ConocoPhillips donates wing to CU Boulder.

• Author: Shortlidge, Chandler
• Position: ENERGY

Large oil companies ran sometimes gel a bad reputation for being nothing but self interested and profit hungry companies, especially with the disaster in the Gulf last year still lingering on people's minds.

Bui when Huston-based energy firm ConocoPhillips puts a large amount of effort and money into research and education toward developing new fuels, and cleaning up our current ones, they might just be helping more than their reputation.

ConocoPhillips recently announced ii was making a $3.5 million gift to toward the University of Colorado at Boulder. ConocoPhillips intends to follow up a $1 million January cash gift with proposed future gifts of $2.5 million over the next two years, for an anticipated total of $3.5 million toward a wing of the new Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering building.

"The Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building creates a Front Range anchor for the biosciences with the help of partners like ConocoPhillips," said CU-Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. "With interdisciplinary research, the possibilities for energy innovation are limitless, and ConocoPhillips is providing the foundation for this vital work," he said.

According 10 ConocoPhillips, the CU Boulder chemical and biological engineers will pursue research toward issues like more efficient biofuels production, improved transfer of biomass into synthetic fuel and improved capture of carbon at energy plants.

The department will be one of three CU Boulder units to occupy the 330,000-square-foot building on the East Campus, along with the Division of Biochemistry and the Colorado Initiative in Molecular Biotechnology, or CIMB. Researchers will begin occupying the building in early 2012.

In all, the building will house 60 tenure-line faculty, 500 graduate students and research associates, and undergraduates and include researchers in nearly a dozen academic disciplines.

This is not the first time the ConocoPhillips has worked with the University of Colorado.

According to the university's website, in 2008 ConocoPhillips signed a $5 million multiyear sponsored research agreement with the Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels a research center of the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaborators', to develop new ways to...