BP Grant Makes Berkeley a Global Biofuel Hub

A group led by the University of California at Berkeley has won an unprecedented $500 million grant from BP to develop new biofuels, "making the Cal campus the international hub of research on clean energy and the Bay Area the potential crucible of a new post-oil economy," reports the San Francisco Chronicle:

The oil giant announced last June that it would stake half a billion dollars over 10 years on the search for alternatives to oil and gas and was looking for a major academic center to host the project, which it described as the first of its kind in the world.

BP's stated objective: "radical research aimed at probing the emerging secrets of bioscience and applying them to the production of new and cleaner energy, principally fuels for road transport."

UC Berkeley prevailed over tough international competition to host the Energy Biosciences Institute, partnering with the University of Illinois, home of the Institute of Genomic Biology, a research center on alternative fuels. Combining its expertise in energy, engineering, and the life sciences with a hand-in-glove relationship with the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, "UC Berkeley has been moving aggressively to become the world's research-and-development center for alternative fuels," says the Chronicle.

[Source: San Francisco Chronicle]