Moral Lessons from Big oil?

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell, the world's top marketer of biofuels, considers using food crops to make biofuels "morally inappropriate" as long as there are people in the world who are starving, an executive said on Thursday.

Ok, this just bothers me. An oil company saying something is morally inappropriate. This is ironic seeing as how they charge everyone so much for gasoline. This is what I like to call the beginning of the new era. Their greed has reached new lows, and people are finally starting to make fuel alternatives. Hooray for changes like this.

G Holthusen, Fuels Technology Manager Asia/Pacific, said the company's research unit, Shell Global Solutions, has developed alternative fuels from renewable resources that use wood chips and plant waste rather than food crops that are typically used to make the fuels.

Holthusen said his company's participation in marketing biofuels extracted from food was driven by economics or legislation.

"If we have the choice today, then we will not use this route," Malaysia-based Holthusen said at a seminar in Singapore.

"We think morally it is inappropriate because what we are doing here is using food and turning it into fuel. If you look at Africa, there are still countries that have a lack of food, people are starving, and because we are more wealthy we use food and turn it into fuel. This is not what we would like to see. But sometimes economics force you to do it."

If the oil companies were so worried, and I mean really worried about starving people, perhaps they could use some of the billions of dollars they get each year to help feed these starving people in Africa and elsewhere. I, for one, am not buying into the guilt trip they are trying to impose on those who are looking for cheaper fuel alternatives. My advice to Big Oil is to use some of your dollars, feed the starving if you are so worried about them. Hell, you could even probably use it as a tax write off. Don't try to dissuade others from looking for alternatives just because you don't want to lose a dollar here or there.

This is exactly what the whole PR thing with this is. The oil companies are starting to become concerned that people are looking for other ways to make fuel, so they will try to shed some bad light on them, hoping to use a sympathetic angle to upset people and bring flack down to the others.

I hope this doesn't work, as you all know I think their greed has finally outdone them.

The world's top commercially produced biofuels are ethanol and biodiesel.

Ethanol, mostly used in the United States and Brazil, is produced from sugar cane and beets and can also be derived from grains such as corn and wheat. Biodiesel, used in Europe, is extracted from the continent's predominant oil crop, rapeseed, and can also be produced from palm and coconut.

Holthusen said Shell has been working on biofuels that can be extracted from plant waste and wood chips, but he did not say when the alternative biofuel might be commercially available.

Of course nobody has said when these alternatives that big oil is working on will be available. They are going to try to gouge the general population for as long as they can by charging higher prices so they can make even more money before introducing what I can only imagine will be an overpriced fuel alternative in the future.

"We are not resting. We are doing what everybody needs to do. We have worked over time on an alternative to get away from food, and this is what we call the second generation of biofuels," he said.

He said Shell, in partnership with Canadian biotech firm Iogen Corp., has developed "cellulose ethanol," which is made from the wood chips and non-food portion of renewable feedstocks such as cereal straws and corn stover, and can be blended with gasoline. Ethanol is typically extracted from sugarcane or grain.

Bottom line is that I don't believe the hype about morals that Big Oil is trying to feed the public with this story. Let them use their own cash if they are concerned...otherwise, shut up! Let other researchers do what they are trying to do best by findind a better alternative to what we have now, and hopefully much cheaper. To Big Oil, I hope you crash and burn, because your greed has become too much for myself and many of the other people I know to deal with, and we are officially fed up with your gouging prices.