Australia's wine industry is investigating whether its current 263 million litre glut of wine would be better used as biofuel to power cars, trucks or even aircraft.

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.

  • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
    6·
    5 months ago

    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.

    • DoubleDongle@lemmy.world
      5·
      5 months ago

      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.

    • arbilp3@aussie.zoneOP
      1·
      5 months ago

      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.

      • shirro@aussie.zoneEnglish
        7·
        5 months ago

        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.