Bio-fuels industry “under attack”

The bio-fuels industry must combat the “negative mis-information funded by the trillion-dollar oil industry”, according to former NATO commander General Wesley Clark.

Now the co-chairman of US bio-fuels specialist Growth Energy, General Clark accused global oil companies of actively undermining the bio-fuels industry, despite the fact that many of them now have business units dedicated to this technology.

He said: “You’re up against the largest industry on the planet,” he told the recent World Bio-fuels Markets conference in Rotterdam. “We’re dependent on buying oil from Russia and the Middle East, and that money flows in a million different ways to finance studies and mis-information that prevent the emergence of the bio-fuels sector. The oil industry’s public-relations budget is $80 million a year. That is four-times the size of all the stuff we’re doing in growing energy from ethanol, so there are massive forces trying to shape society against you.”

However, Philip New, chief executive of BP Biofuels, rejected the accusation that the oil industry was seeking to undermine the expansion of the bio-fuels sector when it was put to him at a press conference. “Different oil companies have different approaches to some of these issues,” he said. “It’s a mistake to think it’s entirely monolithic.”