As reported here, several biofuel companies that had planned to IPO are now holding back and have yet to set a date. These include Hawkeye Holdings (holding back) and AS Alliances and US BioEnergy Corp who have registered but not yet given the date.

Hesitating to call the market for any IPO is nothing new but the nervousness around biofuels is quite marked.

Some of the concerns about biodiesel and bioethanol are;

i) will the price of oil stay high and go higher? Not everyone thinks so, at least in the short-term.
ii) do the environmental benefits add up? Claims of carbon neutrality are now highly disputed and outside of the USA, not everyone sees the benefit of replacing biodiverse forestry in Brazil and Malaysia with vast tracts of industrialized monoculture.
iii) is it scaleable enough to create energy security by eliminating the need for all oil imports? Almost certainly not.

So that's the case for pessimism.

On the other hand . . .

i) the odds of a conflict between the USA and Iran continue to rise and this would send the price of oil into orbit. My guesstimate is that this will almost certainly happen before President Bush leaves the White House. A terrible event of course that no one would want, but one can't ignore that conflict in the Middle East has indirectly been very helpful to the alternative energy industry by boosting the price of oil and I see no reason for this to change.
ii) biofuel - because it is higher octane - provides tangible environmental benefits in cleaner air, producing much fewer particulates. This is particularly relevant in biodiesel.
iii) it's still a tiny industry and nothing grows in a straight line. Just to reach a mere 10% of global transport fuel, would require enormous compound growth for some time to come. So look at it as a 10 year growth story, not a few months.

Nevertheless, as far as alternative fuel vehicles go, I would rank hybrids and plug in hybrids with greater potential over the next 10 years than biofuel.

Let's see . . .

Oil prices have taken a tumble and the alternative energy IPO boom so strong earlier this year has dried up. So it's encouraging to see that Prometheus Energy is planning to list on AIM. Like many of it's American brethren, it is being drawn to London's AIM market, because of the high cost of regulatory compliance following the Sarbanes Oxley Act - something I've written about here before.

The company plans to extract waste methane from landfill and coal mines, liquefy it and turn it into transport fuel. This is all pretty low-tech stuff and I like it. Air pollution in cities would end in short order if cars, trucks and buses ran on natural gas rather than petroleum and especially diesel. Methane - the most powerful greenhouse gas - has very few impurities which create the particulates, or in layman's terms, the black stuff in your nostrils.

The environmental priority for cities is to reduce air pollution - not reduce carbon emissions which perversely encourages diesel. That's why companies like Prometheus are a step very much in the right direction.