News

August 06, 2008

Biofuels Without Increasing The Cost Of Tortillas In Mexico And Bread In Beijing? - Willmott May Have The Answer

By Our Man in Oz

Last week, in a remarkable demonstration of the pleasure and the pain of turning agricultural material into liquid fuel, one small Aussie company gave a “eureka-like” cry and issued a claim that it is close to unlocking the secret to a new form of ethanol feedstock, while another hung limply in limbo, shares suspended, staring bleakly into a future marked “foreclosure” and “all available cash resources at the parent level exhausted”.

In terms of a black versus white comparison, the difference between the bold biofuel experimentation from Willmott Forests and the utter desolation of Agri Energy could not be more stark. One is charging head-first into a technology designed to turn forest waste and other unwanted “woody” materials into ethanol. The other has spent every last cracker in a factory designed to make bio-diesel in the American state of Nebraska, with the now forlorn hope of eventually building additional plants in...