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    Spanish company Ferry Group is to invest €42/US$55.2 million in a project for the production of biomass fuel pellets in Bulgaria. The 3-year project consists of establishing plantations of paulownia trees near the city of Tran. Paulownia is a fast-growing tree used for the commercial production of fuel pellets. Dnevnik - Feb. 20, 2007.

    Hungary's BHD Hõerõmû Zrt. is to build a 35 billion Forint (€138/US$182 million) commercial biomass-fired power plant with a maximum output of 49.9 MW in Szerencs (northeast Hungary). Portfolio.hu - Feb. 20, 2007.

    Tonight at 9pm, BBC Two will be showing a program on geo-engineering techniques to 'save' the planet from global warming. Five of the world's top scientists propose five radical scientific inventions which could stop climate change dead in its tracks. The ideas include: a giant sunshade in space to filter out the sun's rays and help cool us down; forests of artificial trees that would breath in carbon dioxide and stop the green house effect and a fleet futuristic yachts that will shoot salt water into the clouds thickening them and cooling the planet. BBC News - Feb. 19, 2007.

    Archer Daniels Midland, the largest U.S. ethanol producer, is planning to open a biodiesel plant in Indonesia with Wilmar International Ltd. this year and a wholly owned biodiesel plant in Brazil before July, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The Brazil plant is expected to be the nation's largest, the paper said. Worldwide, the company projects a fourfold rise in biodiesel production over the next five years. ADM was not immediately available to comment. Reuters - Feb. 16, 2007.

    Finnish engineering firm Pöyry Oyj has been awarded contracts by San Carlos Bioenergy Inc. to provide services for the first bioethanol plant in the Philippines. The aggregate contract value is EUR 10 million. The plant is to be build in the Province of San Carlos on the north-eastern tip of Negros Island. The plant is expected to deliver 120,000 liters/day of bioethanol and 4 MW of excess power to the grid. Kauppalehti Online - Feb. 15, 2007.

    In order to reduce fuel costs, a Mukono-based flower farm which exports to Europe, is building its own biodiesel plant, based on using Jatropha curcas seeds. It estimates the fuel will cut production costs by up to 20%. New Vision (Kampala, Uganda) - Feb. 12, 2007.

    The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has decided to use 10% biodiesel in its fleet of public buses. The world's largest city is served by the Toei Bus System, which is used by some 570,000 people daily. Digital World Tokyo - Feb. 12, 2007.

    Fearing lack of electricity supply in South Africa and a price tag on CO2, WSP Group SA is investing in a biomass power plant that will replace coal in the Letaba Citrus juicing plant which is located in Tzaneen. Mining Weekly - Feb. 8, 2007.

    In what it calls an important addition to its global R&D capabilities, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is to build a new bioenergy research center in Hamburg, Germany. World Grain - Feb. 5, 2007.

    EthaBlog's Henrique Oliveira interviews leading Brazilian biofuels consultant Marcelo Coelho who offers insights into the (foreign) investment dynamics in the sector, the history of Brazilian ethanol and the relationship between oil price trends and biofuels. EthaBlog - Feb. 2, 2007.

    The government of Taiwan has announced its renewable energy target: 12% of all energy should come from renewables by 2020. The plan is expected to revitalise Taiwan's agricultural sector and to boost its nascent biomass industry. China Post - Feb. 2, 2007.

    Production at Cantarell, the world's second biggest oil field, declined by 500,000 barrels or 25% last year. This virtual collapse is unfolding much faster than projections from Mexico's state-run oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos. Wall Street Journal - Jan. 30, 2007.

    Dubai-based and AIM listed Teejori Ltd. has entered into an agreement to invest €6 million to acquire a 16.7% interest in Bekon, which developed two proprietary technologies enabling dry-fermentation of biomass. Both technologies allow it to design, establish and operate biogas plants in a highly efficient way. Dry-Fermentation offers significant advantages to the existing widely used wet fermentation process of converting biomass to biogas. Ame Info - Jan. 22, 2007.

    Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited is to build a biofuel production plant in the tribal belt of Banswara, Rajasthan, India. The petroleum company has acquired 20,000 hectares of low value land in the district, which it plans to commit to growing jatropha and other biofuel crops. The company's chairman said HPCL was also looking for similar wasteland in the state of Chhattisgarh. Zee News - Jan. 15, 2007.

