Some groups, including certain disabled cardholders, are to be allowed to go on signing. But in any case, not all banks and credit card providers are guaranteeing they will get chip-and-PIN cards to every customer in time.Sandra Quinn of Apacs, the body that runs the UK’s payments system, including the new chip-and-PIN arrangements, confirms: “Not all credit cards will be enabled before next February. Some will need to be converted after that date.”Apacs has told retailers that in cases where customers do not have cards with PINs, they should still be allowed to sign. Exciting though this sounds, a commercial product is still at least five years away.Clearly some of these examples are young, early-stage companies, which are not suitable for every portfolio, but there are plenty of mature, highly profitable businesses listed in the UK.Emma Howard Boyd heads Jupiter Asset Management’s socially responsible investment and governance team.cash independent.co.uk. Thousands of romantic couples could face an embarrassing Valentine’s Day next February, as new rules on how they use debit and credit cards come into force. Those who can’t remember the personal identification numbers (PINs) for their cards will no longer be automatically allowed to sign for transactions.

And those who have still to be issued with cards that use a PIN could be turned away. The introduction of cards with built-in microchips and PINs, where customers input a number rather than signing a receipt, has been phased in over the past nine months. We’ve held it since October 2004, and it has been an excellent performer, even though its business plan is still very much in its infancy.There are a number of other ways into this sector, such as Renova, also an AIM-listed firm, which makes bio-ethanol from corn in the US, a market where demand is currently outstripping supply. A more indirect play is Abengoa, a Spanish construction firm that makes biofuel plants as well as solar stations and recycling facilities.While biofuels are a commercial reality already, there are also some opportunities for investors which offer a glimpse of what may eventually amount to a paradigm shift in energy generation. Ceres Power, another AIM stock, manufactures fuel cells, based on technology developed at Imperial College in London.

Their fuel cell runs on natural gas, propane or LPG rather than new hydrogen technologies, which gives it some interesting openings.For example, it has formed a partnership with British Gas to develop a fuel-cell-driven domestic boiler that uses natural gas to drive a combined heat and power unit – effectively a highly efficient mini-home-power-station. Both of these fuels result in significantly lower and also less toxic emissions than their mineral equivalents.For investors, there are some interesting stocks out there. D1 Oils is a UK biodiesel developer that has discovered that jatropha trees – succulents from the Euphorbia family – are a high-yielding, fast-growing, drought-resistant source of oil which can be refined into biodiesel. Biodiesel, by contrast, is blended with diesel and is made from crops such as sunflowers and soybeans. The European Biofuels Directive requires that each EU member has to sell a minimum level of biofuels as a proportion of total fuel sold, starting with 2 per cent in 2005 and rising to 20 per cent by 2020. In France, all diesel is already blended with 2 per cent biodiesel.There are two types of cleaner fuels on offer: bio-ethanol and biodiesel. The former is a clean-burning alcohol made from sugar-cane, corn or wheat which, when blended with petrol, can be used without any modification to a car’s engine.