{"id":675549,"date":"2026-05-16T22:29:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T22:29:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/675549\/"},"modified":"2026-05-16T22:29:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T22:29:12","slug":"could-wine-provide-australias-next-source-of-biofuel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/675549\/","title":{"rendered":"Could wine provide Australia’s next source of biofuel?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Using red wine as motor fuel could bring new meaning to the term “drink driving”.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Australian Grape and Wine chief executive Lee McLean said the vast majority of the oversupply was red wine<\/a> and it made sense to consider alternative uses for the surplus product.<\/p>\n

“We’ve certainly got plenty of red wine in storage in Australia at the moment,” he said.<\/p>\n

“With the current fuel situation, it seems sensible to at least explore the economics, barriers and opportunities related to converting some of this into biofuel.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Lee McLean is looking to turn Australia’s wine oversupply into an opportunity. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)<\/p>\n

Filling the tank on fumes<\/p>\n

Ethanol would be extracted from the wine through distillation, with 263 million litres of wine expected to produce about 30 million litres of ethanol.<\/p>\n

University of Adelaide plant science professor Rachel Burton said the ethanol in wine was not fundamentally different to the ethanol found in E10 petrol.<\/p>\n

“The difference is in purification,” Professor Burton said.<\/p>\n

“If you wanted to isolate the bioethanol, you would do that through distillation, which is the same process used to make spirits.”<\/p>\n

Professor Burton said while there would be logistics to work out, the theory behind the idea had merit.<\/p>\n

\"woman<\/p>\n

Rachel Burton says the ethanol in wine is not fundamentally different to what is used in biofuel. (Supplied: Oli Madgett)<\/p>\n

“Since the wine is already fermented, the ethanol is sitting there in the product already,” she said.<\/p>\n

“Distillation simply involves applying heat to separate out the alcohol. It’s essentially the same process used to make whiskey or tequila.<\/p>\n

“The difference is that for spirits sold to consumers, flavour matters. For biofuels, it doesn’t \u2014 the aeroplane doesn’t care what [the fuel] tastes like.”The world drinking less<\/p>\n

Mr McLean said the amount of wine consumed globally in 2025 had dropped to 1961 levels, when the world population was 40 per cent of its current size.<\/p>\n

“We’re dealing with a significant oversupply, not just of wine but also in vineyard capacity,” he said.<\/p>\n

“It’s a perfect storm for grape growers and wine makers, with grape prices in many areas sitting at about half the cost of production.”<\/p>\n

Wine consultant Leon Deans said distillation could be a viable option to remove the oversupply, but may require government support because the cost of distilling the wine could be higher than the revenue from the ethanol.<\/p>\n

“Broadly speaking, you’d probably need something in the order of about 15 cents per litre of wine to cover the gap,” Mr Deans said.<\/p>\n

“And that assumes we would still recover some value from converting it into a final product such as pharmaceutical-grade alcohol or fuel-grade ethanol.”<\/p>\n

\"Two<\/p>\n

As less wine is consumed globally, the industry needs to recalibrate its production.\u00a0 (Pixabay<\/a>: epicantus<\/a>; licence<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Mr Deans said removing the oversupply would help the industry restructure.<\/p>\n

“China was seen as the great saviour seven to 10 years ago, but now that market has stabilised and ended up being much smaller than many had hoped,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Over the past 20 to 25 years of imbalance between supply and demand, many growers have had to sell their water entitlements just to survive.<\/p>\n

‘That makes exiting difficult because there isn’t necessarily a cash-positive pathway out.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Using red wine as motor fuel could bring new meaning to the term “drink driving”. Australia’s wine industry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675550,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,325689,110217,19735,325688,44,100840,42387,299599],"class_list":["post-675549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-wine-and-grape","tag-biofuel","tag-ethanol","tag-lee-mclean","tag-news","tag-oversupply","tag-wine","tag-wine-glut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675549\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}