As for the Swan Hill Ethanol Plant, I believe at this point in...

As for the Swan Hill Ethanol Plant, I believe at this point in time it is still basically a paddock with one very big shed. I wasn't under the impression they had actually started to build the facility, even if they had spent a large amount of money designing it.

It probably will be a worse sign if the land is sold, or if the land is currently on the market. That would indicated they have no future plans to produce Ethanol in Australia. Although they had plans for up to 7 Ethanol Plants in Australia, they would construct Swan Hill first because of the amount of effort invested already there.

Perhaps this is a pre-election ploy to try and get one or both of the major parties more involved with the Biofuels industries in Australia as this is just another example of a Biofuel company failing to develop a facility in Australia.

It is more likely that they just couldn't raise the funds to develop the project further following the collapse of the Share Purchase Plan. Why would institutional investors give money to a company that doesn't appear to be supported by their shareholders?

As for AAE's future, that is dependant on the sucess of the Biodiesel Plant in Beatrice. That should be producing good returns soon, but the end result will also depend on the overheads of the whole AAE organisation.

As for the share price, that has already been hammered considerably since the Share Purchase Plan came out a month ago. It is still hard to imagine that the share price will do anything but go down, especially after the annoucement was made in CAPITAL LETTERS.

Another very important point, is that development of new Ethanol Plants in Australia was going to cost a lot of money, which means AAE would have to raise a lot more capital, which dilutes the value of the shares anyway. There is no guarantee that additional Ethanol Plants in Australia would add to the current bottom line given the current drought.

To me, there are better value biofuel companies on the market at the moment such as AAE and NFL. There are also a lot worse such as ARW which despite being bailed out by Maquarie Bank still commands a higher share price than AAE.