For what appears as a cooperative gesture and to set a model in promoting the government’s alternative fuels program, the dominant oil industry player finally signed a distributorship agreement with a CME supplier to sell bottled CME in all their retail stations nationwide.

Energy Secretary Raphael P.M. Lotilla describes this development as "a clear manifestation of their support to President Arroyo’s energy independence program."

While Petron gives in to this arrangement, the other major players in the industry are insisting on the conduct of proper testing and the provision of warranty to vehicles as a way of ensuring the welfare of their customers.

It can be recalled that last year President Arroyo made a personal appeal to the oil companies to sell bottled CME as a shelf item in their service stations; while awaiting policy guidelines on wider use of alternative fuels that shall be outlined under the proposed Biofuels Act.

In promoting biodiesel for the domestic oil market, the Department of Energy (DoE) safeguards its claim of the fuel’s viability by taking frontage on the result of the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s testing on CME’s properties.

During a presentation to media, however, NREL itself claim that the tests were just confined on the properties and there were no actual tests made on vehicles to completely validate the fuel’s long-term potential.

NREL has been commissioned by the US-DoE to undertake the fuel property testing in response to a request for assistance from its counterpart agency here, which heads a multisectoral group that formulated the CME logistical test protocol.