Algae comes in many varieties, but basically it's a primitive and prolific organism that, given the right conditions, works like a microscopic oil well, absorbing energy through light (photosynthesis) and storing it in the form of a crude oil. Up to 50 or 60 percent of an algae plant's weight is oil. Algae breeds well in shallow pools like those at sewage plants. Alas, you can't just skim off the algae from a waste-treatment pool, squeeze the oil out of it, and pump it into an aircraft engine. It has to be refined, and that means building from scratch an entirely new infrastructure to farm, process, refine, and supply oil from algae. Until OPEC oil soared through the $100-a-barrel mark, the costs of developing such infrastructure were problematic. No longer. Not only would algae oil be cheaper, but, unlike other alternative fuels, it burns efficiently at the extremely low temperatures where jets cruise in the stratosphere. It also comes with a huge bonus: The CO2 emissions from a jet using it would be up to a staggering 80 percent less.

One of Daggett's favorite slides compares the area of land required to produce enough soybeans to provide the biofuel for the world's airline fleet with the acreage (in the form of breeding lakes) needed to achieve the same quantity from algae. The first is as big as the whole of Europe, the second the size of Belgium. There are already concerns that an early favorite of biofuel enthusiasts, ethanol, consumes more energy in the growing of corn (and sends up food prices as corn demand soars) than is justified by the results, so algae, in the relative modesty of its social impact, scores again.

Having gotten my attention, Daggett has to draw a veil over just exactly how this alchemy would be achieved. Two stages of it, the extraction of the oil and the refining, will be proprietary secrets held by those who pioneer the process. A realistic estimate for when you could be flying a jet gassed up from algae is 15 to 20 years.

Daggett himself, however, isn't waiting that long to set an example. "I started out as a skeptic on biofuels," he says. "I had to prove it myself. The best way of learning about something is to do it. I'd heard of people making bio-diesel for their cars, so I tried it."

He showed me a photograph of himself in his garage in a Seattle suburb, with one of his family's two cars, standing by a rig of three vessels (each about the size of a large trash bin), together with assorted pipes, pumps, filters, and wires. At one end, he pours in used vegetable oil from a local Japanese restaurant. ("The car might smell of teriyaki," he jokes.) Out the other end comes the Daggett brand of bio-diesel. It costs him about 35 cents a gallon. "We're off the oil habit," he says.

Finding and releasing the talents of a guy like Daggett tends to be difficult in a company as big and stratified as Boeing. The fact that it has happened at all reinforces the feeling I have that a war mentality is indeed at work and forcing the pace. In such a pressure cooker, hierarchies are subverted. Mavericks are given large sums of money and licensed to disregard conventional thinking. Results are wanted in a hurry. This war is not bloody, but it's global and intensely competitive, and—here is the real lubricant—whoever comes up with solutions will create huge new cash cows.