort than most to get on the green wagon this year. (This is the same company that canceled, then smashed, its EV1 program, as documented in the 2006 movie “Who Killed the Electric Car?”) In addition to the three plug-in hybrid concept models it introduced, the company announced its partnership with Coskata to create an ethanol fuel from bio-waste such as cornstalks and even municipal waste.

The partnership between the fuel maker and the auto manufacturer is called A Next Generation Ethanol Company. Catchy, no? The process used to make the fuel involves “gasifying” the solid waste, such as wood chips or household trash, then feeding the gas to microbes that release ethanol as a byproduct. The idea is to use wheat straw or cornstalks after the food has been harvested, or sticks and leaves from the forest floor.

In a video press release distributed by GM, Sean Captain of Popular Science brings up the idea of clearing out debris from the forest floor and turning it into fuel as a way to curb forest fires in the American West and make a problem into a positive. There are as many voices opposing this solution to forest fires as supporting it, since the biomass on the ground is what makes new soil and provides habitat for creatures mostly small. So sending a giant Roomba into the Willamette National Forest might not be the solution, even if the result is inexpensive ethanol.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khasla, who is a major investor in A Next Generation Ethanol Company, says in the video press release that he dreams of $1.99 fuel at every Wal-Mart. Is two bucks per gallon the lowest price he can dream of when electric cars are sipping from the grid at pennies per charge? And isn’t Wal-Mart, with its acres of black-topped parking lots and disposable merchandise, part of the global warming problem? Would ethanol made from cornstalks offset the damage Wal-Mart has done? Probably not, but maybe this new fuel goes way beyond expectations.