Winter 2000/2001

Environmental Grant to
Study Alternative Fuel Sources

Robert Evenson, Professor at the Economic Growth Center, and Christopher Timmins, Assistant Professor for the Department of Economics, recently received a $50,000 grant from the Petroleum Energy Center in Tokyo, Japan to study the role of alternative fuels in reducing petroleum dependency. Microlevel data describing automobile purchase decisions in Brazil will be used to recover consumers' preferences for automobiles using alternative fuel sources. There has been an alternative-fuel program in Brazil since the late1970's. The results of the study will be used to predict adoption patterns of alternative fuel vehicles in petroleum import-dependent countries like Japan under a variety of scenarios describing oil prices and the prices of biomass feedstocks over the next 50 years.