Lakes of Fuel
An EU tender to sell off unwanted wine lakes in France has been opened to buyers who will use it in industrial products. This means that they will sell 100,000 hectolitres of wine to the petroleum & chemical industries. This wine alcohol stored in 2 locations in the territory of the world's largest winemaker, France. A deadline for bids was set for 10 November 2006.
France, Italy & Spain are the EU's 3 largest winemakers by volume. Last year alone they received more than 180 million in EU dollars ($237-Million U$D) to distill excess wine into industrial alcohol & biofuel components. These industries can take advantage of this boon by acquiring the alcohol at a lower price than manufacturing themselves.
Mariann Fischer Boel, EU agriculture commissioner, has just this year presented 4 broad policy options for reforming the wine sector of the EU economy. It has been repeatedly said all over the EU that the wine industry depends too much on distillation to rid itself of the unwanted "wine lakes" all at the EU taxpayers' expense. Reform is the key to making the wine trade more competitive & more economically viable.
Sources:
http://european-convention.eu.int/docs/Treaty/cv00850.en03.pdf
http://europa.eu.int/index_en.htm
http://www.europarl.eu.int/news/public/default_en.htm
http://www.cor.europa.eu
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Comments: 9
There is a man in GA that makes fuel from pine trees, wood alcohol. he is limited to 10,000 gal. per year by the Feds. During WWII we made wood alcohol fuel to run cars from garbage. Cost 10 cents a gal. Why aren't we doing that now?