    The Zimbabwean national police begins planting jatropha for a pilot project that must result in a daily production of 1000 liters of biodiesel. The Herald (Harare), Via AllAfrica - Jan. 12, 2007.

    In order to meet its Kyoto obligations and to cut dependence on oil, Japan has started importing biofuels from Brazil and elsewhere. And even though the country has limited local bioenergy potential, its Agriculture Ministry will begin a search for natural resources, including farm products and their residues, that can be used to make biofuels in Japan. To this end, studies will be conducted at 900 locations nationwide over a three-year period. The Japan Times - Jan. 12, 2007.

    Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint has launched an arrogant attack on "quasi-hysterical Europeans" and their attitudes to global warming, calling the Stern Review 'dubious'. The remarks illustrate the yawning gap between opinions on climate change among Europeans and Americans, but they also strengthen the view that announcements by US car makers and legislators about the development of green vehicles are nothing more than window dressing. Today, the EU announced its comprehensive energy policy for the 21st century, with climate change at the center of it. BBC News - Jan. 10, 2007.

    The new Canadian government is investing $840,000 into BioMatera Inc. a biotech company that develops industrial biopolymers (such as PHA) that have wide-scale applications in the plastics, farmaceutical and cosmetics industries. Plant-based biopolymers such as PHA are biodegradable and renewable. Government of Canada - Jan. 9, 2007.


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Thursday, September 21, 2006

Small fertilizer doses yield big impact in sub-Saharan Africa

At the recently held African Fertiliser Summit, experts agreed: Africa's low agricultural productivity is due to an enormous lack of small investments in the most basic farming inputs: machinery, fertilizer, pesticides. Food crises in Africa are not caused by a lack of land or by bad weather, but by a lack of simple techniques and inputs, and by bad governance and a lack of distribution infrastructure. According to the FAO, many sub-Saharan farmers could increase their yields by 70% tomorrow, if only they were to implement the most basic of farming techniques.

The fertilizer microdosing technique developed by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) once again proves this dreadful fact (dreaful because the problem of Africa's food and fuel shortages could be solved so easily, it seems). Microdosing has reintroduced fertilizer use in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and South Africa in the southern part of African continent; and Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso in western Africa. And through this intervention, ICRISAT and partners have surmounted the barrier to productivity increase which even crop improvement could not overcome.

In 2006, which has been declared as the International Year of Deserts and Desertification by the United Nations, ICRISAT's microdosing initiative is improving the livelihood of the poor and marginal farmers of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) through enhanced agricultural productivity in the drylands. According to Dr William Dar, Director General of ICRISAT, the strength of the microdosing initiative has been the strong partnerships with donors, international and national agricultural research and extension systems, NGOs and farmer communities. "Microdosing permits small farmers to get good impact by adding affordable quantities of fertilizer to the fields. And through the warrantage credit scheme in western Africa, the farmers are effectively linked with the markets," Dar added.

Farmers in the project countries have developed innovative techniques to apply microdoses of the appropriate fertilizer. While the farmers in southern Africa use fertilizer measured out in an empty soft drink or beer bottle cap, in western Africa the farmers measure fertilizer with a three-finger pinch and apply it in the same hole in which the seed is sown.

Linking microdosing to relief in southern Africa
ICRISAT's programs in southern Africa initially emphasized the development of more drought tolerant varieties of sorghum and pearl millet. A combination of international and national crop breeders selected earlier maturing varieties with good food and feed qualities. These offered large yield gains in drought years when the rainy season ended early. But yield gains during normal or longer rainy seasons were smaller. Dr Steve J Twomlow, ICRISAT's Global Theme Leader on Agro-Ecosystems and the leader of the microdosing project in southern Africa, explains "though there was good adoption by farmers of improved varieties, we realized that we did not get the expected yield increase. There had to be some other limiting factor." The idea of microdosing derived from the recognition that nitrogen was often in shorter supply than water.

