Ronald Bailey has written an interesting article weighing our future fuel options. The problem - our green alternatives aren't cheap enough and the cheap alternatives aren't green. He's not impressed by ethonol or hydrogen.

He is excited by next generation (nanotech engineered) lithium ion batteries. Also:

Biotechnology is another possible pathway to a post-petroleum future. For example, the privately-held biotech company, LS9, based in San Carlos, CA. aims to use synthetic biology to skip over ethanol to directly produce gasoline. LS9 co-founder and Harvard University geneticist George Church describes synthetic biology as "treating biology the way you would treat large-scale integrated circuits. We've been dealing with one part at a time or a small number of parts. Synthetic biology is engineering of new systems using parts that we trust." Another way to think about it is that biologists want to do to biology what engineers have done to electronics and chemists have done with chemistry.

I had similar thoughts back in June.