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Our aim should not be total independence from foreign sources of petroleum. That is neither practical nor necessary in a world of interdependent economies. Instead, the objective should be developing a sufficient degree of resilience against disruptions in imports. Think of resilience as the ability to absorb a significant disruption, bigger than what could be managed by drawing down the strategic oil reserve. Our resilience can be strengthened by increasing diversity in the sources of our energy. Commercial, industrial, and home users of oil can already use other sources of energy. By contrast, transportation is totally dependent on petroleum. This is the root cause of our vulnerability. Our goal should be to increase the diversity of energy sources in transportation. The best alternative to oil? Electricity. The means? Convert petroleum-driven miles to electric ones.

THE dream of climate-friendly, petroleum-free motoring is creeping closer - thanks to a clutch of breakthroughs in nanotechnology. Several recently reported lab findings promise to vastly improve the safety and performance of the high-capacity batteries that electric cars will need, at last making them a viable alternative to today's petroleum-powered vehicles.

They calculated water usage, consumption, and withdrawal during petroleum refining and electricity generation in the United States.

Each mile driven with electricity consumes about three times more water (0.32 versus 0.07-0.14 gallons per mile) than with gasoline, the study found.

Here are my Top 10 Energy Stories of 2007

Here's a nice example of the vital distinction between consumption and efficiency. If I told you that a company was about to introduce a new car model that was expected to average 56 miles per gallon, and that it was going to be so cheap that nearly anyone could afford one, that would sound like great news, wouldn't it? Perhaps it depends on the context in which that car is introduced, and our assumptions about what it will displace. The car in question is Tata Motors' eagerly-awaited "1-Lakh" car--referring to its 100,000 Rupees price equating to $2546 at yesterday's exchange rate--and the target market is millions of Indians who haven't been able to afford a car yet. Even at an expected efficiency of 56 mpg, though, the Nano, to give its proper name, will create incremental consumption of petroleum products and new greenhouse gases emissions.

In the battle of environmentally friendly biofuels for cars and trucks, biodiesel beats ethanol hands down, new research concludes – but neither will go very far toward reducing the demand for petroleum.

One thing that became very clear to me is that the world will not be able to displace more than a fraction of our petroleum usage with biofuels.

Ok, so we're asking the oil and gas industry, who make their living by selling us oil and gas, whether there might any problem with the supply of oil and gas. I don't know what Secretary Bodman was expecting, but in his place I would have expected to get a sales pitch for buying more oil and gas. Given that very low expectation, the report is better than one might have feared.

For this special report, PM crunched the numbers on the actual costs and performance of each major alternative fuel. Before we can debate national energy policy--or even decide which petroleum substitutes might make sense for our personal vehicles--we need to know how these things stack up in the real world.

About half our electricity comes from coal, and that will change, at best, slowly as we move to renewables. But we need to keep in mind that when we're talking about cars, even coal-generated electricity results in lower greenhouse gas emissions compared with petroleum.

Plug In America drives change. We accelerate the shift to plug-in vehicles powered by clean, affordable, domestic electricity to reduce our nation's dependence on petroleum and improve the global environment.