Make Ethanol in Your Own Backyard
May 9, 2008 by Lisa Zyga
E-Fuel says the MicroFueler could produce ethanol for less than a dollar per gallon.
A Silicon Valley start-up called E-Fuel is showing exactly how ethanol can live up to its name as "the people´s fuel." The company recently announced that it will soon start selling a home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicoFueler, which will allow anyone to make ethanol from sugar, water, yeast, and electricity in their own backyard.
The MicroFueler, which is about the size of a gas station pump, will sell for $9,995 and start shipping late in 2008. E-Fuel´s founders Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn expect that government incentives for alternative fuels will reduce the initial investment by up to $5,000.
The MicroFueler uses sugar as the main fuel source, which is mixed with a time-release yeast the company has developed. E-Fuel explains that it takes about 10-14 pounds of sugar to make one gallon of ethanol. When using store-bought sugar, which costs about 20 cents per pound in the US, plus the cost of electricity, the cost to produce a gallon of ethanol would be roughly equivalent to today´s gas prices in the US.
However, Butterfield and Quinn note that inedible sugar can be bought from Mexico for about 2.5 cents per pound under the North American Free Trade Agreement effective this past January. Then it could cost as little as a dollar a gallon to produce ethanol with the MicroFueler. Quinn also noted that he´s used leftover alcohol as an alternative feedstock to sugar, and the only cost is for the electricity.
"It´s going to cause havoc in the market and cause great financial stress in the oil industry," Quinn told The New York Times.
Previously, distilling ethanol has required large pieces of equipment and questionable efficiency. But E-Fuel says that it has developed technology such as a new membrane distiller that can separate water from alcohol at lower temperatures than in conventional ethanol refining, reducing cost and complexity. The machine can fill its 35-gallon tank through fermentation in about a week, it doesn´t produce odors, and the water byproduct is potable. Further, the company estimates that burning a gallon of ethanol made by the MicroFueler will let off just 12% of the carbon that a gallon of gasoline emits.
To brew ethanol at home, property owners in the US must obtain permits from the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Currently, however, it´s illegal in the US to run a conventional vehicle on 100% ethanol - but E-Fuel is hoping that regulators will certify all-ethanol cars if their system becomes popular.
E-Fuel plans to release the machine internationally, with production in China and the UK, in addition to the US. The company is also working on a commercial version and variations that will use different feedstocks besides sugar.
via: The New York Times and Popular Mechanics
37 minutes ago
I also seem to remember reading an article on the net in the past where they (state or federal government) shut a farmer down from making biofuel because he wasn't paying "gas tax" on it to run his vehicles.
College kids would probably love this...but almost 10 grand is allot of mac and cheese to give up to save up for one of these.
i sincerely hope this is not the case though...but it seems like this is what this idea is aimed at. that sort of future.
As for fuel, a means of producing sugar far more efficiently (in terms of land use, energy efficiency and cost that is) than current agricultural methods would be needed. It would preferably be a method that could be done close to markets - using energy from other sources (renewable, nuclear etc.) to drive chemical reactions might be conceivable but it might just be easier to design better electric cars.
We all know what happened with corn prise since people started using it to produce ethanol.
Haven't we learn something???
Using food as ethanol source does not work in general - rich nations will have their relatively cheaper fuel, poor people will starve because of the consequent and innevitable rise in the prices.
If you use LNG in your car you are not required to pay road tax. Why should you pay road tax on alcohol?
PS Sugar can come from many sources including your kitchen waste stream.
Obviously they need to make this still run on grass clippings, garbage and (best) BS!
They should be good at this, seeing how much BS they spread in this article!
A much better solution is to make methanol.
Have you looked at the case that Dr. Zubrin makes for making flex-fuel vehicles manadory in the US within 3-5 years... this solution would make the US a non-oil-importing nation... just like Brazil currently is.
Check out Dr Zubrin's video at:
http://tinyurl.com/4s4g7l
Then tell your friends about it;
and write to your congress and try to get them off their butts.
They will just start taxing sugar