Nissan to build plug-in car in UK

Nissan to build plug-in car in UK

The government also announced on Thursday it would provide £360m in aid to Ford for the development of environmentally friendly technologies as it seeks to become a world leader in ultra low-carbon vehicles. The loan guarantees will come from the government’s Automotive Assistance Programme to support Ford’s development of environmentally friendly technologies across its UK sites.

Nissan’s production of the Leaf cars, as well as its batteries, will help safeguard and create over 550 highly skilled jobs at the Sunderland plant, the government said.

The Japanese company plans to produce the battery-powered car in Europe from mid-2012. Sunderland will be its sole production site in Europe for the vehicle, although the company has also confirmed plans to build the battery-powered car in Oppama, Japan, and Smyrna, Tennessee.

The north-east plant – Nissan's largest in Europe – had been tipped as the front-runner to build the car after the Japanese company last year said it intended to invest more than £200m to build lithium-ion batteries to supply electric cars there.

However, its plant in Barcelona had also been a candidate, and Nissan is also building a €200m (£179m) battery plant in Portugal.

A decision by the London 2012 Olympics Organising Committee to award to BMW a tender for about 4,000 mostly electric vehicles over a rival offer from Nissan had angered the Japanese carmaker.

Nissan's decision to build the car in Britain will be a boost to the government's intention to make the country a hub for low-carbon vehicle technology.

The government’s support for Nissan and Ford follows last week’s announcement of a £270m loan guarantee for General Motors’ European arm to secure the company’s operations in Britain and the rest of Europe.

”The automotive sector is of key importance to the UK. It supports R&D, technological innovation, skills and a supply chain that’s a mainstay of the wider manufacturing sector,” Lord Mandelson, business secretary, said.

Ford’s plans to invest £1.5bn over five years to develop low carbon emission diesel and petrol emissions will protect around 2,800 jobs across its UK sites, the government said.

The government has also spoken to General Motors about producing its planned Vauxhall Ampera electric car at its plant in Ellesmere Port. In addition, India's Tata Motors plans to make an electric version of its Indica Vista car somewhere in the UK.

Nissan's Sunderland plant makes its Qashqai and recently launched Juke small sports utility vehicles, but will not be producing the new model of the Micra small car, which the carmaker now intends to make at plants in Mexico, India, China and Thailand.

Nissan and its French alliance partner Renault plan to launch eight electric vehicles during the next four years, more than is scheduled by any other important carmaking group. Carlos Ghosn, the two companies' chief executive, thinks zero-emission cars will make up 10 per cent of the world market by 2020.

Nissan’s Sunderland plant, a £2.7bn investment, has consistently been rated Europe’s most efficient car producer. The plant employs 4,100 people. Thursday’s news is in stark contrast to just a year ago when the plant, hit by recession, had to shed 1,200 jobs.

Agriculture: a growing investment

By Mike Scott Financial Times Published: March 14 2010 10:24 | Last updated: March 14 2010 10:24

In spite of its central importance to society, agriculture is a sector that has long been misunderstood or ignored by investors, but this may be set to change.

“It is amazing how much agriculture has been overlooked,” says Bruce Kahn, director and senior investment analyst at DB Climate Change Advisors, part of Deutsche Asset Management. “There is not a lot of understanding of the complexities and the local and regional differences in agriculture.”

Ruud Nijs, head of corporate social responsibility at Rabobank, the Dutch bank which started as a co-operative offering finance to farmers, adds: “When people think about agriculture, they think about commodities. Commodities is a market that is fairly well understood and many people think that is where the opportunity lies to invest in agriculture, and really it is not.”

One reason is that for a long time in the developed world at least, food prices have been relatively stable and the ability of the system to feed the population has been taken for granted.

Food productivity is a function of its inputs, Mr Kahn asserts, and many people have also taken for granted the availability of the key inputs for food production; land, water and fertiliser.

However, a number of factors have combined to bring into question the ability of the global agricultural sector to feed the world. World population is projected to rise to 9bn by 2050, and large swathes of that population are set to become wealthier and to demand more meat and dairy products, which require a huge amount of water and produce huge amounts of methane.

Meanwhile, the availability of fresh water and land is set to decline. The amount of arable land available per person is set to fall from 0.38 hectares per person to 0.15ha per person, says Rob Wylie, director of WHEB Ventures, which has several agriculture-related investments.

Climate change will have a big impact on the incidence of crop diseases, soil erosion and rainfall patterns. Up to 40 per cent of arable land will be affected by drought as the climate warms, says Mr Wylie.

There is now competition for land from biofuels to contend with, too. Arable farming, while less damaging than meat production, also plays an important part in increasing emissions through deforestation and the use of fossil fuel-based fertilisers and pesticides.

