Surely running the exhaust through some sort of absorbent/condenser could both capture the alcohol for non-food purposes and deprive the mold of food?
The article mentions "ethanol-capturing equipment used by brandy distilleries in California", but i couldn't find anything about capturing emissions from ageing. There are a couple of systems for capturing alcohol emissions from fermentation, but that's a different problem:
In a market economy, I'm sure the distillery warehousers would be free to decide whether they'd rather capture their emissions or wash their neighbourhoods.
After all a corporation’s civic duty is to maximize their profits so they can’t be expected to clean up their pollution when they can off load it for free!
Hashtag capitalism gone wrong.
> 200 to 1,000 tons of ethanol emissions every year.
200 to 1000 tons / year = 200 to 1000 tons * 907185 (g per ton) / (365 * 24 * 60 * 60 s per year) = 5.7 to 28g / s
Very roughly the equivalent of one shot of vodka every second (presume 1.5 fl oz = 44g total and vodka is half-ish alcohol). But, that's spread out over "hundreds of thousands of barrels". So each barrel is releasing ~100-300 micrograms of alcohol per second.
I'm sure it's measurable in the air, but capturable? Hard to say.
At the very least it should be relatively cheap to destroy by passing the air through something like a blowtorch.