The Big Biofuels Blog

Biofuels volumes in the UK are set to rise, but will the announcement by BP, Associated British Foods and DuPont increase the price of food in the UK?

The wide spread availability of biofuels in the UK took a major step forward today as BP, Associated British Foods (ABF) and DuPont announced major investment plans, totalling around $400 million, for the construction of a world scale bioethanol plant alongside a high technology demonstration plant to advance development work on the next generation of biofuels.

The bioethanol plant, in which BP and ABF subsidiary British Sugar would each hold 45 per cent with DuPont owning the remaining 10 per cent, will be built on BP's existing chemicals site at Saltend, Hull. Due to be commissioned in late 2009, it will have an annual production capacity of some 420 million litres from wheat feedstock.

420 million litres makes this world scale, it also means that the demand for wheat grown locally, and there's no indication in the release just what locally means in this context, will be substantially improved.

Also in the release

The BP site in Hull has also been selected as the preferred location for a planned biobutanol demonstration plant, funded and owned equally by BP and DuPont which could produce around 20,000 litres of biobutanol a year from a wide variety of feedstocks.

It would be interesting to get some figures on the yeild they expect. I'll be seeing what the UK farming community thinks about this in later posts.