ChevronTexaco this week promoted its cooperation in a project in Millbrae, California that uses grease to power a wastewater treatment plant. While the company's work in alternative energy is to be commended, Chevron needs to take responsibility for the environmental damage caused by its petroleum operations.

Chevron designed the digester system which turns restaurant grease into a biogas that is used to power the microturbines that produce electricity used for the wastewater plant. Chevron says the city will save $366,000 per year, enabling the plant to pay for itself.

According to Chevron, most of the 4.2 billion pounds of waste grease generate by U.S. restaurants winds up in landfills and creates methane that is a greenhouse gas.

So my two questions are: Why is using a digester to turn waste oil into biogas better than converting the fry oil into biodiesel, and why don't we have a national policy for recycling all of this waste grease into energy? If restaurants are paying people to get rid of it, shouldn't we organize the collection of the raw materials and turn lemons into lemonade?

And now back to Chevron.

The company is also in the news this week due to litigation regarding the pollution it left in Ecuador after it was finished pumping oil out of the rainforest. Chevron is in court in San Francisco battling claims that waste water from its drilling in Ecuador gave cancer and leukemia to local residents, according to SF Weekly.

"The company separated out the oil, and discharged the water into rivers and streams, and stored other waste products in unlined, open pits. Rainforest activists from the San Francisco-based group Amazon Watch (which is not a plaintiff in the suit) claim that 18.5 billion gallons of this "produced water" was discharged during the years Texaco operated the sites, and allege that the water was laced with toxic chemicals known to cause cancer."

Chevron has spent $40 million so far in cleaning up the site, but according to the book Lives Per Gallon by Terry Tamminen, that only took care of 1/3 of the waste pits, leaving 18 million gallons of toxic oil still to be cleaned.

So before we get too caught up in the alternative energy projects that companies such as Chevron, Shell and BP are creating, they have to be held accountable for the lack of regard for sustainability in their petroleum past.