There is some more promising great news in the quest for cheap, renewable fuel front.  The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is licensing a process that can create oil from an algae slurry in an hour and the company, Genifuel, is starting production on an industrial scale machine to produce it.  Even better, the byproducts of this process are all recyclable.  Unfortunately, the produced oil then needs to go through the normal refining process to create gasoline, etc. which is horribly polluting, but that environmental damage can at least be limited to a small geographic area as opposed to the drilling for oil which all to often has vast implications on large swaths of land.

Of course, this still leaves us in the same boat of burning gasoline to power our cars and I’m not sure that’s a tenable solution for the long run.  It also still remains to be seen if this process can be expanded to the scale of our voracious appetite for oil.  Regardless, it’s a tantalizing look into what could be our solution to our dependence on foreign oil.