What do oil, beer and cars have in common? Cellulosic ethanol, according to a research consortium of Japanese companies including Toyota, Nippon Oil Corp., Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Sapporo Breweries. The group plans to team up to make low-cost fuel from non-food feedstocks, according to Reuters. They've set a goal of producing 1.6 million barrels of ethanol by 2014, and selling it for about $70 a barrel — or $1.67 a gallon — by 2015. That's a higher price than many U.S.-based developers of cellulosic ethanol are promising, but then, none have hit full-scale commercial production yet (see Verenium Plans Cellulosic Ethanol Plant in Florida). As it does with oil, Japan imports almost all of its ethanol, four-fifths of it from Brazil, which has a thriving sugarcane-to-ethanol industry. Japan's government wants to replace 0.6 percent of the crude oil it uses for gasoline with biofuels by 2010. As for cellulosic ethanol, Bioethanol Japan started up a plant in 2007 that makes the fuel from wood construction waste, Green Car Congress reported. (Sapporo Breweries was a partner on that project too.) Three plants aimed at making ethanol from "non-food rice" are also underway, with the first expected to start production of about 220,000 gallons a year by next month, Reuters reports.