The problem was that few small-scale farmers in these drought-prone regions used any fertilizer. For instance, surveys in southern Zimbabwe showed that less than 5% of the farmers used chemical fertilizers. And even more unexpectedly 60% of the households owning livestock did not even use available cattle manure as soil amendment. Farmers argued that these inputs were too risky. Despite years of extension advice, they did not understand the value of fertilizer:

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"We began from the realization that poorer farmers in drought-prone areas will not invest in fertilizer - or at most, only in very small quantities," says Twomlow. "The question was not what quantity of fertilizer will maximize yields, but rather how to maximize returns from a small investment in fertilizer." ICRISAT challenged an international workshop of scientists to assess how best to allocate two 50 kg bags of fertilizer on a small-scale farm through a crop systems simulation exercise. Again, the key question was not how to maximize yields, but how to maximize the returns to a severely resource-constrained investment. The simulation allowed options of concentrating the fertilizer on one plot or spreading this. Labor resource constraints highlighted the farmer's problems of weed control. To the surprise of many, the largest gains were achieved by spreading the fertilizer broadly.

ICRISAT worked with the Zimbabwean Department for Agricultural Research and Extension (AREX) and several non-government organizations to implement on-farm participatory trials where a limited number of farmers experimented with the application of small quantities of ammonium nitrate through a method later called microdosing. These results confirmed the simulation results. ICRISAT then challenged the larger donor and NGO community to promote application of these findings in their post-drought recovery programs. In 2003/04 cropping year, 170,000 farmers were provided 25 kg bags of ammonium nitrate with advice on how to apply this on an acre of grain crop. Virtually every farmer achieved a significant yield gain - with most obtaining a 30-50 percent improvement in harvest. More than 40,000 tons of additional grain was produced and ultimately consumed by many of then poorest farmers in the country. This additional production reduced the costs of Zimbabwe's food aid imports by more than US$ 8 million.

The success of this initiative has encouraged growing interest in neighboring countries. Microdosing is now being tested in Mozambique and South Africa. In addition, fertilizer companies are starting to take note. Companies in Zimbabwe and South Africa have agreed to support the distribution of smaller fertilizer packs with the advance on how best to apply them.

A pinch of fertilizer supported with "warrantage" in western Africa
ICRISAT scientists working in the Sahelian region adjacent to the Sahara Desert realized that to improve productivity of pearl millet and sorghum at least 100 kg of Compound Nitrogen-Phosphorus-Potassium (NPK) fertilizer is required per hectare. It was so since the region had received minimal or almost no fertilizer application over decades.

According to Dr Ramadjita Tabo, ICRISAT's Deputy Director for West and Central Africa and Regional Coordinator, Desert Margins Program (DMP), the poor farmers in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso would have needed to spend around US$40 per hectare to follow the recommendation on NPK use. "We could not recommend something that we were sure the farmers would not be able to afford. So we had to find a way to reach the right component to the right spot at the right time," adds Tabo.

Since much of the soil in the Sahelian region is sandy it was realized the most limiting factor was phosphorus. "Initially we used 6 gms of NPK (15:15:15) per hill for a total of 60 kg NPK per hectare. We then searched for a fertilizer with a higher concentration of phosphorus and decided to use Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP), which means that only 2 grams of fertilizer is required per plant, reducing the total fertilizer use to 20 kg per hectare," says Tabo.

DAP or NPK is placed along with the seed and covered with soil. The West African farmers found a labor-saving method for microdosing. While one farmer goes about making holes the second follows him or her with two vessels: one with the seed and the other with DAP or NPK. He plants the seed and puts a three-finger pinch (sufficient for 2 gm) of fertilizer and pushes the soil over the hole with his feet. This microdosing is supplemented with 1 gm of urea per plant three weeks after sowing.

On an average, microdosing has resulted in yield increases between 44 and 120% for pearl millet and sorghum. However, even with increased production, the market dynamics is such that the farmers do not get the right price for the produce since they do not have the ability to store grain, which they sell to middle men at low prices during harvest. The project, through the warrantage or inventory credit system system overcame this problem.
The first step was the creation and strengthening of farmers' associations in the project villages. These associations built warehouses for grain storage. The farmers keep their grain for safekeeping in the warehouses immediately after the harvest, when the grain price in the market is the lowest due to high supply. The associations give a credit of 80% of the grain price to the farmers, which the farmers use for dry-season activities such as raising Africa Market Garden (AMG) with fruit and vegetable trees rearing and fattening sheep or extracting groundnut oil. When the price for sorghum and millet improves, the farmers return the credit taken from the association, retrieve their grain and sell it in the market.

