Wellington, July 7 NZPA - The Singapore-based renewable energy company which picked up Biojoule's willow-energy project for less than $4 million last year today said it will start selling cuttings of the trees to farmers and foresters.

It has launched a manual, Energy Farming with Willow, largely targeted to poorer quality land around Lake Taupo, where farmers are under pressure to reduce the nutrient flows from animal wastes and fertilisers into the lake.

The company said planting and coppicing willows would provide a secure supply from which Pure Power will produce biofuels and a range of bioproducts for use in the manufacture of paints, resins, adhesives and bioplastics.

Shareholders in biotechnology company Genesis Research and Development last year agreed to sell their 65.2 percent stake in BioJoule to international biofuel company Pure Power Global (PPG), for $3.9 million and nearly a million shares in PPG.

Genesis chief executive Stephen Hall complained at the time that it had been difficult to raise capital or grant funding for a biorefinery to produce ethanol, unsulphonated lignin and xylose from shrubby willow in New Zealand.

PPG chief executive David Milroy said his company intended to escalate the international development and deployment of BioJoule, which successfully produced "green" plastics -- expanded polyurethane foam -- from natural lignin extracted from shrubby willows grown near Taupo.

About 50 percent of the cane willow is cellulose which can be turned into ethanol.

Biojoule said the rest of the wood content may be processed to extract lignin for making plastics now reliant on oil-based chemicals, and xylose, a natural sweetener which can be used by diabetics and does not cause tooth decay.

Some overseas biofuel manufacturers are extensively using food-grade corn to produce huge quantities of biofuel, and a third of the USA corn crop this year is expected to be converted into ethanol.

Advocates of the willow resource have said that ethanol feedstocks would make more economic sense if they were grown on land not suited to food crops.

PPG has laid out methods of establishing commercial plantations of new generation biofuels, including breeding and propagation of suitable willows, plantation establishment, plantation management, harvesting and pest and disease control and markets.

It has developed the concept with a partner, the Lake Taupo Development Company, the Government's Sustainable Farming Fund and Hortresearch and Scion.

Pure Power said it had 37 hectares of willows in nursery plantations at various stages of development, enough cuttings for farmers to plant up to 500 hectares in 2009, and 1000 in 2010 , and carry on doubling each year.

The first crops could be harvested in 2013, and those plantings re-harvested every three years for twenty years to give up to eight crops.

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