

Solution to High Gas Prices: Your Own Backyard Ethanol Brewer?

Tired of paying through the nose at the gas pump? A company called E-Fuel Corporation is offering a backyard ethanol brewer that can produce up to 35 gallons of ethanol a week that you can pump directly into your car:

To make ethanol in the EFuel100, feedstock (consisting of sugar and yeast) or discarded liquor is loaded into the device's 200-gallon (757-liter) tank. Using the LCD screen located on the front of the device (next to the pump), the operator places the EFuel100 either in ferment (for feedstock) or distillation (for liquor) mode to begin the process. The EFuel100 is hooked up to a water source—much like one's washing machine or dishwasher is—and regulates the amount of water flowing into its tank to begin the ethanol-conversion process.

Once the feedstock is fermented, the device transfers the solution to its distillation system, where it is vaporized in a vertical column tube and sent through a membrane that separates the alcohol from the water. The distilled vapor is then cooled back into liquid form and sent to the 35-gallon storage tank, from which it can be pumped into an automobile using a 50-foot (15-meter) retractable hose. The process of turning sugar into ethanol fuel takes nearly a week (although alcohol distillation can be done in a matter of hours).

The company's goal is to keep the cost of ethanol to be less than $1 per gallon (which may be impossible to do), but first you have to ante up $10K to buy the device: Link

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(A real solution to dump the pump)
This is the challenge... Let's work together as an Internet community to design and build new and less costly means of travel, share ideas at no cost to our neighbors and beat the oil companies at their own game.

Stop being an oil company's puppet.

Build a folks wagon for Americans, by Americans.
I have seen four wheeled carts with grocery baskets attached to the handlebars, driven by foot pedals and bicycle chains at the senior citzen's center where I work as a janitor. Convert one of these to take a 23 hosepower Briggs Stratton or Koler twin cylinder engine, from a riding mower, add a brake system and an umbrella and you will have a 100 mile to the gallon (CITY CAR) that runs 35 mph for city traffic and plenty of torch to climb hills. Drive it to and from work or to grocery shop or to run errands.

People in rural areas will buy them to drive to town on the alternate fuel lanes and people in the city will buy them to run errands and get back and forth to work. Students will buy them to drive to school and since they are light weight they will drive them on campus. A vehicle that runs on pure Ethanol for pennies per day, produces less carbon exhuast, and is easy to work on would surely be as big a hit as the 1965 Mustang with everyone. I am already working to design one of my own.
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Thomas - it would be kind of silly to do it any other way. Engines can be optimized to burn just about anything, so they are designed to handle the stuff that isn't worth the cost of refinement.

Gasoline is kind of a catch-all term for mixtures of hydrocarbons containing around 5-10 carbon atoms. After extracting the more useful compounds out of the oil, the rest is mixed together and turned into fuel.
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I heard recently that there are so many products produced from one barrel of oil, that it can be worth as much as $10,000 in post-production goods, and that after plastics and the like are made from the oil, gasoline is left over, almost like a waste product, and is the least profitable part of the barrel of oil. Food for thought?
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Hah hah.... So if you have free sugar and free electricity (and exactly how many kW*hr are required to make 1 gallon of EtOH??), this is just the ticket. Oh yeah, you need $10K also. Sigh... There are probably some morons out there who might actually buy something like this...
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