Posted on 05/19/2008 5:25:12 PM PDT by kingattax
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 S. Butterfield for more than two decades. Mr. 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 J. Quinn. The two have started the E-Fuel Corporation, 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, Mr. Quinn sometimes collects left-over alcohol from bars and restaurants in Los Gatos, Calif., 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,” Mr. 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 M. 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,” Mr. Kammen says.
To be sure, Mr. 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 F. 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,” Mr. Quinn says.
Mr. Butterfield thinks that the MicroFueler is as much a game changer as the personal computer. He says that working with Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 10 to 14 pounds of sugar to make a gallon of ethanol, and raw sugar sells in the United States for about 20 cents a pound, says Michael E. Salassi, a professor in the department of agricultural economics at Louisiana State University. But Mr. 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. Mr. Quinn has a federal 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, Mr. Quinn and Mr. 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.
I believe the old STOCK CAR RACERS in the 40s had something like this — I guess they were ahead of the times.
Old story. NYT-Last week’s news tomorrow.
At a yield of ten to fourteen pounds per gallon, I’d need a good size trailer to haul the amount of sugar I’d need for one tankful in the wife’s Escalade . . .
For a 30 gallon tank it would take 420 lbs of sugar, plus water (approx. 1260 gallons), plus yeast and preparation (unloading sugar, mixing, pouring, etc.) before fermentation/filtering. It would seem you would have to devote considerable time operating the process. When it’s all done it could take 16-20 hours per tankful. A two-car family would require a full-time operator (40-hr week) and about one ton of sugar per week to keep them running. Last, but not least, what does it cost to ship one ton of duty-paid sugar 3,000 miles?
What if you combined the ethenol with gasoline, making your own version of "gasahol"? If you could reduce your purchase gas by, say 10 to 20 gallons per week, that translates into a 30 to 60 dollar per week savings. What is that- a 1500 to 3000 per year savings? If they bring the cost of the machine down to 5000, it might be worth it.
“it’s illegal in the United States to operate a car on 100 percent ethanol”
I wasn’t aware of this. Does anyone know the rationale behind this prohibition?
Also - I have driven across Iowa a few times and watched my fuel mileage drop dramatically after filling up at their ethanol-mixture pumps. A drop of 25% in fuel economy. And this is with a mixture, not straight ethanol.
This article and enviro-lefties in general try to imply that a gallon is a gallon. Mileage-wise, this is false. Some people have stated that pure ethanol will give 50% to 75% of the mpg of gasoline, but I suspect it is much, much less.
Mr. Quinn has a federal 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.
Does anyone really think this is what will happen? Every gallon of gasolene replaced by homemade hooch is a net loss for the oil companies AND the government. Do you think either one will allow this to happen?
Every backyard still is an unregulated heat engine, spewing who knows how many organic compounds into the air and water. Oh, and stills do explode rather frequently. And by the way, ethanol is a mind-altering drug, regulated by BATF. Who thinks the enviro-weenies, local law enforcement, the zoning commission, and various government agencies will approve of you making your own fuel? How would you feel if your neighbor started one?
"The cause of ethanol fuels to be made from feed grain is now beginning to starve the Livestock that is providing meat products to the public, beef, pork, and poultry. Now is the moment if one has the means of storage to stock up on meats and poultry, as the price of these products are about to skyrocket within weeks".
Time-for-you-to-diversify PING.
It would take to much time away from making the kind of alcohol that matters. Beer.
That's almost as blasphemous as Nietzsche...
L
I already read about this machine somewhere else. Apparently, it’s automated. All you do is dump sugar into a hopper, and the machine handles the rest. You get pure ethanol out of a spigot...IIRC. You have to mix it with gasoline to be legal though because otherwise you are getting the ATF angry about no liquor taxes being paid. In otherwords, you must “de-nature” the alcohol to avoid the ire of the ATF. I don’t know how Uncle sam deals with the fuel taxes due on it though.
I would expect that this machine consumes quite a bit of electricity. I doubt very much it’s paying for itself at all. My bet is that a better use for this machine(economically) would be to generate bootleg hooch for sale on the black market. Just remember to skip the “denaturing” step if you do use it this way.
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