French Race for Ethanol Supremacy

France wants to be the number one ethanol producer in Europe, according to this article from Reuters posted on Planet Ark today. Currently, Spain is Europe’s biggest ethanol producer with annual output of 200,000 tonnes. France occupies the number two spot with output of 100,000 tonnes a year, according to the article. The French ethanol industry coordinator believes that France can beat that by 2008 because they have more agricultural output than Spain. Alain Jeanroy told Reuters he expects France to produce 880,000 tonnes of ethanol by 2008 and two million tonnes by 2015. Currently, most of the ethanol production in France is from sugar beets, but they expect wheat to be most used in the future “due to it’s high availability.” The European Commission set a non-binding goal to have 5.75 percent of their energy supplied by bio-fuels by 2010, but France wants to beat that goal. I found this map of biofuels plants in France that shows where the production is located. The blue dots are biodiesel and the red squares are ethanol. About 40 percent of the biofuels production in France is ethanol, 60 percent biodiesel. The main crop used for biodiesel production is rapeseed.