Oil and forestry giants team up for bio fuel push

20/05/2009

Catchlight Energy is a new collaboration between forestry giant, Weyerhaeuser Co and oil firm Chevron Corporation, set up to concentrate on developing bio fuels from trees.

The joint venture presented at the recent forest and paper products conference hosted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, with the spokesperson explaining the firm's plans.

Michael Burnside, Catchlight’s president says the firm intends to speed up the natural process of turning trees into environmentally safe hydrocarbons. The trees that are to be used in the huge project are to be taken from Weyerhaeuser’s US tree farms.

Burnside explained that the collaboration between an oil firm and a forestry firm will be effective in developing the product as Catchlight will have a full understanding of each end of the process, from growing the trees, to selling the fuel.

Part of the firm’s plan is to grow switchgrass between the trees in the US farms, which can be harvested every year and will, therefore, double the amount of biomass collected from the forests.

Chevron will work on creating a fuel that is the same as a fossil fuel and can be used directly in vehicles or airliners.