The associations also use their economies of scale to purchase fertilizers and other inputs in bulk and store them in input shops in the villages. This is broken down into smaller packets and sold to farmers. Microdosing when combined with warrantage has resulted in 52 to 134% improvement in income for 12,650 farm households in the three countries.

The project is supported by the United States Agency for International Development and implemented by ICRISAT and a broad consortium of partners. They include the Institut de l'Environnement et de Recherches Agricoles du Burkina Faso, the Hunger Project, the Institut d'Economie Rurale du Mali, Sasakawa Global 2000, Winrock International, the Institut National de Recherche Agronomique du Niger, Project Intrants FAO, the International Fertilizer Development Center, the Tropical Soils Biology and Fertility Institute of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, NGOs, and farmers' organizations.


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India looking to sweet sorghum, as ethanol now beats petrol

According to the Financial Express ethanol in India has become price competitive for blending with petrol as the price of crude oil has skyrocketted recently (but has meanwhile come down substantially). According to the newspaper, this dispels the myth that massive subsidies are needed to augment usage of the bio-fuel in the country. This is the case even after adjusting for energy-equivalence (1 liter of petrol has the same energy content as 1.5 liter of ethanol).

India is targetting a 10% blend of ethanol in its national petrol supply, William D Dar, director general of International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), said. According to Dar, the constraint is not the cost of ethanol production but the supply of raw materials. This is where ICRISAT and partners have stepped in.

Sweet sweet sorghum
Sweet sorghum (earlier post) is gradually being identified as a more promising biofuel crop than sugar cane. ICRISAT headquarters in Patancheru in Andhra Pradesh, has formed a public-private partnership with Rusni Distilleries (P) Ltd. Rusni ensures that seeds of the highest-sugar sorghum varieties identified by ICRISAT and India's National Research Centre for Sorghum reach farmers so that they can increase their productivity. Rusni also helps farmers by transporting the stalks from farms within a 30-km radius of the plant, and providing more distant farmers with technologies to crush the stalks and reduce the juice into syrup that can be moved cost-efficiently to the ethanol production plant. "Lessons we are learning from this partnership will enable the technology to scale up faster and more widely in the coming years.”

Most bio-ethanol in India is produced from the molasses left over from the refining of sugar from sugarcane, but the supply of molasses is insufficient and not reliable enough for costly ethanol production facilities:
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The facilities need to keep working round-the-clock to pay off. But sweet varieties of sorghum store large quantities of energy as sugar in their stalks, while also producing reasonable grain yields. Sorghum, like sugarcane and maize, exhibits C4 metabolism, making it more efficient at converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugar than most plants. As a dryland crop, sorghum requires far less water than costly irrigated sugarcane, making it more accessible to the poor.

The juice squeezed out of sweet sorghum stalks contains about 15%-20% sugar that can be fermented into ethanol more cheaply than from sugarcane molasses, and with even greater energy savings compared to maize grain. Prior to that, maize grain has to be hydrated and converted from starch to sugar.


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Papua New Guinea could be major biofuels producer


Here at the Biopact we focus on chances for development in the poorer regions of this world, offered by the nascent biofuels and bioenergy industry. If one looks at the scientific projections of the biomass production potential of different parts of the world, it immediately becomes apparent that several regions stand out: most notably Central Africa, Latin America and South-East Asia, including the large island of Papua.

In-depth studies by the IEA Bioenergy Task 40, which analyses the global bioenergy potential, have shown that on a per capita basis, Papua New Guinea can easily satisfy its growing energy needs entirely and sustainably by relying on green fuels, and that it can produce a very large excess that it can export.

As the Pacific’s biggest copra producer, Papua New Guinea has the potential of becoming a major producer of biodiesel, first and foremost. There is already increasing interest in the Pacific in using coconut oil for local biodiesel production and shells for electricity generation due to increasing fuel prices.

