When I visited Death Valley last summer, I received a wake-up call: a single gallon of regular gasoline was five dollars and eighty cents. After thinking about it, I realized that this could be the future for many fellow Americans if nothing was done to stop the rise of fuel and/or find new sources of fuel.

            Of all the ways proposed to replace or supplement gasoline, electric cars seem like an obvious alternative; after all, they have been around almost as long as the internal combustion engine itself. However, as you probably know, most of these cars can only go about forty miles on a charge, however, if battery exchange stations were set up, much like gas stations or propane tank exchange stations today, electric cars would seem like a great idea. You are probably wondering how we would get all of the electricity to power these cars, right? I have an answer for that: use renewable existing technologies like solar, wind, and nuclear power, and while we are at it, we can eliminate the coal and oil burning power plants too.

            Another obvious idea is to convert all of our vehicles to use biofuels, specifically ethanol and biodiesel. One of the most successful programs using ethanol can be found in Brazil, where they have used sugar cane to nearly stop their importation of oil, using fermented sugar cane. However, using sugar cane (and for that matter, corn too) is wasteful as nearly the whole plant is thrown away and only the ‘food part’ is used, making food prices go up. Fortunately, there is an answer to that too: cellulosic ethanol uses all plant parts containing cellulose to make ethanol, plus, you can use non-food plants, saving everyone money. Unfortunaely, ethanol doesn’t have enough power for trucks, but we can use biodiesel, something that many people who own diesel powered cars have already done. America probably has the most materials availible to be converted into biodiesel, mainly leftover vegetable oil from fast-food restaurants.

            A third possible, mostly experimental, alternative fuel is hydrogen. Hydrogen is probably the most expensive due to the lack of a hydrogen infrastructure and the relative newness of the technology. It is also very dangerous, as demonstrated by the Hindenburg disaster, so we would essentially be driving minature Hindenburgs around, which doesn’t seem like a great idea to me.