Manila OKs foreign firm to plant biofuel coconut

Pacific Bio-Fields Holdings Plc said it has received approval to use 400,000 hectares of land to plant coconut trees in the Philippines to make alternative auto fuel, which it aims to sell to Japanese users in five years. The company, which plans to list on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM) later this year, said on Thursday the agreement allows it exclusively to cultivate unused public land on the northern main island of Luzon for free for up to 50 years. “It is the first time the Philippines’ government has allowed any local or foreign company to use land for a coconut oil-made biodiesel project,” Yuji Taniguchi, head of the U.K.-based holding company with its main operations in Japan and the Philippines, told a group of reporters. In the Philippines, the world’s biggest coconut oil exporter, local biodiesel producers have increasingly been using coconut oil as feedstock now that a 2 percent mixture of plant-origin fuel in diesel for auto use is mandatory. Competition with food is not an issue for this project, whose location is in the northern part of Luzon, where fields are largely abandoned after once-dominant tobacco production receded, Taniguchi said. (June 19, 2009)