Free Dating Site    

Ethanol, the ultimate home brew
By Michael Fitzgerald
Sunday, April 27, 2008

What if you could make fuel for your car in your backyard for less than you pay at the pump? Would you?

The first question has driven Floyd Butterfield for more than two decades. Butterfield, 52, is something of a legend for people who make their own ethanol. In 1982, he won a California Department of Food and Agriculture contest for best design of an ethanol still, albeit one that he could not market profitably at the time.

Now he thinks that he can, thanks to his partnership with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thomas Quinn. The two have started E-Fuel, which soon will announce its home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler. It will be about as large as a stackable washer-dryer, sell for $9,995 and ship before year-end.

The net cost to consumers could drop by half after government incentives for alternate fuels, like tax credits, are applied.

The MicroFueler will use sugar as its main fuel source, or feedstock, along with a specially packaged time-release yeast the company has developed. Depending on the cost of sugar, plus water and electricity, the company says it could cost as little as a dollar a gallon to make ethanol. In fact, Quinn sometimes collects left-over alcohol from bars and restaurants in Los Gatos, California, where he lives, and turns it into ethanol; the only cost is for the electricity used in processing.

In general, he says, burning a gallon of ethanol made by his system will produce one-eighth the carbon of the same amount of gasoline.

"It's going to cause havoc in the market and cause great financial stress in the oil industry," Quinn boasts.

He may well turn out to be right. But brewing ethanol in the backyard isn't as easy as barbecuing hamburgers. Distilling large quantities of ethanol typically has required a lot of equipment, says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he says that quality control and efficiency of home brew usually pale compared with those of commercial refineries. "There's a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It's entirely possible that they've done it, but skepticism is a virtue," Kammen says.

Quinn, 53, has been involved with successful innovations before. For instance, he patented the motion sensor technology used in Nintendo's wildly popular Wii gaming system.

More to the point, he was the product marketing manager for Alan Shugart's pioneering hard disk drive when the personal computer was shifting from a hobbyists' niche to a major industry. "I remember people laughing at us and saying what a stupid idea it was to do that disk drive," Quinn says.

Butterfield thinks that the MicroFueler is as much a game changer as the personal computer. He says that working with Quinn's microelectronics experts — E-Fuel now employs 15 people — has led to breakthroughs that have cut the energy requirements of making ethanol in half. One such advance is a membrane distiller, which, Quinn says, uses extremely fine filters to separate water from alcohol at lower heat and in fewer steps than in conventional ethanol refining. Using sugar as a feedstock means that there is virtually no smell, and its water byproduct will be drinkable.

E-Fuel has bold plans: It intends to operate internationally from the start, with production of the MicroFueler in China and Britain as well as the United States. And Butterfield is already at work on a version for commercial use, as well as systems that will use feedstocks other than sugar.

Ethanol has long had home brewers, and permits are available through the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. (You must be a property owner and agree to make your ethanol outdoors.) But there are plenty of reasons to question whether personal fueling systems will become the fuel industry's version of the personal computer.

For starters, sugar-based ethanol doesn't look much cheaper than gas. It takes up to 14 pounds, or 6.5 kilograms, of sugar to make a gallon of ethanol, and raw sugar sells in the United States for about 20 cents a pound, says Michael Salassi, a professor in the department of agricultural economics at Louisiana State University. But Quinn says that as of January this year, under the North American Free Trade Agreement, he can buy inedible sugar from Mexico for as little as 2.5 cents a pound, which puts the math in his favor. While this type of sugar has not been sold to consumers, E-Fuel says it is developing a distribution network for it.

In addition, it's illegal in the United States to operate a car on 100 percent ethanol, with exceptions for off-road vehicles like Indy cars and farm equipment. Quinn has a U.S. permit to make his own fuel, and believes that if MicroFuelers start popping up like swimming pools, regulators will adapt by certifying pure ethanol for cars.

Despite all the hurdles, Quinn and Butterfield may be on to something. There are plenty of consumers who want to reduce their carbon footprint and are willing to make an upfront investment to do it — consider the success of the Prius.

And if oil prices continue to rise, the economics of buying a MicroFueler will become only better and better.
Notes:

| www.iht.com

Mr MacDonald visits about 100 restaurants in Glasgow collecting used cooking oil that would otherwise be thrown away.

He uses it to make about 4,000 litres of biodiesel a week, and has built up a dedicated band of about 200 customers, including taxi drivers, HGV drivers and regular motorists.

The first time he put the biodiesel in his van he was terrified about what would happen.

"My heart was in my mouth. I was expecting it to explode or to just stop, but it just went on and on and on."

