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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: elmatador who wrote (33386)	4/19/2008 4:17:09 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 220290

ElM, in the mid to late 1980s BP Oil International was doing lots of ethanol R&D [my 1986 job was gasoline/petrol R&D and market strategy in petrol technical aspects]. I was putting the kibosh on ethanol/methanol because it was pretty obvious that methanol and ethanol were uneconomic without government/tax-payer support. With the collapse of oil prices, there didn't seem to be any good reason for governments and taxpayers to line up to hand over the loot to BP Oil and farmers to run ethanol and methanol programmes. A friend of ours worked for DuPont in Europe [now I'm not sure if it was DuPont or another company] and he said that ethanol was going to be big time. We had some discussions about it, agreeing to disagree. Mq was right. With low oil prices, and governments not so keen, ethanol fizzled as a fuel. With oil at $115 a barrel biofuels and other alternatives are economic again. But that's not going to last, especially now that biofuel subsidies are turning out to be genocidal as well as environmentally counter-productive, rather than environmentally friendly. Rather than saving the world, they are destroying the world [as far as hungry people are concerned and CO2 emissions are concerned, if you believe that CO2 emissions are a bad thing]. As you say, governments and others think they can just throw some money around and make things happen, but they can't. Mqurice