Scam alert!

First it was "Carbon Credits", the Ponzi Scheme of all time, now it's "Vetroleum"

Read this article. Read it knowing it has been written to bamboozle the reader.

Let's take some principles of the old "snake oil" type of scam and see if we can find them here.

1. Find everything a new name to make an older process (in this case, making biodiesel) seem like a breakthrough. We start with the very catchy word "Vetroleum". No, that's not correct. we should start with the reference "biocrude". It doesn't exist. Crude oil is a specific substance, namely petroleum oil pumped right out of the ground. It is "crude" or un-refined. There is no such thing as "bio-crude". If you are going to make biodiesel, you start with raw materials called biomass. At some point in your very long (not "8-minute") reaction, the substance you are cooking down in the presence of reagents, at high pressure, takes on characteristics of a long-chain oil molecule. You may then refine that substance, once it is fractionated (distilled and the fractional compounds removed) in the process (which is not called a "time reaction", it's Catalytic Cracking) into other products (in this case, they seemed to have refined it down into a form of volatile fuel usable as gasoline, but that is a HUGE waste of time, refining equipment and energy, it should be left at the earlier state where it resembles diesel).

2. Get impressive-sounding groups to push your snake oil for you. In this case, they've gotten the "Central American Parliament" on their payroll. Read about the CAP here, it seems to be a club that talks about economics, mostly, and wants to be a super-government like the European Union, but isn't recognized as such. Then get a "Large Corporation" with an impressive name to package your product. Here we find US Sustainable Energy Corporation, whose stock is listed here. That's right, it's a Penny Stock, in this case trading for a little over two cents per share, and three-quarters of the impressive looking 1.3 billion shares are restricted (and may not exist). The capitalization of their UNRESTRICTED stock (Book Value) is less than $750,000.

3. Finally you locate in place known for it's involvement (in energy here), and enlist well-known local government leaders to help you push your product. Baytown-Sugarland in Chambers County, Texas isn't exactly on the cusp of energy production these days. I was down in that area a few weeks ago, in Dickinson, and there didn't appear to be much in the way of energy production going on. Some old oilfields are being drilled for gas now, but that's about the extent of it. My guess is that the Chambers County Commissioner cited in the article isn't exactly an oil baron, either.

Nope, this is a scam designed to line the pockets of a few folks who get in early, and all the rest of the suckers who get in at the end are going to get nada as investors. Maybe this refinery will produce a few barrels of biofuel, but you wouldn't want to have to pay their production costs, and somehow, those aren't even talked about in the article, are they?

The world is going to see many, many fast-buck operators in the biofuel arena in the coming years. This is just one of the earlier ones, that's all.

H/T to the EllTee for this one.