The Volt (along with many other vehicles) is going to be E85 compatibe.  That means that it can run regular gasoline or a mixture of gas(15%)/ethanol(85%).  The issue many people have right now with E85 is the way in which we get it.  Currently lots of corn is used to make the E85.  This means that farmland, land that would normally be going to producing food for ourselves and for sale all over the world, is now used for producing a crop that we turn into a fuel for our cars.  There is a lot of energy put into producing this crop too, all the diesel fuel from farm equipment to shipping the corn long distances to the processing plants.  This makes the current way of generating E85 not very economical both in terms of money put in or energy put in.

A company called BioFields is hoping to change that.  The mexico based alternative fuel company has a factory set up in the Sonora  desert in New Mexico that they hope will produce 1 billion gallons of ethanol by the year 2012.   The 1000 gal capacity transparent bioreactors have five inputs: Algae, sunlight, CO2, nutrients and seawater. Outputs are: ethanol, oxygen and freshwater.

The things not needed for the process, developed by Algenol Biofuels of Baltimore, are arable land, harvesting, large amounts of fossil fuel, fossil based fertilizer or lots of fresh water. Algenol estimates the energy balance, i.e., the ratio of energy out vs. energy in will be greater than 8:1 which compares with 1.35:1 for corn ethanol.

Algenol explains that energy from the sun through photosynthesis produces simple sugars inside algae cells which, concurrently with enzymes, produce ethanol. Extremely fast growing algae renews the sugar supply.The cost is said to be less than for any other U.S. fuel.

The field coming online next year will have an initial output of 100 million gallons, ramping up to the 1 billion they hope to have in four years.