According to Trucost, the use of traditional pesticides to produce rice results in emissions of 18.38kg of CO2 for every kg of rice.

Finally, many commentators predict that oil prices will head back towards the record levels of 2008, when a barrel of oil hit $147 and the price of many foods rose as a consequence.

In future, says Mr Kahn, “we believe prices will go up, there is no getting around it”. The need for the agricultural sector to address such serious issues creates opportunities, “from the seed to the supermarket”, says Mr Wylie. Many of these are linked by the need to do more with less and to eliminate waste in the supply chain. At the most basic level, this starts with the development of more robust, higher-yielding seeds that are more resistant to disease, pests or drought. Despite continued controversy over their use, there are likely to be more genetically modified (GM) crops. In a sign that Europe, the region most resistant to GM, may be coming around to the idea, the European Commission recently approved a GM potato for cultivation in Europe – only the second organism it has approved.

With 70 per cent of all the world’s fresh water consumption being used for agriculture and more than 200bn tonnes of fertiliser used a year – causing about 2 per cent of CO2 emissions and creating land and water pollution – there is great potential to reduce the amount of water and fertiliser used in cultivation through more precise agricultural practices, and a number of companies have emerged in these areas.

These include water efficiency companies such as Aquaspy, which offers “intelligent water control” to enable farmers to cut water consumption. Israel has carved out a niche as the global leader in drip irrigation technology, with companies such as Netafim and Queengil leading the way.

The Carbon War Room, a non-governmental organisation founded by Sir Richard Branson and other entrepreneurs, has identified a low-carbon fertiliser that it thinks could save 1 gigatonne of CO2 emissions every year: a product called biochar, a carbon-sequestering fertiliser. The process takes agricultural residues ranging from chicken manure to sugar cane leftovers and, using a process called pyrolysis, turns them into biochar. As well as removing carbon from the atmosphere, it also increases the water absorbency of soil, which prevents flooding and increases the amount of nutrients available to plants, says Peter Boyd, director of operations. The need to cut emissions and mounting consumer concern over pesticides has created a niche that Exosect, a UK-based company, has moved into with products that can control insects without pesticide. Deutsche Bank says that combining the food and potential fuel needs of 9bn people will require a 50 per cent increase in productivity – a challenge “that provides very large investment opportunities across the agribusiness complex”.

Arctic vault to safeguard world’s seeds

By Fiona Harvey in Svalbard Financial Times

Published: February 26 2008 01:36 | Last updated: February 26 2008 01:36

The door will open on Tuesday on an Arctic “doomsday” vault that will safeguard seed samples from the world’s most important food crops against possible disaster, in scenarios from drastic climate change to nuclear war.

The first seeds – of rice plants – are to be delivered this morning to the Svalbard global seed vault, dug out of a snow-covered island 800 miles (1,280km) from the North Pole. They will be kept at 18°C below freezing. The intention is to preserve hundreds of millions of seeds from varieties of nearly 100 of the world’s main crops.

“It’s an insurance policy,” said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which built the vault with $8m (€5.4m, £4.1m) from the Norwegian government.

In the event of a sudden disaster such as a nuclear attack or an asteroid strike, the seed bank would hold the means to restock the Earth’s agriculture.

It would also protect against the much more likely – some scientists would even say inevitable – effects of global warming by providing seeds for researchers to breed new crops that can to cope with a changing climate.

Mr Fowler explained: “We are losing crop varieties and crop diversity all over the place ... [even as] climate change is affecting the way some crops grow.”

He pointed to varieties of rice sensitive to temperature rises much smaller than those forecasted by climatologists as the result of global warming: if exposed to a temperature rise of 1°C during a crucial period of growth, the crop’s yield is cut by one-tenth.

If agricultural scientists could find strains of rice that were able to withstand higher temperatures, they could breed varieties to maintain yields.

At present, there is no single seed repository. Collections are maintained haphazardly worldwide, meaning samples are lost. Sometimes samples of potentially important varieties of plants, along with the genes that could have conferred benefits on new plants, become extinct.

Seeds from the 1.5m crop varieties known to be in the world’s collections will be sent to Svalbard, which will form the repository of last resort, dispensing seeds for crop varieties to be regrown only when all other known examples are gone.

Tuesday’s delivery of seeds will be attended by José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, and Jens Stoltenberg, the prime minister of Norway.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust has raised $100m of the endowment of about $300m needed for the upkeep of the vault and the process of collecting and experimenting on seeds.

Samples will be kept in watertight foil packets behind blastproof doors and concrete walls a metre thick. The vault’s remote location – 60m under the permafrost of the island of Spitsbergen, in the archipelago of Svalbard, one of the most northerly points of land on Earth – is intended to keep the seeds at the low temperatures required while also safe from intruders.