http://www.peakoil.ie/download...2.pdf

A good read of this monthly Newsletter from Ireland [do they have much of an axe to grind...probably not]

http://www.peakoil.ie/

"In France, the worldwide wine glut forced winemakers to make 100 million litres of wine into ethanol last year for selling to oil refineries to mix into fuel".

Q45tech wrote:"In France, the worldwide wine glut forced winemakers to make 100 million litres of wine into ethanol last year for selling to oil refineries to mix into fuel".

Man, and we thought ethanol form corn was expensive!

i am defintely no expert on this subject but i do have two questions that never seemed to get answered. 1. every other technology has improved and expanded exponentially over the years, for instance, computer technology practically doubles it's power and improvements every six months. yet, we are still using the same internal combustion engine that is practically the same technology from 100 years ago. this also includes pretty much all propulsion systems that are tied to the petroleum industry. 2. i can't believe the petroleum industry, knowing they are dealing with a finite substance that is the cornerstone of their entire empire, is just waiting for the end to come. they must be working on alternatives that will power the world (done in secret???) when fossil fuels are exhausted.

Must have been some really bad stuff [10 cents per gallon] to convert 12% into 100%..........100M liters of wine yields 3 million gallons of ethanol.

I'll bet the French government paid a serious subsidy to the growers like is done in US with Corn Farmers.

"This year grain piles are everywhere across Iowa and parts of Illinois, the two biggest corn-producing states. In Iowa, the amount of grain being stored on the ground for lack of storage is averaging more than 19 percent, its highest level in at least 25 years, Mr. Fray said, citing private industry data.

Lately the giant piles have become the butt of jokes in farm country. They were spoofed in a fake picture, widely e-mailed, that showed a skier airborne atop West Central's biggest pile, with the caption that said "one thing you can do with a 3-million-bushel pile of harvested corn: Ski Iowa."

"The US government spent $41.9 billion on corn subsidies from 1995 to 2004, according to the Environmental Working Group. "

nuQ wrote: i am defintely no expert on this subject but i do have two questions that never seemed to get answered....

2. i can't believe the petroleum industry, knowing they are dealing with a finite substance that is the cornerstone of their entire empire, is just waiting for the end to come. they must be working on alternatives that will power the world (done in secret???) when fossil fuels are exhausted.

Following the links will lead you to a statement that the oil companies are really just a financial organization for refining and marketing products from crude oil. Hence the recent consolidation by merger by the major brands and admitted past over estimates of their proven reserves. By this account, major oil only controls about 10% of world oil reserves.

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