Silicon was today found in fuel blamed for causing thousands of cars to break down, trading standards officers said.

Scientists revealed their findings after testing petrol sold in southern England in recent days.

A spokesman for Cambridgeshire county council trading standards department - one of a number of authorities involved - said the presence of silicon had been confirmed in fuel supplies.

It is believed the substance could have damaged oxygen sensors and resulted in cars across the country losing power.

Ian Hillier, a lead officer for petroleum at the Trading Standards Institute, said: “The first result is from a sample of unleaded petrol supplied by a motorist in Cambridgeshire whose car suffered a breakdown.

“Silicon products are used by fuel producers as anti-foaming agents in diesel. However silicon can cause serious problems in petrol engines, particularly in modern cars with computerised fuel management systems. Silicon can build up as a deposit on sensors causing them to malfunction.

“As these are preliminary findings and because further tests are being carried out, no information will be released at this stage on where the contaminated petrol had been purchased.”

Car makers sent for extra spare parts as hundreds of motorists flocked to garages in the last few days. Renault, Peugeot, Mercedes Benz and Citroen made special orders for more oxygen sensors to replace those apparently damaged by “faulty” fuel.

The contaminated fuel was thought to have come from a single batch from the Vopak distribution terminal in West Thurrock, Essex, and seemed initially to be concentrated in the south, with problems being reported by motorists who had filled up at forecourts in Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Middlesex.

However, cases were reported by motorists as far north as Fife in Scotland, as well as in Norfolk and Dorset. More than 4,000 motorists told the BBC they had suffered problems across the UK.

The depot is used by at least two companies: Greenergy, which supplies Tesco and Morrisons, and Harvest Energy, which supplies Asda.

The AA said the number of people asking for advice more than doubled at times yesterday. In addition, thousands of drivers registered problems at http://www.faultyfuel.com/, a move that could presage expensive legal claims.

Tesco and Morrisons insisted there was no evidence to suggest their fuel had caused breakdowns and sought to play down the level of concern, with Tesco saying it had received fewer than 100 complaints.

“We take quality very seriously, and we are doing everything we possibly can to find out what the issue is and whether it is related to us,” Greenergy said in a statement.

None of the companies involved had reported problems with the quality of their fuel supplies and insisted they met British standards.

Trading standards officers made spot checks on fuel from petrol stations in Cambridgeshire, Kent, south Essex and Milton Keynes.

The Association of British Insurers said motorists affected by contaminated petrol could be able to claim for accidental damage if they had comprehensive cover.

WASHINGTON: The Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol industry’s major lobbyist, works out of cramped offices that it shares with a lawyer near Capitol Hill. Pictures of ethanol-manufacturing plants from its 61 board members hang everywhere. “We’re about to run out of wall space,” said Bob Dinneen, the association’s president.

The association may have only six staff members, but it is now bursting with energy, a far cry from the early days when its founder, a South Dakota farm boy who was convinced that America needed to break the stranglehold of foreign oil, quit in frustration after four years.

After three decades of surviving mostly on tax subsidies, the industry was poised Tuesday night to get its biggest endorsement from on high that it has a long-term future as a home- grown alternative to gasoline.

In his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush was expected to call for a huge increase in the amount of ethanol that refiners mix with gasoline, probably double the current goal of 7.5 billion gallons by 2012.

While the details of the proposal are not known, 15 billion gallons of ethanol would work out to more than 10 percent of the country’s current gasoline consumption, and is far beyond the current capacity of about 5.4 billion gallons.

At least half of the new ethanol would come from corn, signaling the administration’s support to the Midwest farm states that have benefited the most from the ethanol boom.

For an industry once dominated by the will of a single powerful producer, Archer Daniels Midland, ethanol has come a long way, joining the oil industry and producers of major agricultural commodities as an entrenched political force in Washington.

And it now enjoys a powerful role in presidential politics because of Iowa’s status as one of the first states to select delegates to the parties’ nominating conventions.

But with dozens of new ethanol plants coming online this year, the ethanol lobby is facing a critical point. The political reality is that corn’s days as the chief crop for making the fuel may be numbered.

Corn-based ethanol can only marginally reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. But it does little, if anything, to improve energy efficiency and the mounting concern of some politicians is that relying on corn is leading to collateral damage in other parts of the agricultural economy and threatening the nation’s status as the world’s leading corn exporter. The big increase in the works may even mean that consumers would end up paying more at the supermarket.

So the ethanol lobby and its political supporters now face the challenge of trying to maintain the momentum of ethanol’s feel-good story before the potential negative consequences of the rapid ramp-up become all too apparent.

Clutching the reins these last five years has been Dinneen, a longtime Washington lobbyist who joined the association in 1988. He recalled his early years there as a pitched war with the oil industry. “I would wake up in the morning and try to think of a way to vilify the oil guys,” he said.

Today, to keep the ethanol train moving, ethanol makers are cozying up to the oil industry, forming political alliances and enlisting executives from companies like Chevron as they race to make a quicker transition to cellulosic ethanol made from nonfood crops, like switchgrass.

