BIG OIL'S STALL ON ETHANOL - Business Week magazine

[JohnWxy]

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_40/b4052052.htm
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At the same time the industry is collecting a 51 cents-per-gallon federal subsidy for each gallon of ethanol it mixes with gas and sells as E10 (10% ethanol and 90% gas), it's working against the E85 blend with tactics both overt and stealthy. Efforts range from funding studies that bash the spread of ethanol for driving up the price of corn, and therefore some food, to not supporting E85 pumps at gas stations(my emphasis_JW).

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Academia plays a role as well. There is perhaps no one more hostile to ethanol than Tad W. Patzek, a geo-engineering professor at the University of California at Berkeley. A former Shell petroleum engineer, Patzek co-founded the UC Oil Consortium, which studies engineering methods for getting oil out of the ground. It counts BP (BP ), Chevron USA, (CVX ) Mobil USA, and Shell (RDS ) among its funders (my emphasis_JW). A widely cited 2005 paper by Patzek and Cornell University professor David Pimentel concluded that ethanol takes 29% more energy to produce than it supplies—the most severe indictment of the biofuel. Michael Wang, vehicle and fuel-systems analyst at the Energy Dept.'s Argonne National Laboratory, says among several flaws in the study is the use of old data and the overestimation of corn farm energy use by 34%

[BadgerKid]

1. Yet BP is funding a new Berkeley energy research group

BP selects UC Berkeley to lead $500 million energy research consortium with partners Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, University of Illinois

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 1 February 2007

BERKELEY – Global energy firm BP announced today (Thursday, Feb. 1) that it has selected the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to lead an unprecedented $500 million research effort to develop new sources of energy and reduce the impact of energy consumption on the environment.

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2007/02/01_ebi.shtml


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It makes one wonder if Big Energy is playing oil and the alternatives off one another to maximizes profit$.

Edit: spelling gremlin

[JohnWxy]

2. BP which used to stand for British Petroleum, now stands for Beyond Petroleum seems to be the most

forward thinking of all the oil companies. they seem to be unique in that regard.

[RC]

3. Ethanol is not worth the cost, at least not using corn or farm land needed

for food crops. It in reality saves no oil.

[JohnWxy]

4. You might want to check out the article at link provided. It contains a link to the Berkeley study

which concluded: Ethanol can replace gasoline with significant energy savings, comparable impact on greenhouse gases:

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/01/26_ethanol.shtml