Chevron exec: Ethanol means no new refineries

WASHINGTON – A top Chevron Corp. executive said Tuesday the push to displace as much as a fifth of the country’s gasoline with ethanol will make it less likely the industry will build new domestic refineries.

“We’ll take all the ethanol that corn growers produce. We’ll use that enthusiastically” as a 10-percent blend with gasoline, Peter J. Robertson, Chevron’s vice chairman, said in an interview with The Associated Press.


But Robertson, the No. 2 executive at the country’s second largest oil company after Exxon, said he questions whether a goal of a 20-percent reduction in gasoline use, largely by substituting ethanol, can be achieved by 2017 as President Bush has urged.

The push for greater use of ethanol, now made from corn but presumed to be produced from switchgrass and other cellulosic sources in the future, has been framed largely in the context of a need for greater energy independence from imports.

But so has the need for more domestic refineries.

AP