Forget EVs, hydrogen and everything else that's pie in the sky for the next three decades. If you're looking for a viable alternative fuel, a bunch of patented, bespoke bugs has the capacity to do more for slashing both our dependency on foreign oil and our greenhouse emissions from cars than anything else on the ‘alternative fuel' radar. A process has been built around them that's so robust, viable and available - today - that even labelling it ‘alternative' would doing it a gross disservice. For Australia, getting onboard will require industrial and political will, but the payoff would mean significantly more for economic growth than a tsunami of $900 cheques signed by the PM.

A company called Coskata - you've probably never heard of it - has tacked a bunch of patented microbes onto an industrial process more than a century old, and effectively captured the technology that turns a dry tonne of garbage into 400 litres of fuel-grade ethanol. We're not talking about doing it in test-tubes, either. Coskata's process works and is viable on a grand industrial scale. It could - sustainably - offset 30 per cent of petrol consumption globally, slashing OPEC's stranglehold on the west.

Last time I compared ethanol and petrol in Fuel Line, a little over nine months back, I (unfortunately as it happens) concluded ethanol was, in the grand scheme of long-term alternatives: "only a second-rate stop-gap measure". D'oh!, as Homer Simpson would say. I might need to fall on that sword over it.

Under Coskata's auspices, however, ethanol's fundamentals really add up. The company's so-called ‘feedstock flexible' process cuts CO2 emissions by 86 per cent in an apples-for-apples ‘lifecycle analysis' comparison with petrol. It also halves he demand on our limited water supplies. And you get eight times more energy from the ethanol than you had to put into the process to create it - a ‘net energy balance' that other forms of ethanol production - and most other fuels - just can't match.

Price? Without government support, it's cost-competitive with oil at the $US60 a barrel mark.

Lot's of terms are bandied about: ‘cellulosic', ‘bio-thermal', etc. Basically, it works like this. First, you need a good supply of waste - municipal garbage, old tyres, plastic bags (bad luck there, SA), leftovers from the wood chip/paper pulp industry - or a strong supply of some crop (let's call them ‘weeds') that has no real virtue other than fast growth in a particular region with no special agricultural/fertiliser/pesticide support. It doesn't matter what the waste is, since all you're going to do is rip it apart on a molecular level into carbon and hydrogen so your bespoke bugs can, literally, lunch off it.

You also have to build a Coskata-spec ‘renewable refinery' under license. Unfortunately, this isn't a backyard operation. A beer keg and some copper tubing won't cut it. You need to be living next door to about 500,000 tonnes of waste annually and have $300 million up front for the plant and equipment. But you stand to produce 200 million litres of fuel annually, which should help repay the mortgage, even when the economy gets better and the cash rate goes above zero per cent.

All the waste goes in a ‘gassifier'. This is basically a sexed-up version of the process that made town gas for street lights in the days before electricity. These days it's called syngas, but the stuff is the same - a coarse mixture of carbon-monoxide (CO) and hydrogen.

Gassification requires a lot of heat energy, so it's essential for efficiency's sake that you have another industrial process nearby that can recover the waste heat - as steam to turn a turbine, or run a distillery, whatever. That cools your syngas down to a palatable temperature for your bugs, which eat it. The next bit is indelicate, but convenient: they poop ethanol - job's done.

Perhaps you're worried about those bugs escaping, going mutant and spawning a plague more unspeakable than Ebola. Don't be. They're not genetically engineered, for starters. Had they wanted to launch an attack on earth, perhaps destroying all the cellulose and turning our world into the alcohol planet - which might actually be pleasant, or at least not such a bad way to go - they would probably have done so already, before they were found at the bottom of a pond at an undisclosed location, quietly pooping ethanol every time some CO and hydrogen floated by. Their bid for world domination is limited by them being ‘anaerobic'. In contact with air, they die.

If you clone Coskata's process everywhere on earth that's either overflowing with garbage - municipal, industrial or agricultural - or in a position to grow nought but some woody weeds, global demand for oil drops 30 per cent, a bunch of farmers start making real money in otherwise unproductive or marginal land, and you don't get any more Christmas cards from OPEC.

Coskata is aggressively commercialising their garbage-to-gasoline technology globally, under license. Holden is on board, and set to become a key stakeholder in the Australian ethanol equation via the rapid uptake of its ethanol-in-any-proportion Flex Fuel engine technology.

Wes Bolsen, Coskata's vice-president of business development, visited Australia recently to meet key stakeholders from industry and government, and I met him at Holden's head office. His message was frankly compelling. It smacked of truth - and I know I did an about-face. Tomorrow's ethanol is something you would certainly want to be using. And I sure hope those government stakeholders listened.