According to the Australia and New Zealand Bank’s (ANZ) Pacific quarterly report (earlier post), copra is by far the most significant crop in the Pacific Islands and has a good potential for use in biofuels. ANZ said Papua New Guinea is the region’s biggest copra producer, followed by Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Fiji. Samoa also has extensive coconut plantations. "While other alternative sources of power such as solar and wind power are also gaining attention, biofuels remain attractive because they can be used in existing generators," ANZ said. Unelco in New Caledonia has installed new power generators on the Loyalty Islands that run solely on coconut oil.

For decades, Pacific nations have produced copra for domestic consumption and export. Vanuatu exports copra to Germany for processing into coconut oil and already the oil is being used or tested by power suppliers in Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Samoa and Fiji.
ANZ said producing that oil would require 12,000 tonnes of copra, according to recent research by the Vanuatu commodities marketing board. Samoa’s Electric Power Corp is testing a blend that includes 20% coconut oil and the Fiji electricity authority also plans to use vegetable oil in its generators. ANZ said while the development of a Pacific biofuels industry sounds attractive in theory, there are serious impediments:
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One major hurdle is the uncertainty over land tenure, it said. In much of the Pacific, land is communally owned by traditional owners, ANZ said. "The investment needed to set up the large-scale plantations that would underpin a viable industry will not be forthcoming without land ownership certainty," ANZ said.

Globally, much of the biofuel focus has been on the world’s big producers such as Brazil, where ethanol from sugar cane plantations is widely used with 70% of new cars produced there able to run on ethanol and normal gasoline. But in the much smaller biofuel market of the South Pacific, coconut oil, rather than ethanol, is the focus.
Coconut oil is extracted from copra, the dried flesh of the coconut.

Another major problem is the question over Papua New Guinea's unique environment and biodiversity, with its pristine rainforests and its many endemic species. Vast swathes of the island are suitable for monocrops like palm oil or nipa fruticans, and if oil prices stay high, the temptation might be great to effectively start converting forests into plantations. Unlike crops in the North (maize, sunflower, rapeseed), tropical energy crops and biofuels can compete with oil as long as prices stay above US$40-50.

However, an alternative consists of the so-called system of "compensated reduction", which was first called for by Papua New Guinea, and which comes down to the international community 'compensating' tropical countries not to cut down their forests in exchange for carbon credits that can be traded on a global market. After all, these forests are the lungs of the earth and the carbon sinks we must keep standing.

It remains to be seen which route Papua New Guinea will take: producing biofuels and selling them on the global market? Or being more prudent by demanding carbon credits for not making use of its potential as a biofuels producer?

More information:

The National (Papua New Guinea): PNG could be major bio-fuel producer: ANZ - s.d.

Biopact: "Pay us and we will not burn down our forests": a look at 'Compensated Reduction' - September 02, 2006


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Farmer experiments with exotic 'diesel tree' for biofuels

There is a huge diversity of exotic tropical crops out there that could be used as biofuel feedstocks. Most of us have never heard of them, because they do not figure in our daily lives (just like people in the West only know a few tropical fruit species that have been marketed and that conform to the simple tastes of the consumer, whereas in reality there are of course thousands out there). It is interesting to see that some farmers dare venturing into planting such more exotic crops with a view on the long term implications of the post-petroleum era.

In Australia, a Queensland farmer is experimenting with the tropical Copaifera langsdorfii, also known as the 'diesel tree', which is native to the Amazon (but can be found all over the humid tropics in South America). The name is derived from early texts by Catholic missionaries, ethnobotanists and anthropologists who witnessed indigenous 'Indios' tapping the tree and obtaining copious quantities of an oleoresin called 'copaiba', which was later identified to have properties similar to diesel fuel. In 1978, Nobel laureate Dr. Melvin Calvin, director of the Chemical Biodynamics Laboratory at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, said:
"Natives ... drill a 5 centimeter hole into the 1-meter thick trunk and put a bung into it. Every 6 months or so, they remove the bung and collect 15 to 20 liters of the hydrocarbon. Since there are few [Volkswagen] Rabbit diesels in the jungle, the natives use the hydrocarbon as an emollient and for other nonenergy-related purposes. But tests have shown that the liquid can be placed directly in the fuel tank of a diesel-powered car."
Since then, the tree has become known as the 'diesel tree'. Mike Jubow, the nursery wholesaler from Mackay, Queensland, has now begun importing copaifera seed from Brazil to plant the trees. Even though there is not much consistent information on the yields of the species, it is estimated that with good management, a one hectare plantation could produce 12,000 litres of fuel a year, one of the highest yields for any biofuel crop.

