The company uses 15 waste-vegetable-oil-powered trucks to deliver 30 to 55 percent of its products on average.
That initial investment should provide the island's 14, 000 residents with enough clean electricity to shut down its heavy-oil-powered generator in 2004.
Wrapping silicon controls and lithium batteries around oil-powered engines is a winner.
It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oil-powered lamp was developed.
But the real star of the show is the city itself with its dark, zombie-infested alleys and sewers, its whale-oil-powered steampunk technology, and its high brick walls.
It's worse than I thought: These are people independent from foreign oil, carrying solar-powered chain saws, full of American ingenuity.
The proposed act focuses on the central impediment to energy security: Our transportation sector is virtually entirely powered by oil-derived products (gasoline and diesel fuels) and consumes two-thirds of the oil we use in this country.
It produces less carbon dioxide for a unit of energy than coal or oil, so the climate will benefit to the degree that gas replaces either of those: it will mostly substitute for coal, though some oil too, especially if gas-powered trucking becomes widespread.
The latter's batteries can be charged off the electrical grid (which is almost entirely powered by non-oil fuels) and operate for upwards of twenty miles without using a drop of gasoline, and for a fraction of the cost of oil-based fuels.
More important, it highlights an unappreciated implication of a solar-powered economy: The end of the oil age will not necessarily bring an end to the ugly geopolitics, resource wars and national rivalries that oil created.
In Germany biogas is already being fed into into the national gas grid and in Sweden and Spain, vehicles including buses are run on biogas, but they still use an awful lot of oil overall and most of the small number of gas-powered vehicles are run on petroleum-gas.
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They fill up their diesel-powered Volkswagen and Dodge pickup with vegetable-based oil.
This week it announced plans to put half a million gas-powered vehicles on its roads by 2011, to reduce oil dependence and provide a market for the off-shore gas fields it is developing.
Persistently high oil prices would clearly lead to substitution (electric cars, natural-gas-powered trucks) but the transition costs could be significant.
And then there was Richard Nixon mandating a national 55-mph speed limit to help conserve gas in response to the OPEC oil embargo, which served to make everyone at the time driving a big V8-powered car grumpy (and subsequently helped reduce traffic fatalities).
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Vehicles powered by natural gas save more gas dollars and crude oil imports than government-dictated plans for all-electric and hybrid vehicles.
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