Oil Watchdog

BP and the University of California finalized a contract yesterday
for the oil giant’s 10-year, $500 million dollar investment in a new
biosciences center to conduct research into energy technologies.

The Energy Biosciences Institute, which also includes the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, will focus initially on biofuels, but it will also
explore the conversion of heavy hydrocarbons to clean fuels, enhanced
recovery from existing oil and gas fields, and carbon sequestration.

The alliance between BP and the institutions was first
announced in February (Greenwire, Feb. 1). It is the largest
industry-academic alliance ever, the San Francisco Chronicle reported
at the time.

The signing of the contract comes as industry, academia and
government are banking on development of next-wave biofuels in an
effort to move past traditional corn-based ethanol. Congress is mulling
a plan to expand the national biofuels mandate to 36 billion gallons by
2022 — roughly six times the current production, with 21 billion of
these gallons coming from "advanced" biofuels like cellulosic ethanol.

"Our mission is to harness the potential of bioenergy, to make
discoveries and to help them become commercially viable so they can
benefit the world," said Christopher Somerville, who was announced
yesterday as the director of the institute. "The institute will also
examine the social, economic and
environmental implications of using cellulosic biofuels to meet a
significant proportion of the earth’s energy needs."

Somerville is joining the University of California’s faculty as
a professor of plant and microbial biology. He had been a visiting
scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The first slate of research projects is expected to be
announced later this month. The institute already began soliciting
research proposals over the summer and received strong interest from
researchers at the two schools and the national lab, officials said.
Controversy

The new center is not without controversy. The plan allows $15
million of the yearly $50 million BP investment to go toward
"proprietary" company research with results owned solely by BP. The
company will conduct this research at space rented from the two
universities.

The proprietary and open research elements will be separate,
but the center envisions "strategic interaction" between them; the
proprietary labs will be located next to the other research areas of
the institute.

A California-based watchdog group, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, criticized the agreement.

"BP researchers will be able to suck up the best of what
Berkeley’s scientists have to offer, retreat behind locked, guarded
doors and pursue their corporate agenda without giving anything back,"
the foundation’s John Simpson said. "Academic research is based on an
exchange of ideas and information. This is a one-way street benefiting
only BP."

The group took also aim at the governance structure of the
institute. It will be overseen by an eight-member governance board,
with four members appointed by UC-Berkeley and four by BP. The
university’s initial plan for the institute had called for a board with
a majority of university appointees.

But Robert Sanders, a spokesman for the school, defended the agreement.

"BP felt that because they are giving us half a billion dollars,
they needed to have a measure of control in the governance of the
institute," he said.

‘Perfect match’

An executive committee — which reports to the board — will
select and steer the open research projects. The majority of this
committee comes from the two universities and the national lab,
although BP is also represented. "We wanted to make sure the academics
had the main say in how the research was chosen," he said. The
governance board would have to approve the overall open research plan
and budget, but has no authority over the proprietary aspect.

Sanders said the union between the schools and BP allows a way
for beneficial research to be transformed into real-world use of
cleaner energy technologies.

"It was a perfect match," he said. "They were willing to fund
it, and we had a lot of interest and expertise to throw at the problem.
It is not either side taking advantage of the other. We have mutual
goals here to find substitutes for the current polluting transportation
fuels of today."