Fueling the Debate Over Alternative Fuels

My partner in internet radio "crime", Jazz Shaw, spent the last half of last week at the New York City Auto Show (his field dispatches can be found here and here). However, the story that he brought back from Manhattan that interested me the most was this one (courtesy of Green Dreams).

“We need a simple way to store and carry hydrogen energy and a simple process to produce hydrogen, said Y.H. Percival Zhang, assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech.

Using synthetic biology approaches, Zhang and colleagues Barbara R. Evans and Jonathan R. Mielenz of ORNL, and Robert C. Hopkins and Michael W.W. Adams of the University of Georgia, are using a combination of 13 enzymes never found together in nature to completely convert polysaccharides (C6H10O5) and water into hydrogen when and where that form of energy is needed. This “synthetic enzymatic pathway” research appears in the May 23 issue of PLoS ONE, the online, open-access journal from the Public Library of Science.

Here is an exciting practical alternate fuel that does not use foodstuffs (a la ethanol) in it's generation and yet we have politicians who are stuck on dictating which form of "alternative" energy we can use (Governor Pawlenty and former President Bush with corn ethanol and current President Obama with electricity). Both of the current, politically popular alternatives have their disadvantages - ethanol with it's dependence on foodstuffs and electric fuel cells because....well where do you think the electricity comes from (hint coal fired and nuclear POWER PLANTS).......

Rather than governement deciding which alternative fuel will be the "winner" in the free market, how about we let the smart folks (like the smart folks at Virginia Tech) do their thing and figure out the best way to make alternative fuels that are easy to produce, easy to convert existing cars to and (most importantly) easy for the country to convert to. It is the common sense thing to do...