Forgotten to fill the petrol tank? Worried that you won't find a garage that still has any diesel, because of the strike by fuel tanker drivers? Fearful that even if the garage does have petrol, you don't know if you'll be able to afford any on account of the numbers in the price window at the petrol station spinning round, these days, as randomly as the drums of a one-armed bandit?

If you can hold out for just a few more years, science is galloping towards ridding the world both of its dependency on oil and the climate damage caused by burning it. We report (see page 52) two developments that promise to liberate us from our thirst for crude. If one of them proves successful, Rockefeller's famous recipe for growing rich - “Get up early, work late, and strike oil” - will have to be tweaked to: “Get up early, work late, and acquire some of the designer bugs that scientists are developing in a Californian laboratory that excrete hydrocarbons that act as ersatz crude oil.” If all goes to plan, the Californian biofuels industry expects such synthetic fuels to be available as early as 2011.

Meanwhile, at Tsukuba University in Japan, Professor Makoto Watanabe believes he has made a breakthrough in his lifelong search for a species of alga that “sweats” crude oil, a scientific leap he ambitiously imagines turning his country from a thirsty energy importer to an oil exporter.

The professor's algae produce oil that not only yield more energy than they consume, but are vastly more efficient in generating biofuels than are corn or rapeseed. The financial arithmetic is still problematic. But who knows? The age may be dawning when we not only grow our own vegetables, but our own diesel, too.