An advertisement placed by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council recently has fallen foul of the UK's Advertising Standards Authority. In upholding four complaints made against the advertisement, by Friends of the Earth, the ASA said this week (9th September) the ad must not appear again in its current form.

A contract to research, develop, and demonstrate commercial scale production of algae-derived advanced biofuel for the United States Navy has been awarded Solazyme by the US Department of Defense, it was announced today (9th September). The contract calls for the company to provide renewable F-76 Naval Distillate fuel for testing and fuel certification to demonstrate it meets all military specifications and functional requirements.

New analysis suggests that the south east Asian bioethanol market will produce revenues of $6.17 billion by 2015, due to its potential as a next-generation biofuel and the pushing up of production within the region. The report, Southeast Asian Bioethanol Market, from analysts Frost & Sullivan, argues that the surge will be driven by a market that is brimming with opportunities following the recent industry growth, rising number of entrants, and intense competition for best market positioning.

A $3 million shipment of biodiesel to a large, but undisclosed, European customer has been completed this week (2nd September) by the Indian company Universal Biofuels Pvt. Ltd. The fuel came from the company's 50 million gallon per year production facility located in Kakinada, India.

Funding totalling Can$7.7m has been awarded to the Canadian company Nexterra Systems Corp to support its recently announced program to commercialize a high efficiency biomass power system in collaboration with GE Jenbacher and GE Energy. The funding, announced this week (31st August), comes from a variety of sources including the BC Bioenergy Network (BCBN), Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC), the National Research Council Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC-IRAP), and Ethanol BC.

A successful demonstration of a new technology to produce large scale quantities of transport fuel from landfill waste was been claimed by Fulcrum BioEnergy yesterday (1st September). Commenting on the trials E. James Macias, Fulcrum President and CEO said; “The operating results from our TurningPoint Ethanol Plant represent a watershed event for Fulcrum and this new industry. By demonstrating first the clean and efficient conversion of garbage to syngas, and now syngas to ethanol, we have demonstrated that the technology is ready for deployment at our first large-scale project, the Sierra BioFuels Plant.”

Diversified Energy today (28th August) revealed two significant steps in the development of its alternative and renewable energy programme with an award by the National Science Foundation and a call fom the DoE to develop concept idea for further research.

The first was the announcement by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that NC State University had won a 4-year, multi-million dollar award to advance an integrated algae-to-biofuels technology. The back-end technology for this project is based on the Centia™ technology licensed exclusively to Diversified Energy.

The European Union (EU) has just (19th August) invested €5.9m into a project, NEMO, to develop manufacturing methods  for liquid biofuel from agricultural and forestry waste. The project is being headed up by Finland's VTT Technical Research Centre and brings together European research institutes and companies to develop the next generation of biofuel.