It turns out the Toyota Prius is not just the number one selling hybrid vehicle. It's also #1 in consumption of "rare earth" metals. Each Prius built requires a little more than two pounds of neodymium, and each Prius battery made gobbles up 22 to 33 pounds of lanthanum. Why is that important? Well, right now, China is the world's biggest producer of rare earth metals, and China wants to keep much of that on its home soil. Read more with this link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090831/india_nm/india420934

What's going to happen to the Chevy Volt? General Motors has put lots of eggs in the Volt basket, and frankly, so have I. Oh, don't get me wrong, I know there were major concerns even before the automaker filed for bankruptcy. The battery may not be up to par, the projected price keeps going up, the specs are modest (especially compared to the speed and range numbers Telsa Motors claims for its models), it will not likely turn a profit, and could in fact become a financial disaster. The reason I'm excited about the Volt, is that somebody has to do it, somebody has to lead the charge on the future of automotive propulsion, and at least GM is giving it a serious try.
That is, if the struggling automaker proceeds with the plan. Check out this Scientific American article for more.

I was just learning to drive when the first energy crisis hit, and gasoline suddenly became something you had to budget for. That was 35 years ago, and although automobiles have become much safer and more fuel efficient since then, there has been relatively little progress on the alternative fuels front. We're importing more foreign oil than ever. The Chevy Volt is a step in the right direction by a major player in the automotive industry. The Volt could be described as, in a sense, the opposite of a typical hybrid. Your standard Toyota Prius is essentially a gas powered vehicle, with an electric motor for "assist." The Volt is essentially an electric vehicle, with a small gas engine for "assist."

Fuel cells hold promise for the future, but many experts say practical, moderately priced fuel cell vehicles are decades away. We need something now, and the Volt, for all its shortcomings, is supposed to hit the road next year. That is, if GM, and it's new major shareholder, the tax-paying public, still plans to build it. This article quotes a GM spokesperson as saying the Volts is still "as high a priority" as GM has right now.

Tucked away in a quiet corner of UCONN's John Dempsey hospital complex in Farmington, Connecticut, sits a molecular biology lab run by a small company with a big idea. Arbor Fuel is fermenting butanol from cellulose, using the same yeast you put in your bread maker.

What's so big about that?

Well, cellulose is found in pretty much everything that grows on the planet... and butanol, well butanol just may be THE biofuel of the future. Much government and media attention has been focused on ethanol in recent years, but the increased use of ethanol has had unintended consequences. An article in Time Magazine Online labels ethanol an eco-disaster, and blames farm-grown biofuels for a global food crisis and accelerated deforestation in South America. Ethanol also has lower energy content than gasoline, and it absorbs water from the air which makes it corrosive inside a car's engine.
According to the Arbor Fuel team, butanol solves those problems. A clean burning renewable fuel, with nearly the same energy content as gasoline, butanol doesn't require any modifications to gas engines. And most importantly, it's not made from things people eat.
"We've been using the Hartford Courant and the New York Times," says Arbor Fuel's Steven Henck. "But were not relying solely on newspaper. We've also been using corn cobs, white paper-- office waste paper, and wood chips. We're taking things that normally would be going into a landfill and reusing them."
If this is all starting to sound a little too good to be true, well, until recently, it was. You see, yeast doesn't eat cellulose, and it doesn't make butanol. But the Arbor Fuel team knew a common fungus that grows on trees loves cellulose, so they spliced a few Aspergillus fungus genes into the yeast, and that did the trick. Making butanol with that yeast required more gene splicing.
"Almost a dozen genes needed to be modified to make the yeast process cellulose-- something it doesn't normally do-- and ferment it to butanol-- also something it doesn't normally do." says Henck.
But, the Arbor Fuel team has one last hurdle to clear. The cellulose-eating, butanol-making yeast they created is a lab strain. They need an industrial strain, robust enough to use in mass production. When that happens, it won't happen in a chemical plant or refinery, but in a facility that poses no more environmental hazard than a bakery. In fact, open the incubators in Arbor Fuel's lab, and the fermenting butanol smells just like bread rising or beer brewing.
And one more thing. Ethanol has been criticized for increasing global warming. You see, plants contain carbon dioxide, and when they are harvested, that CO2 is released into the atmosphere. But Arbor Fuel's process is designed to allow the fermentation of butanol using waste products, so no new harvesting of vegetation is necessary.

So when might we see butanol at the gas station?

Well, a 2007 Federal Law requires the companies that blend gasoline to add increasing amounts of renewable fuels into the gas they sell over the next decade.
Henck believes butanol's combination of horsepower and green power will appeal to those companies. So, he can't say when we'll see butanol at the gas station, but he firmly believes we will.

Learn More:

To learn more about BUTANOL, check out the story of a man who traveled the country in a '92 Buick running on butanol, and got better fuel economy and dramatically lower emissions.