If Shell were a character in a US teen movie (bear with Greenbang here), it would doubtless now be the character at the end of the movie that whips off the braces and the glasses, gets a decent haircut and waltzes off to the prom to be roundly applauded by its peers.

For Shell and partner CHOREN Industries have finally taken the wraps off what it claims is “the world’s first commercial production plant to convert biomass into synthetic diesel fuel” in Germany and has got the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other assorted bigwigs to come and have a look.

The plant is located in Freiburg, Germany, and will make the fuel from non-food biomass like forest residues and waste wood.

But you can’t get the woody goodness just yet – production is set to start in 8 to 12 months and will produce 18 million litres of fuel a year.

The showing-off in front of Merkel and chums was, according to Shell, to mark the end of the construction phase of the plant, built by CHOREN Industries. The companies are now undertaking structured testing of the 113 subsystems at the plant and are now working on a concept for the first industrial scale plant too.

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