Otherwise, public support could turn against the fuel, which yields a third less energy than petroleum-based gasoline and still relies on a federal subsidy of 51 cents a gallon to remain competitive.

“We are no longer debating whether this makes sense, if this public policy should be pursued,” Dinneen said. “The discourse now is how much ethanol can we produce, how quickly can we produce it and what is the pathway for greater production of domestic renewables.”

That pathway, at the moment, relies on commercializing cellulosic ethanol made from crops like switchgrass or wood chips, which today is twice as expensive to produce as ethanol made from corn.

Some analysts, though, believe that politics has already trumped economics. “Once we have a corn-based technology up and running the political system will protect it,” said Lawrence Goldstein, a board member at the Energy Policy Research Foundation. “We cannot afford to have 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in 2015, and that’s exactly where we are headed.”

Goldstein said that rather than speed up the process of producing more ethanol, Congress should “step back and reflect on the damage we have already done.”

By contrast, ethanol advocates in Congress are pushing to accelerate research into cellulosic sources with the stated goal of speeding the timetable for when corn can be supplemented or supplanted as the chief ethanol crop.

The Internet search provider Google, moving to broaden its revenue beyond advertising, is poised to shake up the business software market.

The company is bundling the Web- based software programs that it offers free to consumers into a premium package, and, in a challenge to Microsoft, it will be selling a paid version to businesses.

Google’s enterprise product, which will include e-mail, calendar, word processing, spreadsheet, instant messaging and voice-over-Internet programs, is expected soon, said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager for enterprise at Google, in Mountain View, California.

The move comes as Microsoft prepares to bring out Office 2007, the new version of its best-selling productivity software suite, as well as Vista, the latest upgrade of its ubiquitous operating system.

Some businesses, faced with the cost and disruption of upgrading their software, may be ready to turn to Google, said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president at Nucleus Research in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

“I think this could pose a significant threat to Microsoft,” she said. “Had this happened 10 years ago, it would have been a different story. But we see a lot of folks willing to explore the Google applications right now.”

Girouard, in Boston last week to address the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, said Google would not market its corporate product as a direct substitute for Office or Outlook, the Microsoft e-mail program. Instead, the Google software will be offered as “a set of tools that will give businesspeople more choices,” he said.

But he acknowledged that the Google choice represented a challenge to existing software suites on corporate desktops. Google is also selling customized business search engines.

“There’s not a CEO I’ve talked to who doesn’t want to investigate,” said Girouard, a veteran technology executive.

“There’s curiosity, but there’s also caution.”

Much of the caution stems from Google’s model of hosting software, like its free e-mail application, on its own servers rather than those of its customers, meaning they would be outsourcing software programs that are critical to running their business. Companies like Salesforce.com led the way with this “software as a service” model, but the Google move could encourage and accelerate its adoption by larger businesses.

Thousands of small and medium-size companies, along with dozens of colleges and universities, already use a free version of Google’s product called Google Apps for Your Domain, which was introduced in a beta test version in August. Google adopted the Web-based productivity suite for its own business in October. Google executives have not given details of what they will add to make the premium package appeal to paying customers, when it will be introduced or what they will charge.

Microsoft sees Google’s bundled applications as an effort to fashion a rival software ecosystem for enterprise customers. “It’s bigger than any one application,” said Don Dodge, senior technical evangelist for Microsoft’s emerging business team in Waltham, Massachusetts, who heard Girouard’s presentation to the technology leadership council.

“Essentially, they’re saying they’ll take over your infrastructure and free you up to do other things.”

Dodge said Microsoft, while continuing to improve its robust productivity applications, was countering Google by developing its own Web-based business software, called Office Live, marketed to smaller businesses. “We’re both going in the same direction,” he said.

Kyle McNabb, principal analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said many companies were loath to “introduce a foreign set of tools” to employees who use Microsoft programs at home and at work. Microsoft dominates in office productivity software, with more than 95 percent of the market, he said, predicting that at best, Google would be able to grab a market share of between 1 percent and 2 percent in the next two years.

“Businesses will play around with Google in their information technology departments,” McNabb said. “But they’re going to be slow in adopting Google. Most won’t jump off Microsoft overnight. They trust Microsoft; their employees are comfortable with Microsoft. Google has much to learn about what it means to be a trusted enterprise partner.”

In his remarks to the technology council, which included many enterprise software executives, Girouard, of Google, said business technology managers spent too much time maintaining basic software programs. They would be better off turning them over to an outside company like Google, he said, and focusing on specialized business applications that differentiate their companies in the marketplace.

Girouard also said business software had become too complex and distant for its users.

He predicted that future generations of enterprise software would, like Google’s applications, take their cue from the consumer market, stressing simplicity and ease of use. “There’s been an artificial wall between consumer technology and enterprise technology, and it’s starting to crumble,” Girouard said.