The tropical tree is one of the many species that can be tapped, simply by making an incision into the bark, after which the resin flows out of the cut - the procedure is similar to that of tapping rubber trees or sugar palms (an overview of such palms and trees that are traditionally tapped for gums, latex, sugar or fuel can be found here).

Mr Jubow, who operates the Nunyara Wholesale Forestry Nursery and has been in the industry for 14 years, said he had heard about the trees from a colleague attending a forestry conference. "I pricked my ears and thought 'This guy is having a go at me' but when I came home I got onto the net and typed in diesel tree and there it was," Mr Jubow said. "I thought 'I've got to get seeds for this thing' and it's taken me three years to track them down." He sourced the seed from Brazil and says the first seedlings would be available in late January:
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The recommended method of growing them is to plant 1,000 trees on a hectare of land, preferably in a tropical area, then test them for their vigour, growth and yield about three years later, which ordinarily would lead to culling about half of them. About four to six years later they would be measured again before culling them down to between 250 and 350 of the best trees, which would be inter-bred and harvested for seed.

Mr Jubow said a large mature tree would yield about 40 litres of diesel a year, which equated to about 12,000 litres per hectare of trees. "It becomes astonishingly viable for a farmer to have a piece of his most productive land to get the tree up and running and then he can be independent from the fuel companies for the rest of his life," he said. They are known to produce fuel for 70 years.

While the fuel cannot be stored for more than a few months it can be tapped. But even if it is left too long, it thickens into copaiba oil, which is used in alternative medicines and fetches around $100 a litre in the United States. And at the end of the tree's life, it can be milled to produce a light brown timber favoured by cabinet makers. "There's nothing wasted on the tree," Mr Jubow said.

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George Soros to invest $300 million into biofuels in Argentina

Quicknote bioenergy business
Via Treehugger. Argentinean Federal Planning minister, Julio de Vido, revealed in New York the interest of the group lead by Hungarian financier and philanthropist George Soros in developing biofuels in Santa Fe province, Argentina. The investment would be "between 250 and 300 million dollars", he informed after meeting with Soros’ son -Jonathan Soros-, and it would be oriented to produce bio-fuel from corn and sugar cane.

The plant would be settled in Santa Fe province, one of the closest to Buenos Aires and one of the main centers for farming activities in the country. More specifically, it would be set at Venado Tuerto city. The project would employ "1,300 people directly and among 8,000 to 10,000 people indirectly", the minister considered, and anticipated a production of 200 million liters of ethanol.

The Soros group was already involved in real estate investments in the country and then got to manage over 170 thousand hectares of country land in several Argentinean provinces. It has now strong investments in cattle, soy, corn, wheat, sunflower, and milk production. Though their biofuel interest has a background with the buying of an ethanol plant in Minas Gerais -Brazil-, they surely saw an opportunity in Argentina after the recent fuzz about the biofuel law declared by the government -- approved in 2004 and re-approved in April with a different text (see earlier post).

The law sets tax deduction incentives for the production of biofuels, and makes mandatory for all liquid fuels from petrol to contain 5% of ethanol or biofuel. Though it might seem a positive initiative, the duplicate approval left a sour feel to it. On the other hand, it’s no surprise the project takes place in Santa Fe province, since it is home to several bioenergy initiatives. Major oil companies have projects for soy conversion into biodiesel, and oil companies such as Repsol have plans for millionaire investments.

Months ago, Jim Rogers, an associate of Soros said that investing in tropical commodities (sugar, palm, cattle, corn, wood) will beat all other forms of investment, including those in petroleum (earlier post). George Soros is the latest in a series of big investors to take an interest in the biofuels industry. Before him, Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla, Richard Branson, Larry Page and Sergei Brin all made investments or have shown interest. Of those, Soros is the first one to make a large investment outside the United States [entry ends here].
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