Algae Industry OP-ED: WHERE'S THE OIL?

March 17, 2015 - PRLog -- The claim that the US government wants to reduce dependency on foreign oil has been misleading to US taxpayers and to
the emerging algae fuel industry. Getting off foreign oil has been the rallying cry for the last decade, and billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent to develop technologies that will accomplish that goal. So, Washington, where are the promised algae fuels?

We have witnessed grant recipients, researchers and lobbyists change their missions as the grant wind blows.The latest mission is to pressure the government to change the renewable fuels standards, not to pressure grant recipients to produce the oil they’ve claim they’ve allegedly proven they can produce. But the fact is that the technologies that have been paid for by US taxpayer dollars are being sold to foreign countries by the very same companies that used taxpayer dollars to develop them.

This situation has become a total victory for the favored few algae research grant recipients who received federal money based on grant applications containing less than truthful information, the researchers and Department of Energy Biomass Program employees who’ve made an entire career out of the buffoonery, and for the companies who received US government money to develop the technologies and foreign money to put them into operation.

Taxpayers are tired of hearing that algae fuels are still being researched or in pilot stage. Researchers claim they have established industrial standards that have never been used for commercial algae production for fuels in the US. Where are all the non-research US jobs that were supposed to be created?

In a nutshell, the American taxpayer has paid for the technologies, and will pay foreign countries for the oil.It seems that we could have saved billions of dollars by not ever pursuing alternative fuel technologies.Let the other countries spend their money commercialization and deployment of our algae technologies while and the US will purchase our fuel from them.Maybe we should have spent the money teaching morals and ethics to our leaders, change legislation to prohibit lobbying, and pay lawyers to pursue those who have financially benefited from the debacle.