The Energy Bioscience Institute, funded by the major English oil company BP, is funding its first 49 projects with approximately $20 million. These initial projects fall into four categories:

• feedstock development
• biomass depolymerization
• biofuels production
• socio-economic impacts of cellulosic biofuels development

A complete list of the projects funded is available on the Energy Bioscience Institute website. These 49 projects were determined to be high-priority research, sorted out from over 250 proposals by Institute management and placed in one of two categories: projects (small, speculative research projects) and programs (large-scale focused research). Programs are receiving funding between $400,000 and $1 million per year and may be funded for up to ten years. Projects receive an average of $150,000 per year for up to three years.

The Institute expects to begin its second round of funding later this year, and plans to focus on fossil fuel bioprocessing. In total, BP has funded the Institute for a 10 year program of distributing $500 million.

BP established the Energy Biosciences Institute as a public/private consortium — it’s currently the world’s largest — along with three public partner institutions, the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Institute’s mission is to advance the application of bioscience research to the energy sector. There have been some concerns about the interactions of the public and private sectors in the person of the Institute — the privatization of public universities is a key concern.

Funding research into alternative energies is one of the best things an oil company can be doing these days. Fossil fuels are unquestionably finite, and the cost of extracting them (as the easy-to-reach fields run out) is rising. The only option for a sensible energy company is to be investing in other sources of energy. Of course, BP is only funding the Energy Bioscience Institute with $500 million. I say ‘only’, because the company’s 2007 revenues were reported as $291.438 billion. The cost of the Institute’s research is approximately 0.001 percent of those revenues. And considering BP’s environmental issues in years past, I’m not quite ready to give them a big old pat on the back yet. Funding research is a step in the right direction, but I want to see BP keep going down that path. They’ve made plenty of advances — offering carbon offsets, an $8 billion commitment to alternative fuels, etc. — but they’ve also been on the receiving end of accusations of manipulating propane prices, human rights violations and involvement with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and its associated safety and environmental issues.

Photo — Unisouth