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Consumer Ethanol Appliance Promised By Year's End
Newscloud brings us news of a startup called E-Fuel promising to ship a home-brew ethanol plant, the size of a washer-dryer, for under $10,000 by the end of this year. We've had plenty of discussions about $1/gal. fuel — these guys want to let you make it at home. The company says it plans to develop a NAFTA-enabled distribution network for inedible sugar from Mexico at 1/8th the cost of trade-protected sugar, to use as raw material for making ethanol. A renewable energy expert from UC Berkeley is quoted: "There's a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It's entirely possible that they've done it, but skepticism is a virtue."
To a certain extent, I can understand the twisted reason behind denatured alcohol (alcohol is a sin, must poison sin), but denatured sugar? Crazy.
Count on other things to go up as well.
First off, just about any company named E* isn't going to be a company worth doing business with. Didn't anybody learn anything from the dot-bomb bullshit just a few years ago?
Secondly, this will fly when somebody comes out with a gadget that will accept all kinds of organic household waste, not just some product that you have one source for. If there's a device that'll take all of the stuff I normally throw on my compost pile, I'll buy one.
I don't respond to AC's.
North Carolina will probably hunt you down and charge you with tax evasion. They did it in 2007 for a guy buying vegetable oil and converting it to biodiesel.
hell they have been known to test fuel at events, to see if people are using fuel they don't like. They check NC registered trucks to make sure they don't buy fuel over the border.
you think that they just won't slap a silly tax on the sugar?
The one thing people keep ignoring as cars become more efficient are tax addicted governments are going to have to raise them to make up for the losses because of our efficiency and if we circumvent the whole tax strategy they have they will simply make a new one
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Not only is Ethanol shortsighted it is exactly the wrong direction for us to take. Ethanol is taken from food sources and results in local, regional and, as it increases in popularity, global increases in food prices as well as predictable food shortages.
Besides the inefficiencies of transporting the raw materials, the finished product CANNOT be piped due to the inherent water in the ethanol rusting/corroding the pipes. So, the only means of transportation is truck, train or barge -- fossil fuel transportation systems.
[!-- insert face-palm photo here --]
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
From the same article:
Methanol itself is not toxic; rather, the toxicity is due to the accumulation of its metabolites -- formaldehyde and formic acid.
Wow. By the same token, antifreeze (ethylene glycol) isn't really toxic. It's just the metabolites that will do you in.
Can we just permanently ban Wikipedia references here and stop the madness?
A shortage of bread eventually? I don't think you've been reading the news recently.
how to solve global food crisis
end of cheap cotton is near
walmart restricts rice purchases
government to examine effects of biofuels on food prices
action to help poor with food prices
denatured alcohol being un-drinkable has more to do with taxes than sin.
and denatured sugar has more to do with farm subsidies and protectionism than food quality or safety. The fact that when they denature grain alcohol or in this case sugar, suddenly the price plummets, tells me that those "food grade" products are horribly over priced.
How insulting is it to the Mexican sugar farmer to tell him "If you want export sugar to the US, you have to poison it first and then only charge 1/8th the price that US farmers charge. But no you cannot immigrate to the US. Hooray for the North American Free Trade Agreement."
We are all just people.
how about putting the 10 grand towards a vehicle that uses less fuel?
And the other one - and one that'll be very difficult to overcome - is that ethanol is the stuff we drink. Dilute ethanol with distilled water at about 50/50 and you get some so-so vodka. Add this or that flavor and you've got a party.
I don't think this is a problem at all. In fact I think it probably explains the "inedible sugars" mentioned in the article.
Chances are the sugar by itself isn't inedible. It is probably treated to make it inedible with something that won't easily be distilled out.
So yeah, it'll make a lot of alcohol. But I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be alcohol you'd want to drink very much of at all.
For distillation, you don't use "two or three passes". You use a distillation column with a few (20-40) trays. Ethanol comes out the top, water out the bottom (usually).
It takes energy, but usually you can do heat integration to save a lot of energy in a chemical plant. If you have a stream that need to get hotter and another that needs to cool down, you put them through a heat exchanger to save on utilities.
EtOH has another problem, it forms an azeotrope. You can't easily get above 95% EtOH using simple methods. You can put in an organic and break the azeotrope, but then you need to distill twice. I doubt your engine can run with 5-10% water...
Butanol is an interesting one, it settles out from water without distillation. Or rot anything and collect methane. Or algae based biofuels. If oil stays above $100
The latest I hear was coal for gassification. Methanol can apparently be made at about $0.40 / gallon. But volumetric energy content is lower, so it is really like $0.80/gallon. And they can sequester a lot of the CO2 in the process. Lots of interesting options...
The premise of the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler is you pay 10K to have a pre-made still (for lack of a better word) to make ethanol. Then you take your home-brew and put it into your car. I'll let others poke holes in this approach.
For $10,000 you can convert your gas powered car to be powered by electricity. "A typical conversion, if it is using all new parts, costs between $5,000 and $10,000 (not counting the cost of the donor vehicle or labor). The costs break down like this:
- Batteries - $1,000 to $2,000
- Motor - $1,000 to $2,000
- Controller - $1,000 to $2,000
- Adapter plate - $500 to $1,000
- Other (motors, wiring, switches, etc.) - $500 to $1,000"
The advantage here would be a form of daily transportation with zero-emissions, using a quiet motor that's cheaper to operate per mile (3).References
"It's one thing to talk about the poetry of machines. Quite another to listen to it for yourself."
Other followers of Yaweh, involve themselves in very strange debates about what he said.
This is NOT a signature.