Business Photo Slideshows

Fuel Cell Hard Sell

General Motors was an early proponent of hydrogen as the fuel of the future, and is still pressing ahead with the Chevrolet Equinox, an auto powered by a fuel cell that uses hydrogen gas to generate electricity cleanly. G.M. committed itself to build more than 100 of the vehicles and lend them to customers.

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Keeping Options Open

More recently, G.M. has talked up vehicles that run on ethanol. Now the world's biggest automaker is actively exploring alternatives to those alternatives. A good example is this concept car, the Chevrolet Volt. It can run on electricity, gasoline, ethanol, or biodiesel.

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Small Car, Big Hit

G.M. is not giving up on gasoline yet, either. In 2004, Chevrolet introduced the Aveo, a subcompact that is rated to get 32 miles per gallon in the highway but "sacrifices little in terms of features or comfort," according to Edmunds.com, a web site that gives auto-buying advice to consumers. Aveo has been a surprise hit for Chevy.

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Back to the Lab

Photo by Tyler Mallory for General Motors

In addition to its own research and development efforts, G.M. has backed innovation elsewhere. On the first day of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, for example, it said it had invested in a startup working on a way to make ethanol from waste. Here, Coskata Inc. engineer Mike Sura sets up a seed tank where microbes are cultured.

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Turning Up the Heat

Engineer Carl Swanstrom tends the seed tank that produces the microbial cultures at the heart of Coskata's proprietary process. The Warrenville, Illinois, company is also backed by Khosla Ventures, an angel investing firm founded by Vinod Khosla. He was a cofounder of Sun Microsystems and has been an influential partner of the powerful venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers.

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Garbage In, Gas Out

Operating in secrecy, G.M.'s new partner has sought to commercialize its fermentation technology for making fuel-grade ethanol from synthetic gas. The gas is produced by the microbes as they consume waste—shredded tires, wood chips, straw, or ordinary municipal trash—in fermenters like this one.

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It Works, but Will It Pay?

Many other companies are working on similar processes to convert nonfood agricultural products into ethanol as a cheaper alternative to making that form of alcohol from corn or sugar. The trick is to make it economically so that ethanol can compete with gasoline without being subsidized. That is the goal for researchers Young Do, foreground, and Seth Fischbein.

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Put a Microbe in Your Tank

Some of the microbes Coskata uses in its process to produce cellulosic ethanol, or grain alcohol. When ethanol is mixed with a little gasoline—in a ratio of about six to one—the resulting fuel, called E85, can be used in existing "flex-fuel" vehicles that G.M. is already producing by the hundreds of thousands.

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