India plans to spend $1.5 billion in the next three years to help farmers grow oil palm trees, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi pushing to make the nation self-sufficient in edible oils this decade.

A successful Indian push into palm cultivation would affect international demand for the commodity. Palm, the highest-yielding perennial edible oil crop, needs only a fraction of the area used by other oilseeds, making it suitable for India, a country where land is scarce.

However, India still does not recognize oil palm as a plantation crop, prohibiting large-scale cultivation by companies. One of the reasons for the rule is the fear that corporations would take over large tracts of land at the cost of other crops.

This specific rule, together with the gestation period of palm, have stymied previous efforts to switch to the crop, putting off local farmers as well as companies. The government now hopes that its $1.5 billion backing and the direct support from Modi will make the difference.

Australian agriculture could help to literally fuel the United States Navy's expansion in the Asia-Pacific as the US moves towards powering its navy war craft with a biofuel blend by 2020.

Dr Ian O'Hara from Queensland University of Technology recently received a grant from the Federal Government to investigate how Australian crop waste can be used to fuel the US Navy's ships. However, the overall aim of his research was to help make Australian farmers more profitable by finding new uses for their crops.

"One of the big challenges facing Australian agriculture at the moment is that, while productivity is very high, the profit is very low," said Dr. O'Hara. "So we are trying to find ways that we can convert the wastes of farming into high value products like animal feeds, fuels and chemicals."

Aside from sugarcane, sorghum is another crop with untapped potential for fuel production, according to food technologist Ross Naidoo, from Queensland's Department of Agriculture.

A Boston firm is working to build almost two dozen biofuel plants in Ukraine to help reduce the country's reliance on Russian natural gas.

The Ukraine Agro Valley Association plans to build 20 factories across the country that would produce biofuel pellets. Each factory is planned to be surrounded by 10,000 acres of farm for the crops. The factories are likely to begin operation by 2017, but miscanthus, the crop to be used as feedstock, need to be planted a year before factory operation.

Miscanthus, regarded as one of the best crops to make biofuels, would be used to make pellets that can be burned for fuel. However, it initially will have to be brought into the country.

Latvian scientists have succeeded in producing bioethanol and furfural from plant wheat straw. The co-generation of the two products, ethanol and furfural, is what made their method unique.

Ethanol and furfural are two substances that are used in the chemical industry. Both chemicals can be generated from plant material. However, cellulose used for making furfural can no longer be used to produce alcohol. As a result, both ethanol and furfural are often made at different production facilities and by different technologies.

This was the research of a group of Latvian scientists headed by Prof. Alexander Rapoport from the University of Latvia Institute of Microbiology and Biotechnology and Prof. Nikolay Vedernikov of the Latvian State Institute of Wood Chemistry.

They changed the mechanism of furfural formation to prevent permanent damage to cellulose, making it viable for ethanol production. The substrate left after furfural formation was then treated with advanced commercial cellulases, followed by a traditional microbiological process of using yeast to generate alcohol.

Researchers at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) have discovered a "super-algae" that could provide a source of oil.

Scientists led by Stephen Slocombe of SAMS examined microalgae strains in the Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa, an internationally important algal store based at SAMS in Oban, to see which ocean-based strains had the highest oil content. They discovered two strains, Nannochloropis oceanica and Chlorella vulgaris, both having a dry-weight oil content of more than 50 percent, making them ideal sources of biofuel. Their results have been published in Scientific Reports and are likely to help bring forward research into algae as a source of biodiesel.

Microalgae synthesize high levels of oil, carbohydrates and proteins from sunlight but only a few species are currently grown commercially for health foods. Aside from strains for biofuels, the report also signposts those which could be used as sources of food, Omega-3 oils, or aquaculture feed.

Their shortlist of "super-algae" will give researchers a head start when investigating which strains to produce, or genetically engineer, for mass culture.

Understanding the interactions within the cell wall is vital to overcome recalcitrance of the lignocellulosic biomass for ethanol production. A major factor affecting recalcitrance is lignin, which can be manipulated by changes in its biosynthetic pathway.

 A research team led by Robert W. Sykes of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory down-regulated the expression of cinnamate 4-hydroxylase (C4H) or p-coumaroyl quinate/shikimate 3′-hydroxylase (C3′H) in eucalyptus and evaluated their cell wall composition and reduced recalcitrance.

Eucalyptus trees with down-regulated C4H or C3′H expression displayed lowered overall lignin content. The control samples had an average of 29.6 % lignin content, while C3′H and C4H reduced lines had an average of 21.7% and 18.9 % lignin, respectively. Both down-regulated lines also had different lignin compositions and reduced recalcitrance as indicated by increased sugar release.

Lowering lignin content was found to have the largest impact on reducing recalcitrance of the transgenic eucalyptus variants. The development of lower recalcitrance trees opens up the possibility of using alternative pretreatment strategies in biomass conversion processes that can reduce production costs.