Amelot Holdings has signed a letter of intent to acquire the Three Rivers Biofuel company. Commenting on the deal Mr. Aziz Hirji, president and CEO of Amelot Holdings said; "Bud Stacy is the only man for this job. Bud's track record of designing, constructing, and operating large scale energy plants speaks for itself. He took Olgethorpe Power and turned it into a Fortune 500 top 50 utilities company. He is just the kind of person we need and want at Amelot to build our first class Jatropha biodiesel plants in the U.S. and around the world."

In a letter to the Australian Stock Exchange today (28th March) Peter Anderton, chairman and ceo, of the the troubled Australian biofuels company Agri Energy Ltd outlined the situation the company currently finds itself in, and its view of the future. Writing on behalf of the board Anderton explained that; "The main focus of the company is the Beatrice Biodiesel Project. With the increase in feedstock prices in the second half of 2007 which continued through January 2008 to early March 2008, the company suspended all construction and testing activity at Beatrice in early 2008 and is reassessing the Group’s options for the future."

A castor farming project, to plant, harvest and produce non-edible oil for the biodiesel industry, in Ethiopa has been unveiled today (28th March) by Global Energy. The company expects to commence seeding of castor in April,this year and harvest in August/September 2008. The expected yield of the harvest, says the company, is 28,000 tons of seeds producing approximately 12,000 tons of castor oil. The current commodity price for castor ranges from $700.00U.S. to $1100.00 per ton.

Chronic neglect of the agricultural sector in Asia and the Pacific is condemning 218 million people to continuing extreme poverty, and widening the gap between the region’s rich and poor, according to the Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2008, launched today (27th March) by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

ESCAP’s focus on the agricultural sector comes amid signs of rising food prices, pressured by soaring demand for biofuels. The survey says that biofuels are not only hurting poor consumers in Asia and the Pacific through high food prices, but they are also failing to help the region's poor farmers who do not have the resources to adapt their land to the biofuel crops.

Austrian company Vogelbusch GmbH, today (26th March) announced that it has applied for a patent for an efficient fermentation process for the high-yield extraction of bioethanol from materials containing hemicellulose. Working in partnership with the Institute of Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering at Graz University of Technology, the company has succeeded, it says, in extracting significantly more ethanol from this raw material than other processes.

A new multi-fuel bio-energy combined heat and power (CHP) project in Meer, Hoogstraten in the North of Belgium was announced today by Thenergo. The project, named Binergy Meer, will, says the company, generate between 6.5 and 25 MWe of renewable electricity and similar amounts of renewable heat. It will be built in several phases due to the need to modify the local grid to inject the generated electricity. The current available injection capacity will allow 6.5 MWe of electricity generation. In a second phase, extensions are planned to extend generation capacity to 13 and to 25 MWe.

A joint research and development effort to convert plant sugars directly into gasoline and gasoline blend components, rather than ethanol was unveilled by Shell and Virent Energy Systems today (26th March). The collaboration, claim the companies, could herald the availability of new biofuels that can be used at high blend rates in standard gasoline engines.  This could potentially eliminate the need for specialized infrastructure, new engine designs and blending equipment.

Initial results from trials of a new jatropha extraction technology, Continuous Liquid Hydrocarbon Extraction (CLHE(r)), are very positive says the developing company Jatropha Biofuels Technologies (JBTI). According to the company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Amelot Holdings, the CHLE(r) has proven in lab tests to produce up to 30% of the weight of the Jatropha seed where the normal expeller process produces much less. This represents over 20% total output increase over extraction technology currently available.