It's this kind of calculus that fuels Lewis' fervor for ethanol.
As a young man, Lewis, who has a bachelor's degree in finance from Ohio State University, yearned for a life on Wall Street. He signed up on a whim for a job interview on campus with Ford Motor Co., just so he could practice for the interviews he really cared about -- the ones with New York investment banks.
Ford flew him to Detroit and put him up in a fancy hotel, and within days, Lewis signed on with the car company as a factory representative. After about three years, he came to San Diego to live aboard a boat and work for Pearson Ford, a local dealership where he ran the service and repair shop.
Lewis began talking with the dealership's owners, John McCallan and Gary Hertica, in 1997 about selling alternative fuel vehicles with an eye toward future days when oil would be in short supply. Six years later, the three cut the ribbon on a Ford-franchised showroom that sold 14 models of alternative fuel cars, a repair and service shop for those vehicles and the Pearson Fuels station.
Dubbed the Regional Transportation Center, it had a nonprofit education operation to teach schoolchildren about global warming and alternative fuels. It was the nation's first ethanol station open to the public and the first station to sell biodiesel fuel in San Diego. Lewis even sold the world's first hybrid sport utility vehicle, a Ford Escape powered by gas and an electric battery, in September 2004.
The future looked bright. Then Ford and other car manufacturers killed the electric car, and just as quickly as the signs went up, the lights went out on the ambitious $15-million project.
What remains today are the fuel station and the education center, which continues to be funded by state grants and private donations. The center so far has hosted 28,000 San Diego schoolchildren, all ferried there on a natural-gas-powered bus.
Lewis and his partners have struggled to pay the bills by leasing out office space to a local high school, a credit union and other tenants.
Last year, he came up with another idea.
There were hundreds of thousands of cars in California capable of burning both ethanol and gasoline, but only one ethanol station open to the public at that time -- Pearson Fuels. He persuaded the state and the U.S. Department of Energy to contribute $1.5 million to a project to help build more ethanol pumps around the state.
