If it has an engine, it is, almost certainly, consuming a share of the world’s non-renewable petroleum-based fuels. And if it’s doing that, it is also pumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and possibly contributing to global warming.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to do either. There are some new kids, the alternative energy biofuels, in town, and they are just itching to take the petroleum-guzzling vehicles of the world out for a spin.

The current poster child of the biofuel clan is ethanol. Usually produced, in the U.S., from Midwestern corn crops, it is, more than likely, already at work providing alternative energy in your gas tank, where it is blended with your fossil-fuel based gasoline.

Ethanol’s cousin biodiesel is an alternative energy fuel processed by blending either vegetable oil or animal fat with alcohols like ethanol. The Midwest again accounts for most of the U.S. biodiesel stock with oil from its soybean harvests.

But alternative energy research is being conducted at the University of California at Davis that will, it is hoped, extend the biofuel family to include not only food crops. It will try to utilize the even greater alternative energy trapped in the cellulose and woody tissues found in plant leaves and stems, and trees.

California is on the cutting edge of alternative energy research involving biofuels, and, in April of 2006, the state’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger signed an Executive Order mandating that by 2010, 20 percent of the biofuels consumed in California–including 180 million gallons of ethanol–be produced there.

California has already invested $6.5 million in the “Hydrogen Highway” project, which will fund a network of at least sixteen fueling stations to provide alternative energy hydrogen for the fleets of public transit and government vehicles which use it.

And even petroleum giant Chevron has jumped on the alternative energy bandwagon with an offer to fund up to $25 million of UC Davis’ research on alternative energy biofuels.

And, as each of its stated alternative energy goals is met, the Golden Sate by the blue Pacific will become increasingly green.