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I suggest leaving your alternator on the engine, but having a kill switch for it so you can turn it on when going down hills to capture some of that kinetic energy. I've been known to use the air conditioner like this too, since it's effectively free.
A free-spinning alternator not generating power has very little resistance and you'd probably not see any difference at the tank level vs taking the belt off. The advantage here would be that you would also be able to flip it on if you need to drive greater distances than the batteries can sustain. If you wanted to use some of that electricity for propulsion you could, I suppose, put another small motor on the belt system running off of the same 12v, but be aware that the net effect of the system will be near-negligible.
Even on my Insight, where the car only weights ~1900lbs and the batteries can provide 100amps @ ~165v (16,500 watts), the energy captured by regenerative braking is relatively small, and though you can definitely feel the assist in propulsion, it saves relatively little gas overall; it's more a drivability aid for an undersized engine running lean, which is what really saves gas. With a 12v system you're not going to be capturing 1/50 of that, in a vehicle with more than twice as much mass.
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