By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

LAS VEGAS, Nevada --Energy gazillionaire T. Boone Pickens has been singing a variation of the same song for several years now, but it's a tune worthy of repeat play:  The planet, says a man who made billions in petroleum exploration and ought to know his stuff, is using more oil than it produces, the situation isn't going to improve and nobody's doing much of anything about it.

"America is in a hell of a bad spot," he said in a presentation Tuesday at the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles annual conference here.

Without a radical reduction in the nation's appetite for imported crude, which now accounts for 72 percent of our total daily consumption, "we are going to be reduced to something less than the superpower we are now."

For Pickens, who has become one of the country's biggest backers of wind energy and of natural gas as a transportation fuel, the cure is painful but necessary.

We must cut back on the use of oil for automotive fuels and shepherd in a rapid and widespread adoption of domestically produced alternative fuels, he said,

Pickens, who left the oil exploration business in 1996 to set up his BP Capital Management investment company and, it turned out, to become one of the nation's biggest alternative energy boosters, has big holdings in natural gas and, not coincidentally,  believes it to be the best interim solution on the transportation side of things.

"Everything" from propane to biofuels will have a place in the effort to reduce oil consumption, he said, but available supplies of domestically produced natural gas are the largest "alternative" energy source around and, if used entirely for transportation fuel, could reduce oil imports by 38 percent.

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It's starting to look as if corn-based ethanol's future is dimming, although corn futures – the kind traded in the commodities market  -- are still soaring.

Critics of using one of the world's basic food crops as a feedstock for fuel for cars and trucks have been scoring points in the debate over the past few months as prices of most grain-based and grain-fed foods climb. 

Many insist that using corn for ethanol – and diverting land once used for other crops in order to increase corn supplies – is a big factor in those food price increases.  the federal Department of Argiculture has estimated that corn ethanol and other biofuels are responsible for 20 percent of the food price surge.

On Monday, a group of 24 Republican senators – including GOP presidential candidate John McCain -- sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking that it alter rules that require a 400 percent increase in U.S. ethanol production  by 2022, to 36 billion gallons a year from just over 7 billion gallons last year.

The senators' letter says that the ramp-up should be reduced, or suspended, to put more corn back into the food chain, where it is used for animal feed, and to free up land now used for corn for increased production of cereal grains such as wheat.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also have said that government promotion of corn-based ethanol ought to be reexamined in light of soaring food price and sport shortages of critical grains.

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By Dale Buss, Contributor

With its second major equity investment in a biofuels startup company in the space of five just months, General Motors is moving front and center in what may become a pivotal global economic development of our time: the rapid rise of the cellulosic-ethanol industry.

GM’s announcement on Thursday that it has made an equity investment in a Boston-based company, Mascoma Corp., is a bookend to its January deal to help fund Coskata Inc., based in Warrendale, Ill.

The two companies, partially nurtured by academics, use two different processes to yield similar crucial results: the production of ethanol for fuel from non-grain, essentially waste sources.

Mascoma's single-step cellulose-to-ethanol method is called consolidated bioprocessing, which uses cellulosic biomass such as woodchips and switchgrass in a formula that lowers costs by limiting additives and enzymes that are brought into other biochemical processes. Mascoma expects to begin producing ethanol later this year at a demonstration plant under construction in Rome,  N.Y.

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Chemicals giant Monsanto Co. has teamed with a California firm, Mendel Biotechnology, to develop a strain of elephant grass native to China into a renewable feedstock for ethanol production.

The move is part of a growing effort to derive energy from cellulose -- the non-edible parts of plants – and comes, unsurprisingly,  just as Congress has earmarked cellulosic research for increased federal subsidies in the new farm bill wending its way through the legislative process.

The bill would increase subsidies for cellulosic ethanol and decrease subsidies for corn-based ethanol, which is being criticized in many quarters these days for diverting a basic food crop for energy production, thus diminishing global food supplies and helping to drive up the price of grain-based foods.

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Computer rendering of Coskata's pilot plant for cellulosic ethanol production.

