Reuters: Japan’s first commercial plant to produce ethanol for cars from locally grown rice will reach full capacity of 1,000 kilolitres a year by March 2009, a few months behind schedule, a senior manager said on Friday. The project in Niigata, central Japan, for which the Japanese government is paying half the plant construction cost of 1.6 billion yen (US$15 million), is one of Japan’s three such government-backed commercial production schemes. It is managed by the National …