What do you think of this idea? I had this image of people going to the petrol pump and taking a swig, but if the boffins can do something useful with all the warehoused unsellable wine it might help in various ways.
Agriculture and horticulture use massive amounts of fossil fuels. Not just to run equipment that could be electrified at massive cost but chemicals that use them as feedstock . Ethanol is an agricultural subsidy, not a green fuel and not a path to energy independence.
Yank here, subsidy-seeking agriculture businesses making unhelpful biofuel is an American problem you don’t need to adopt. I may not know anything about your wine industry, but I can assure you that the grapes-to-fuel proposition is as useless as it sounds and based on American corruption.
I understand that, however there’s a lot of wine that is taking up space and its use to make ethanol would not be permanent. Perhaps the other option of converting it into pharmaceutical-grade alcohol is a better one. Finding some viable use for the wine that will help the industry recover some of the costs is needed.
The industry needs to respond to overproduction by reducing plantings or finding new markets or products as they always did. What they are fishing for instead is a govt handout to subsidize an extremely inefficient means of energy production that uses massive amounts of scarce irrigated water and a shitload of fossil fuel. The money for those subsidies could have gone into healthcare, schooling, social security or taxpayers pockets. The water could have gone on crops that created more jobs and wealth for the country. And the diesel used in production could have been used to grow and ship crops people actually want.
Well put!
Hear hear. My position precisely
Or to put it simply. Privatise the profits and socialise the losses.
if the boffins can do something useful with all the warehoused unsellable wine it might help in various ways.
Don’t need to be too much of a boffin to know how to distill wine into straight ethanol, we’ve been doing it for about 3000 years as a species.
The question is not “how” we turn red wine into pure ethanol that a petrol car can run, the question is “is it cost effective”.
Given even the cheapest red wine is currently going for a similar price to petrol, undistilled, they’re going to need to take a massive haircut on the cost if there is going to be ethanol produced that is cheaper than petrol per litre when you’re only going to get about 10% ethanol per litre.
That’s why they’re asking for govt help.
Fair point but it is still a cost benefit equation. The govt spends $X hundred million on subsidising farmers vs other things they could have spent it on.
Personally I’d prefer the however many millions be spent where it reduces our carbon footprint - solar, wind, batteries.
Burning ethanol has the same carbon cost as burning petroleum, probably better to assist low income earners into EVs for that carbon cost than burning it in ICE
Burning ethanol does not have the same carbon costs as petroleum.
Petroleum is taking millions of years of carbon stores and releasing. Ethanol is carbon cycle, and carbon released was recently fixed by plant growth.
It only comes down to how energy is made to distill the ethanol.
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/09/13/ethanol-burns-clean-but-creates-more-emissions-than-gasoline/
“When used as a motor fuel, ethanol burns cleaner than gasoline. There is no dispute about that. But there is a dispute about the carbon emissions created in the manufacturing process that makes ethanol from corn. According to recent research by Reuters, ethanol plants in the US produce more than double the harmful emissions, per gallon of fuel production capacity, than the nation’s oil refineries.”
It’s the amount of CO2 going into the atmosphere that counts, not whether it was converted from sun last week or 400MYA
Burning fuel bad.
According to recent research by Reuters, ethanol plants in the US produce more than double the harmful emissions, per gallon of fuel production capacity, than the nation’s oil refineries
Oil and gas have been paying for this anti-ethanol propaganda for over 100 years.
Reuters is a news service, not researchers.
Agree though you’d be surprised (or not) that many farmers don’t think they get enough help.
And , like I say to shirro there’s a lot of wine that is taking up space and its use to make ethanol would not be permanent. Perhaps the other option of converting it into pharmaceutical-grade alcohol is a better one. The wine industry needs some solution to recover some of the costs.
Yeah that sounds like a wine industry problem not a govt. problem to me.
I grew up on a cattle station then moved to wheat country as a teenager, I know exactly how entitled they are. The only reason I’d support this is if it was carefully engineered to ensure the multi-national agribusinesses don’t get a red cent.
Betteridge’s Law invocation.
“one for me one for you” - me to my car while waiting to pick up my kids from school
Curious if any smell would make it through production, like the bio diesel cars that make you crave fish & chips
