Ford Motor Company recently announced a partnership to push new fueling stations for its ethanol-ready fleet of 1 million vehicles. Ford Ethanol Article. The actual fuel is E85, a blend of 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline.

I view this as a major win for cleantech. The future for clean fuels is not hydrogen, electric, or gasoline electric hybrids, but likely some liquid fuel blend running in hybrid configurations. And hopefully with a Plug-in hybrid options. These vehicles can run on gasoline, allowing us to deal with the fuel infrastructure problem in an incremental way.

Think plug-in hybrids running on a switchable fuel mix of ethanol and gasoline. That would not only slaughter emissions, and dramatically increase fuel efficieny, but allow our transportation sector to cheaply and easily fuel switch between fuel sources as diverse as grain ethanol, crude oil, natural gas (if GTL ever occurs in a big way), syncrudes, as well as electricity sources: coal, natural gas, hydro and wind.

That is a very viable plan to solve our energy independence problem. In contrast, additional drilling in ANWR and supporting OPEC is only a short term solution.