The plant, an initiative of Natural Fuels Australia Limited and merchant banker, Babcock and Brown, produced its first litre of fuel in November, 2006.

But it soon ran into trouble because the price of the feedstock used for biodiesel production, palm oil, increased by 300 per cent in the first 12 months after the factory opened.

In a similar move to Queensland Biodiesel, as reported in last week’s North Queensland Register, Natural Fuels commissioned trial plantings of soy beans to try and find an economic replacement feedstock for the increasingly expensive Malaysian palm oil.

* Extract from a full story the North Queensland Register, October 2 edtion.