Coskata Inc., which recently inked a partnership deal with General Motors Corp. to develop its unusual process that uses gas-eating bacteria to produce ethanol from virtually any kind of organic waste, announced today it will begin construction of its first small-scale demonstration plant at a site near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The site will piggyback on plasma “torch” technology developed there by Westinghouse Plasma Corp., a division of Alter Nrg. The plasma gasifier superheats the source material into a synthetic gas comprised mainly of carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

Coskata's patented strain of bacteria feeds on the gas, excreting -- conveniently enough -- a virtually pure ethanol.

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By Dale Buss, Contributor

As General Motors ties more and more of its market positioning and long-term survivability to cleaner and more efficient engines and a heightened environmental sensibility, its powertrain engineering operations have moved to the front lines.

The automaker sees an opportunity to grab the industry’s "green" leadership away from Toyota and Honda with new vehicles that turn marketing promise into retail reality.

Combine those growing stakes with another important GM initiative this year – the GMnext centennial celebration – and you have some notion of the pressure being felt these days by Micky Bly, Bob Babik and Henrique Pereira.

The three hold environmentally significant engineering positions and are among a few dozen executives, in all disciplines from around the world, that GM has selected to highlight as "future leaders" during the course of its 100th-anniversary observance this year.

That means they’ve already been called upon to represent their employer in the media, and they’ll be spotlighted again as the year goes on.

So not only are Pereira, Babik, and Bly expected more than ever to be getting the job done, they also must look good and sound good in the process.

"I look at it as my company showing confidence in me and supporting me, if they want me to go out there and be a spokesperson for the company," said Babik, GM’'s Detroit-based director of vehicle-emissions issues.

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We've been saying it for a long time, it's the reason Edmunds.com began Green Car Advisor in the first place, and now auto industry insiders are agreeing: Environmental concerns are the principal issue driving the industry these days.

Although a new survey asked only about this year, we believe it will be the case for decades to come.

Read on for contributor Scott Doggett's report on what the survey found.

John O'Dell, Senior Editor
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Green Concerns Emerge as Chief Challenge

Environmental factors have replaced cost considerations as the U.S. auto industry's top challenge, according to an annual industry survey.

The result marks the first time in 14 years that costs haven't been the industry's No. 1 concern.

"Green" issues such as fuel economy and emissions regulations were cited by 53 percent of the 300 automotive designers and engineers responding to the survey, as the chief challenges facing the industry. Only 32 percent cited cost concerns.

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Nearly 1.8 million alternative-fuel cars were sold in the United States during the 2007 model year, about 250,000 more than the previous model year, according to figures gathered by the automotive information and marketing company R.L. Polk & Co. and released by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

The sales tally included 1,670,933 E-85-capable flex-fuel vehicles, 375,506 diesel-powered and 347,847 hybrids that use gas engines and electric motors. Honda Motor Co. also sold about 1,000 Civic models modified to run on compressed natural gas -- the only factory-built CNG cars in the market.

Sales of E-85-capable vehicles more than doubled from the 823,726 sold during the 2006 model year, while sales of hybrid vehicles increased 37 percent from the 253,081 hybrids sold during the 2006 model year. Sales of diesel vehicles actually fell 21 percent from the 475,203 sold during the previous model year, due to the discontinuation of some models.

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Our Euro-correspondent finally runs out of interesting green and greenish vehicles at Monaco's eco-fest -- but not before stumbling across a Ferrari converted to run on E85, and a racing series dedicated to the stuff. 

Note: If you are seeing this first, remember that blog sites are last in, first up. Drop down four more pieces to Nick's look at Venturi Automobiles and you can read his dispatches back up to here, in order. 

Enjoy!

John O'Dell, Senior Editor.

By Nick Kurczewski, Contributor

Monte Carlo is one of the few places where you don’t need to set an alarm clock to get an early start to the morning. Simply leave your window open and let the cacophony of shrieking supercars rolling through early-morning traffic be your wake-up call.

Of course, you do run the risk of having the occasional moron redline his brand new Ferrari 599 GTB outside your hotel window at 3:00 a.m. We learned this lesson the hard way.

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By Robert E. Calem, Contributor

The virtues and failings of ethanol, biodiesel and other alternative fuel and energy sources were in sharp focus last week at the fifth bi-annual State of the Planet conference in New York.

Organized by the Earth Institute at Columbia University, it featured expert speakers who either blamed these fuels for threatening the global food supply or called them progressive.

There was consensus, though, that governments around the world must do much more to address the problem of CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions.

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