Sky, anybody that has a "miracle" alternative fuel system doesn't need the federal government to supply $. There are several silicon valley venture capital firms that will throw piles of money at any program that remotely appears viable. If there is a legitimate system that is used in other parts of the world those boys would be on it like white on rice. If something genuine is to be found I'd bet those folks will finance it. And if you or anyone else thinks the "big evil oil companies" and their master, the more evil Darth Cheney, can buy those uber rich guys off you need to put down the Olbemann pipe.

Yeah, the Brasil ethanol story is really neat until you start studying the realities of it. They essentially use just about all they make, as you mentioned, from sugar cane. Sugar cane produces about three times more product per acre than corn, and the efficiencies of it as far as energy yield are increased by the use of the waste (cane stalks mostly) being used to fuel the conversion process. In this country we're mostly not able to grow sugar cane (Except Fl, and Hi), and our environmental watchdogs wouldn't allow us to burn the stalks either. Ethanol can't come close to surviving without federal subsidies, and foreign sources of sugar cane based ethanol are priced out because Congress won't drop a 54 cent per gallon import duty that makes that source uncompetitive. And if you think Brazil has forsaken petroleum based fuel you need to do a database search on Petrobras, and their latest OFFSHORE oil discoveries that will likely put them in the world's top 10 of oil producers. Since Petrobras is a state owned oil company, and Brazil is mostly a socialist nation the enviro nuts don't bother them. Hmmmm. They have also discoverd offshore oil under thick salt layers where geologists in the past believed there could not be oil reserves, so yet another potential expansion of previously unknown geologic formations that haven't been explored could be available to further expand the potential for more new crude discoveries.

There are all sorts of proposed alternaives out there, but over and over they fail to be price competitive when they have to be scaled up to meet the full market demand. There's only one other form of energy that has anything close to the distribution system in place to readily displace gasoline.........that's electricity, and again, even with all the chat about plug in hybrids, and Honda's newly announced vehiclle yesterday, they still only compete in a boutique market of short, local trips.