In April, it will be two years since the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill that dumped nearly five million barrels of the black stuff into the Gulf of Mexico. The folks at BP would like everybody to move along now.

To help ease that transition, the company — the second largest gasoline marketer in the US — plans to invest $500 million over the next two years for an American marketing push, according to Convenience Store News.

According to the report, the plan is centered around “a distinctive fuel offer, improved customer experience, and a more compelling loyalty rewards program” with the hope that the company can become the “No. 1 fuels marketer east of the Rockies” again.

“In 2012 and beyond, BP’s commitment to its branded marketers will be second to none in our industry,” said Doug Sparkman, president of BP’s East of Rockies Fuels Value Chain, at this week’s 2012 BP Amoco Marketers Association (BPAMA) Convention and Business Expo, an annual gathering of BP marketers taking place in Florida.Continue reading...

British Petroleum has rarely been out of the spotlight since the Deepwater oil spill in 2010 that put nearly five million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This week it's back in the news again, with word that the still-in-turnaround energy giant has extinguished its solar power business.

The simple reason, according to The Guardian, is that — despite being one of the world's largest solar companies — BP says it can't turn a profit on selling panels at a time while it spends $20 billion annually on its oil and gas businesses.

Despite its much-ballyhooed aim to move "beyond petroleum," BP has been quietly closing its solar panel factories in recent years, with around 1,750 workers laid off just in the last three years according to the Guardian. "At the same time," the report adds, "the company has gradually retreated from other areas such as carbon capture and storage and shut down its separate London headquarters for BP Alternative Energy."

Where BP is not scaling back its financial investment: sports, as a London 2012 Olympics partner, and the arts.Continue reading...

Shell Oil Products U.S. has had a lot of success with its two-year-old Grocer Rewards program, which allows consumers to get discounts on gas depending on how much they spend at participating grocery stores. So now the Houston-based company is expanding on the idea with its new Fuel Rewards Network, according to Convenience Store Decisions.

“What we are aiming for with FRN is a program that is even bigger than just grocers—one that goes into all the other spin categories that the typical family has and allows them to earn fuel rewards based on those other purchases,” said Dan Little, Shell’s North America Fuels and Forecourt Marketing Manager, according to CSD. “Those fuel rewards can be redeemed at all Shell stations, not just the 8,000 Shell units that have a grocery partner.”

Consumers simply get a FRN loyalty card at a Shell station and then register it online, where they can find a list of participating retailers and also download a mobile app to make their phone into a loyalty card.Continue reading...

As people across the globe buy up the Toyota Priuses and electric Ford Focuses and Chevy Volts and switch their cars to biofuels and try to just figure out what is the best way to run cars without sucking up all the oil and polluting the air, there have been a few massive carbon-eating culprits flying around: airplanes.

Virgin Atlantic tried out biofuels three years ago, and is now working on developing the world's first low-carbon aviation fuel with just half the carbon footprint of the standard fossil fuel alternative, as Richard Branson announced last month. Two years ago, KLM completed the first commercial biofuel flight, while Finnair completed the longest biofueled commercial flight in July.

Now, U.S. airlines are finally getting into the greening business. The Guardian remarked how U.S. airlines are "racing" this month "to demonstrate their clean energy credentials, scheduling a number of flights powered partially by biofuels.”Continue reading...

PBS NewsHour is about to lose $2 million from its budget. The New York Times reports that Chevron is going to pull its sponsorship of the show, which has lasted for four years.

"We constantly review which media we use to reach our target audience given our yearly budget and specific goals," Brent Tippen, a Chevron spokesman, told the Times. "We hope that we will be able to partner with them again at some point in the future."

The San Francisco Chronicle notes that the relationship had gotten some bad publicity in September when PBS ombudsman Michael Getler wrote about an online piece critiquing Chevron's sponsorship video (from its "We Agree" campaign, at top) that had the company claiming that every single last penny of its profits “went into bringing profits to the world.”

The Chronicle reports that Chevron claims that bad PR didn’t have anything to do with the ending of its sponsorship.

NewsHour approached a foundation earlier in the year for sponsorship dollars but was rebuffed, the Times reports. Still, Jim Lehrer, one of the longtime anchors of the show who now only helms it one night a week since stepping down as anchor in May, is confident the show will come up with the cash by year’s end, the paper reports.

At the end of October, Chevron announced that its quarterly earnings more than doubled with the company’s profit rising to $7.8 billion, according to Reuters.

Big Oil has joined other brand marketers, ranging from Amazon to AT&T, in harnessing the marketing appeal of jobs amid stubborn 9-percent-plus American unemployment. Specifically, ConocoPhillips, with the third-largest oil and gas reserves of any U.S. energy company, has launched a new "public-service" campaign touting natural gas not only as the nation's abundant, clean energy resource — but as a jobs creator as well.

"We wanted to inject the ConocoPhillips voice into the conversation," Davy Kong, spokeswoman for the Houston-based company, told brandchannel. "As a company, we recognize that we need to do a better job of talking about the natural-gas industry and its benefits and explaining them to the public."

In this economic environment, little gets Americans' attention more quickly than talk of jobs. And no industry has a better jobs story to tell right now than natural-gas exploration and development, what with "fracking" technology newly unlocking vast shale-natural gas supplies from Pennsylvania to Texas.Continue reading...

Sir Richard Branson today announced that Virgin Atlantic is developing (in partnership with LanzaTech) a low-carbon aviation biofuel within three years. He describes Virgin's latest sustainability investment as a vital "building block" for cleaner aviation:Continue reading...

Masdar City, near Abu Dhabi, means "The Source" in Arabic. It's also not, technically, a city.

Masdar is a "cleantech cluster," and a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company — itself a division of the Mubadala Development Company, an Abu Dhabi government initiative "that seeks to be a catalyst for the economic diversification of the Emirate."Continue reading...