Are you one of those good citizens who owns an alternative fuel vehicle? Having trouble finding a place to fill up? Help’s now available on your Google Maps-enabled phone or PDA. The U.S. Department of Energy has launched the Alternative Fueling Station Locator, a tool that helps you find the five closest alternative fuel filling stations. This tool should help early clean car adopters, especially those who travel away from familiar territory. Maybe it’ll even get some people to buy cleaner cars. The numbers behind the information service tell the story of how far we have to go, though. The database contains 5,866 alternative fuel stations across the U.S. This compares to 167,000 gasoline stations. That’s about one alt fuel station for every 28 gas stations. At first blush this doesn’t seem so bad. But if you remove the fossil fuel sources included in the list -- compressed natural gas, liquid natural gas and propane -- you’re left with 2,141 stations. That works out to about one alt fuel station for every 78 gas stations. Now let’s say you’ve been reading about the downside of corn ethanol (for example the high levels of greenhouse gas and particulate emissions from the corn ethanol lifecycle) and you’d like to exclude E85 from the list, at least until there are better sources of ethanol. Now you’re down to 1,211 stations: 687 biodiesel, 466 electric and 58 hydrogen. That’s about one alt fuel station for every 138 gas stations. To be sure, driving on natural gas is better than burning gasoline, but what I’d really like is to see that 1 to 138 ratio rapidly decrease. Eric Smalley is editor of Energy Research News. He has written about technology since 1987 and has freelanced for many publications including Discover, Scientific American, Wired News and The Boston Globe on topics ranging from quantum cryptography to global warming.