NEWS

Oil giant Exxon Mobil plans to announce today a $600-million investment to produce liquid transportation fuel from algae, The New York Times reported. The effort by Exxon, whose chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson once derided ethanol as "moonshine," includes a partnership with the biotechnology company Synthetic Genomics. "Scale was the first. For transportation fuels, if you can't see whether you can scale a technology up, then you have to question whether you need to be involved at all." But Jacobs acknowledged that it would take at least five to 10 years before large-scale commercial plants could produce algae-based fuels. "Research is great, but we need to see new products in the market," Greenpeace research director Kert Davies told ."We've always said that major oil companies have to be involved. But the question is whether companies are simply paying lip service to something or whether they are putting their weight and power behind it."