BP’s $500-million award last year to a research team led by the University of California at Berkeley is among the best known in a recent spate of generous grants to academe from oil corporations for research to develop clean, alternative sources of energy. But those projects have not begun to reverse more than two decades of deep cuts in industry and federal spending on energy research, a new report says.

In the report, “Big Oil U.,” the Center for Science in the Public Interest describes some striking trends in overall spending for such studies, relying on data reported last year in the journal Energy Policy.

Starting in 1985, the energy industry’s spending on research and development fell by almost three-quarters, after adjustment for inflation, to $1.1-billion in 2003. Federal spending also fell at the time. During those years, the energy industry invested less than one-quarter of 1 percent of its revenues in research, a far smaller proportion than in the drug and information-technology sectors. In the 1970s research into energy efficiency and oil alternatives reached 10 percent of total research spending from all sources; that figure now stands at 2 percent.

“It raises the question of where the energy technologies are going to come from if we’re ever going to move away from fossil fuels,” Gregory F. Nemet, co-author of the Energy Policy paper and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told the public-interest center. His paper says that a tenfold increase in research spending “is both warranted and feasible.”

Prompted by soaring gas prices and national-security concerns, Congress has begun to move in that direction. Lawmakers increased overall spending for energy research by 23 percent in the 2008 fiscal year. Most of that goes to corporations and federal laboratories. Universities get about 10 percent of federal spending for research in renewable energy and fossil fuels.

Some experts believe that more research is not urgently needed because existing technologies — like electric hybrid vehicles — that could reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and reliance on petroleum already exist.

The new report includes a section that argues that some university recipients of grants from oil companies gave them too much control over the research’s agenda and findings. The Chronicle has reported on the terms of deals between BP and Berkeley and between ConocoPhillips and Iowa State University. —Jeffrey Brainard