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Oil Companies Patent Trolling Biofuel Production
Whatsmynickname writes "Thought oil companies were done patent trolling to try to shut down any efforts to wean us off of crude oil (e.g. Chevron and NiMH batteries)? Think again. BP and DuPont (Butamax) have taken an advanced biofuel company to court over infringement of newly awarded patents for developing biobutanol. When an oil company advertises it is looking for alternative fuels, it's not necessarily because they want to be socially responsible..."
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Every oil company I've seen seems to acknowledge oil is finite. Their estimates of when production will peak differ from environmentalists, but other than OPEC (who says it will never peak) they all seem to understand the concept.
So, that being the case, what do you think they are going to do? Just wait until oil becomes extremely expensive and difficult to get, humans transition to a new power source, and then go out of business because they have to product to sell? Or do you think maybe they'll look in to other energy sources they can sell, be it biofuels, thorium, solar, whatever.
Remember that companies aren't evil, they are just amoral. They don't really care one way or the other, they just want to make money. So no, oil companies aren't interested in the damage they cause, except to the extent the law requires them to be and to the extent the public cares. However that doesn't mean they just want to destroy the world to be evil. Likewise they'll happily sell a limited resource for tons of money today, but that doesn't mean they aren't thinking about what to sell tomorrow.
The higher the price of traditional fuels, the more interest there'll be in biofuels. After all if I invent a process that can deliver a BioOil(tm) at $150/barrel with the potential to scale to $100/barrel in 10 years there is no interest when oil was back down in the $30/barrel range. Now that it is up in the $80 range, it is maybe something to look at, though it is still cheaper just to extract oil. If it went up to $200/barrel, there'd be tons of interest as it'd be cheaper right now.
The one thing we know for certain is that the cost will not go down. When all the oil goes away, its replacement will cost more, and the oil companies want to be the ones collecting that money.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"We've looked into biobutanol, but it wasn't economically feasible to produce". Wanna bet? Know why? They are in the business of pumping oil from the ground and delivering it to your car. The infrastructure is already bought and paid for. All these alternative energy sources will NEVER be economically feasible to the big oil companies for this reason. That's precisely why you cannot leave ALL biofuel research to the oil companies.
I guess it's possible, but still, that's a million miles away from the plant based technologies "biofuels" of today and even theoretical algae biofuel technology is still likely to be less efficient land-wise than other solar powered derived electric vehicle techniques.
http://fatknowledge.blogspot.com/2008/06/algae-biodiesel-vs-solar-panels.html
Provides a comparison of required land use of algae biodiesel production to a PV solar-energy powered electric car. The PV -> electric car method requires around 1/5 the land use. The real efficiency killer is simply the internal combustion engine. Also, that's based on theoretical algae biodiesel production, commercial-scale production would probably be less efficient. Meanwhile, both solar-power and electric car technologies are getting more efficient all the time.
This is not Ford buying up the Los Angeles public transport company in order to shut it down and increase the demand for cars.
What the "greed is good" crowd seem to be missing here is that these energy companies are big. Really really big. And as a sector, the oil energy sector dwarfs all other economic sectors. If large players in that sector start to amass patents on technologies that could displace their core business, then will become increasingly able to stifle competition in this field. In other words, they will be increasingly able to decide to sit on those patents if it serves their immediate economic self interest. And the forces that are supposed to guarantee that the self interest of companies overlaps with the common interest of society, namely competitive forces, are made irrelevant by the huge size of these companies. They will become increasingly able to squash/buy-out smaller entrants to the market who might displace them. This is made even worse by the fact that many of these private interests seem to have captured the regulatory and governing systems, the very systems that are suppose to guarantee that the private activity of corporations overlaps with the public interest.
So please don't cry that the poor companies are only doing what they are supposed to do, namely making money, because you are sidestepping the arguments made by many of us who are skeptical of the overlap of the activities of companies like BP and the public interest. You statements sound less like arguments and more like advertising slogans.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)