The debate is completely fabricated, Sergio Thompson-Flores declares, dismissing talk of biofuels plantations destroying the rainforest.

The chief executive of Infinity Bioenergy points to a map of Brazil and sweeps his hand over the areas of sugar cane cultivation in the southeast of the country. “Sugar cane does not grow where you have humidity and thin soil. It requires a drought period, which causes the plant to stress and produce sugar.”

That rules out plantations in the rainforest to the north and he insists that there is no shortage of existing farmland for a massive expansion of cane cultivation. Infinity Bioenergy, which launched on AIM last year, has acquired four mills, is building plants on greenfield sites and is on the prowl for more assets, expecting to raise its ethanol capacity from six million tonnes to 29 million by 2011.

The biofuel excitement has pushed up Infinity’s market value to more than $400 million, but Mr Thompson-Flores has his eyes on something much bigger.

“The big paradigm shift is to create a fuel company,” he says. The end-game is not owning plantations and distilling ethanol but creating an integrated company that would take Brazilian sugar cane and deliver ethanol to the gates of oil refineries in America and Europe.

Targets set by President Bush to reduce America’s gasoline consumption by 20 per cent would create a gigantic market for Brazil if the politics and logistics can be made to work. Forecasters predict a global market of 63 billion litres by 2011, up from 48 billion today. Supplying that market requires huge investment.

Then, there is politics and subsidies. “There is a battle of feedstocks,” the Infinity boss says. “Biofuels are going to grow where it is energy efficient and environmentally sound.”

Cane sugar has a huge advantage, he says, over rival crops, such as corn and sugar beet, citing studies that indicate the energy gain from producing ethanol from sugar cane is a multiple of 8.3, while corn generates up to 1.8 times more energy and beet 1.9 times.

Ethanol production from sugar cane is highly efficient, Mr Thompson-Flores says, because a waste material, known as bagasse, accounts for a third of the crop and can be transformed into fuel pellets.

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