Conventional drag racing is pretty much the furthest thing from a green sport, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of it. Yet even this tire-melting, gas-wasting sport is diving into the realm of alternative fuels for a variety of reasons.

Roush, a leading builder of aftermarket Mustangs, is developing two Mustangs for the drag strip powered not by gasoline, but clean-burning propane.

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New findings from the Cassini mission to Titan — Saturn’s largest moon — show that its atmosphere contains about 29 billion gallons of propane.

Given that the average new car fuel economy in the US is currently about 20 miles per gallon, and that propane-converted cars get about the same mileage as regular gas cars, there’s enough propane on Titan to take one average car more than 23 million times around the Earth’s equator.

Wow! So what you say? Even though that may sound staggering, you still aren’t convinced that it really means anything to you? What if I told you this: that’s only enough propane to satisfy the propane needs of the US for 18 months.

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From there, I convinced him to let me take a liquid propane injection (LPJ) F150, model year 2007, across the country (I’m technically on vacation). I know that propane is not a new technology -it’s been used as a fuel since the 1930s- but in America, it is rarely used in vehicles outside of fleets, but is gaining momentum and can now be used in applications such as lawn mowers.

Now here are the selling points from companies such as Roush that are producing LPJ vehicles:

• 97 percent of propane is produced in North America
• Reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 18 percent
• No loss of horsepower, torque or towing capacity
• Up to $5,000 federal tax credit available
• Tax credit of 50 cents per gallon (not always passed to the consumer)
• Significantly reduces operating costs

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I have a guilty concscience. You see, even though I aspire for literary greatness one day (hey, we all need dreams) most of my jobs have involved menial, manual labor. Right now, that is landscaping in a fancy-pants Connecticut town where most of the people have more money than free time.

But landscaping is a dirty, dirty business. My boss will sometimes go through a 100 gallons of gas in a week between his trucks, mowers, blowers, and trimmers. What’s more, although the EPA is imposing new regulations for small gasoline engines, they don’t take effect until 2012 (although California has already enacted its own standards). Engines under 50 horsepower can contribute significant smog emissions in some states because most of these mowers don’t even have basic catalytic converters, and run on mixed gas-oil fuel.

But there is an even better solution, one that for some landscaping companies seems only…natural. Natural gas, to be exact.

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Apparently, the cola wars spilled over into the green tech sector a few years ago. Coca Cola has placed vending machines that use hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) alternatives at the Olympic Games since 2004 as well as at several other international events. Not to be outdone, along with the machines Pepsi is testing in the nation’s capital, they are testing a few thousand other machines around the world that use other green refrigerant alternatives to HFCs. Moreover, the older models these green machines are set to replace are themselves improvements over models from 2003. Both companies have also joined with Greenpeace and several other corporations to form the Refrigerants, Naturally! coalition, a group determined to reduce the environmental impact of HFC refrigerants.

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• zero-emission electric cars and trucks
• hybrids
• plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, rated in excess of 100 miles per gallon
• vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, natural gas, propane, biodiesel and ethanol

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Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that’s up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it’ll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin’s secret ingredient. Whenever the truck’s juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it’ll recharge a set of “supercapacitor” batteries in seconds.This means the H3’s electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What’s more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it’s time to fill the tank, he’ll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease–as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double–from 300 to 600.

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