Message from the President of Eco-Carbone

In 2009, Eco-Carbone faced with difficulties linked to the international crisis. In such a context, the company had to take new steps in order to maintain the pursuit of its strategy.

Eco-Carbone suffered from a drastic decrease of its anticipated carbon credits revenues while its several jatropha projects were in need of capital funding. Therefore, Eco-Carbone had to undertake a capital raising.

At the end of 2009, Eco-Carbone then raised 3 million Euros from the company historical shareholders and, in particular, Truffle Capital and Pierre Landolt.

The five Chinese coalmine methane abatement projects start generating Certified Emission Reduction (CERs), which enables Eco-Carbone to reinforce its leading position on this market. This activity is expected to become profitable in 2010, being nurtured by the current registration of the Nanmei and Hegang mines as well as a similar project in Ukraine. In 2009, Eco-Carbone promoted and conducted the first worldwide installation of ventilation air methane abatement, all financed with carbon credits.

From now on, Eco-Carbone is conducting three jatropha projects including grain production and oil extraction: 1700 ha already planted in Mali (in partnership with Novartis) and two 500 ha sites in Indonesian Papua. These plantations will increase by circa 1000 ha per year to reach a dimension of 10 to 20.000 ha each in the long run.

Similar size projects are being negotiated in Vietnam and Laos.

In addition, Eco-Carbone, together with Lafarge, is conducting a biomass and jatropha production pilot project in North West Nigeria. Both biomass and jatropha will be used as energy sources in a cement plant of the region.

Recently, Eco-Carbone decided to give priority to “green” electricity production and therefore to use jatropha crude oil for this purpose. Complementary revenues from seedcake and carbon credits will drive our project returns which will also benefit from the oil price rebound.

In order to rapidly boost our revenues, Eco-Carbone opted for conducting profitability tests on castor grain production (this cultivation has lots of similarities with the jatropha but produces grains within between 4 and 6 months). 2010 will witness the results of these tests conducted on rent fields located in the Bahia state in Brazil.  They will aim at comparing the results between rainfed plantations and mechanically irrigated plantations with a “pivot” system.

Over the last few years, Eco-Carbone finalized carbon credit registrations and selected appropriated sites for its jatropha projects. Eco-Carbone is now in a value creation process as well as onsite development phase in accordance with its original strategy.

February, 2010