He has now driven 30,000 miles in the van, all powered bybiodiesel.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Frydrive-how-waste-cooking-oil.4070247.jp

"... any restaurant with a deep fryer produces a steady stream of waste vegetable oil (WVO). ... [which] is generally stored and picked up by chemical companies, ... In some parts of the country the oil is just thrown away."

"But it's relatively easy to turn WVO into a fuel, ... SFPUC official Lewis Harrison stated that at least 1 million gallons of biodiesel could be produced ... which is "more than enough" to run the city's entire bus fleet on B20. Since WVO is a waste stream, offsetting petro-diesel usage with WVO biodiesel is particularly advantageous: the use of 1 million gallons of WVO-biodiesel would offset 19,600,000 lbs (9800 tons) of carbon dioxide emissions each year. It also has significant economic and public health benefits: municipal biodiesel production should beat the $4/gallon price of fuel in San Francisco, and B20 biodiesel blends cut diesel soot emissions by 20-40%.

http://www.greentechnolog.com/2007/07/san_francisco_puc_
to_make_biodiesel_from_used_cook.html

One gallon of used motor oil when recycled yields the same amount of refined lubricating oil--2.5 quarts-- as 42 gallons of crude oil. Recycle your used motor oil!!!

According to one expert, if America refined the billion gallons of motor oil they use every year, we would save 1.3 million barrels of oil every day, which represents half the daily output of the Alaska Pipeline.

Boosting the fuel efficiency of cars in the United States by a mere 1.5 miles-per-gallon would save more oil than is estimated to lie under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

http://www.summitrecyclers.com/did_you_know.html

Biotour.org's bus can get halfway across the country on a single fill of waste vegetable oil ( WVO ).

They get their fuel from the used oil tank behind restaurants.
All processing of incoming oil takes place right on the bus, mostly while it's in motion. That means heating, water separation and filtration. They get about 10 mpg on veggie oil, which is about the same as they do on diesel.

This bus is a VEGGIE DIESEL bus, that can burn straight vegetable oil, as well as regular diesel or biodiesel.

It's a "two-tank" system, which means the bus has a small tank of biodiesel (or diesel) to start the engine, and then they switch to straight vegetable oil when the engine is hot.

For the uninitiated, Biodiesel is veggie oil that's been subjected to a chemical process so it's thin and runny (lower viscosity) all the time and can be run in unmodified diesel engines. This bus runs on straight veggie oil, no reaction needed. It only requires biodiesel or diesel fuel except for starting and shutting down the engine.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Biotour.org-Waste-Vegetable-
Oil-Conversion-Diesel-/www.biotour.org

A man in Mississippi, Robert Tomey, recently converted his two cars to run on vegetable oil. Using systems he bought from Greasecar, an online provider of veggie fuel systems, his Ford pickup and VW Beetle now emit a pleasant, french-fry-like odor and require just a bit of diesel to get them going. The irony: he owns four McDonalds franchises; thus, his supply of grease is nearly unlimited. "I throw away 10,000 gallons of grease every year from all my locations," Tomey said. "I have more than I can use." It's sure nice to see him putting some of that grease to good use (he thinks he could run a small fleet of 20-30 cars on the waste grease from his four locations), but, while McDonalds the corporation has made strides in social and environmental responsibility of late, they are far from perfect. We could go round and round about this one: "McDonalds is a large, un-sustainable, dirty corporation. Period." vs. "McDonalds is a large corporation that isn't going anywhere; might as well make the best of it and begin to close the loop. Congratulations to this man for starting to make a difference." We're leaning toward the latter.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/03/mcdonalds_owner.php

I solve my problems and I see the light
We gotta plug and think, we gotta feed it right
There ain't no danger we can go too far
We start believing now that we can be what we are

Grease is the word
They think our love is just a growing pain
Why don't they understand, It's just a crying shame
Their lips are lying only real is real
We start to find right now we got to be what we feel

Chorus:
Grease is the word (is the word that they heard)
It's got groove, it's got meaning
Grease is the time, is the place, is the motion
Grease is the way we are feeling

We take the pressure and we throw away
Conventionality belongs to yesterday
There is a chance that we can make it so far
We start believing now that we can be who we are

This is a life of illusion
Wrappde up in trouble
Laced with confusion
What are we doing?

We take the pressure and we throw away
Conventionality belongs to yesterday
There is a chance that we can make it so far
We start believing now that we can be who we are

I wonder if it is possible to buy stock in it. Or maybe in the sugar?

Yup, this is where that evil "speculation" begins. People might actually try to make money from this...