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EU Opens Tender to Turn Wine Lakes into Biofuel |
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| BELGIUM: January 27, 2006 | ||
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BRUSSELS - The European Union has opened a tender to sell off unwanted wine lakes in four countries to produce bioethanol for use in EU markets, the latest edition of its Official Journal said on Wednesday.
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The tender would offer 666,095 hectolitres of wine stored in France, Italy, Hungary and Spain to companies willing to put it to "exclusive use as bioethanol in the fuel sector", it said. France and Italy were home to 250,000 hectolitres apiece of this amount, Spain had 150,000 hectolitres and Hungary 16,095, the Journal said. The deadline for bids is March 1. After any sales had been concluded, the national intervention agency in the country concerned would check that the wine had been transformed into bioethanol, it said. France, Italy and Spain are the EU's three largest winemakers by volume. Last year they received more than 180 million euros in EU cash to distill some of their excess wine, both table and quality, into industrial alcohol or biofuel. In the past, the European Commission favoured a system of public sales to approved companies to dispose of surplus wine alcohol earmarked for bioethanol. In March 2005, this was changed into a tendering scheme -- the current tender is the fourth under the new system, Commission officials said.
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REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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