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."

Shortsighted?

TFA mentions that the device requires 14 Lbs. (6.5kg) of NAFTA-approved nonedible sugar from Mexico, which costs approximately $0.025 per pound in addition to several other "ingredients". Regular "edible" sugar costs about $0.20 per pound.

Apart from the blatant inefficiencies present in transporting these quantities of raw materials, I imagine that the cost of sugar will skyrocket even if the thing actually works.

Probably not a good thing...

Stop turning food into fuel

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.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

Two points: I agree that ethanol is the wrong way to go. ANY distilled biofuel is a bad idea. We need to start differentiating between distillates like corn or sugar ethanol and refined products like biodiesel. Biodiesel is best made from non-food sources like switchgrass. Incidentally, many biodiesel materials stocks are not grown on food-producing farmland.

Second point: Trains use (1/5) the fuel of trucks per ton-mile, barges (1/10) and the engines are far easier to convert to biodiesel. Each cylinder in a train engine is something like 2 liters, and there are 12 of them. The engines are tolerant of crap. In fact on EMD locomotives, one never changes the oil, just the oil filter. I agree though, that using fuel to move fuel is not good.

The point of mentioning trains though, is that railroads have to pay HUGE property taxes on the one best solution to their pollution. The railroads would see their property taxes TRIPLE on electrification improvements. That, coupled with high capital costs means that railroads won't touch electrification.

If they did electrify, rail transportation could potentially be carbon-neutral. They merely need to buy the power from a renewable source.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

Ethanol might not work for the USA, but don't discard it so fast.

Look at Brazil for an example, here we make Ethanol from sugar-cane.It had virtually no impact on food price or availability, mostly because the culture is concentrated at the north-east region while our grain production is more concentrate on the middle and southern regions.

Also, Ethanol harvested from sugar-cane is a good alternative for lots of developing coutries, because it would give them a valuable commodity to export.

Ethanol would be good for Europe too, because they would have a cheaper alternative to petrol.

But Ethanol is bad for the USA, mostly because you don't get the same level of production from corn, so it's more expensive. And you have to dedicate a bigger slice of land to produce enough to supply the demand for fuel, and this means less space for food.

Also, the North American Petrol industry don't want to see their market taken away.

Ethanol is viable, and it's already a reality here at Brazil. My car can run on both ethanol and gasoline, but since Ethanol is about 30% CHEAPER I almost never put gasoline on it.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

When governments such as the United States' starts offering farmers subsidies if they switch over to growing switchgrass and corn for ethanol, those farmers stop making food. This is the reason for the rise in price of flour, bread, beer, etc.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

Oh yeah, and... increased food prices are actually a good thing for all but the richest people in the world. The poorest people in the world make their money from selling food. Higher prices means better lives for and faster development for people in the poorest parts of the world.

Are you serious?
The price of rice, palm oil, wheat, and corn has risen by 60% to 100% over the last year.

Within the last month, there have been food riots in 11 countries.
Numerous countries have banned rice exports.
The ones that haven't are raising export tariffs by large amounts.

As for what's causing all this, the US deserves a big heaping portion of the blame, but there are also ~3 other major contributing factors, like the ongoing droughts in Australia and Russia and changing eating habits by the Indian & Chinese middle class.

To specifically rebut your "better lives for and faster development for people in the poorest parts of the world" their fuel and fertilizer prices have gone up, just like everyone else's. Oh, and they're the ones rioting over food prices.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

I'm afraid you are completely incorrect on this issue. The vast bulk of poor people do not produce a surplus of food, they are either subsistence farmers, or urbanized poor. In neither case does increased food prices help them. There are now tens of millions cast back into extreme poverty because of global food prices.

Even for those in poor countries that export foods, the developed world has so many tarrifs and subsidies that they are still not able to benefit from it (USA and EU, take a bow).

Don't believe me? Fine. Last week's Economist [economist.com] had their leader article on exactly this topic. Go and read it. The Economist is an economic liberal, you will find them promoting trade and economic prosperity. They know far more about this issue than either you or me.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

A bottle of tequila will sit indefinitely in a glass bottle

Not in my house!

Oh, lol, internets!

They didn't mention the little fact about having to get a frelling federal ethanol production license. I looked into this a few years back, and...YIKES. (Pay lots of money. Send in a sample. Keep logs of your activities, etc. etc.)

Oh, and how about calculating in electricity costs?

$10,000?!

That would take a LONG time to "pay for itself" and this doesn't even take into consideration the various restrictions on the use of such devices that will most assuredly follow shortly after competing interests start buying laws to that end. Further, what will the cost of unprocessed materials be? Ah yes, they'll go up in demand and the prices will rise too.

This doesn't strike me as a good alternative.

Probably bad energy return on investment...

You've got the energy cost in growing the raw sugar, transporting a LOT of raw sugar, and distillation. WHich means a LOT of energy goes into this. And you only really save on taxes (beacuse otherwise, they could just do this in a big factory and bring it too, duh, gas pumps).

you won't save on taxes in some states

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

A good reason to get rid of the alcohol taxes.

They already have consumer ethanol appliances, they go by other names: bread makers, home beer breweries, and the like. Won't help me much on getting around in my car, but I'll be too full and drunk to care.

Sounds like they just invented the still

The time-honored method of turning sugars into ethanol is to ferment the sugars; the yeast culture will excrete ethanol until they perish in their waste products at about 7% ethanol.

Then you just distill it to concentrate the ethanol. You'd probably have to make two or three passes through the still to get it up to E85 level.

There's a couple of fairly significant problems with this scheme, though. One is the energy that's used to operate the still; where does that come from, how much does it cost? 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.

The BATF isn't going to like this one little bit. Liquor taxes are an important source of revenue; they'll insist that you comply with their bureaucratic regulations if you're going to make any kind of product that contains ethanol.

And if this magic box will produce 170 proof at $2 per gallon - how much of that is going in the car and how much will be going into mixed drinks? Imagine the parties; gallons and gallons of alcohol and more being produced in every neighborhood every day. I suspect the law of unintended consequences is going to kick in on this one...

Cue all the naysayers

Is this "the answer" for our consumption and supply issues with gasoline? Of course not. There is not going to be a single answer, at least not until we figure out a better battery combined with a global solar grid. Meanwhile, prepare for a myriad of small solutions, like biodiesel, ethanol, heavy crude sources like tar sands and shale, converted coal, none of which are perfect on their own, but which, together, can bridge us to the next big thing.

Sugar as fuel?

I am sure the International Ant Coalition will have something to say about this. It could get ugly folks.

Bad bad idea.

This whole Ethanol idea is a disaster waiting to happen.

A simple fact - Mexico produces a total of 5 million tons of sugar a year. That amount, according to the article, is enough to make about 800 million gallons of ethanol. US consumes 400 million gallons of gasoline a DAY for transportation. That means the entire crop of Mexican sugar would be completely used up by cars in TWO days. What would we do the rest of the year I don't know. And guess what this would do to sugar prices. Also - no more sugar in your food either.

And if the proposition is to use this as an addition to oil-based fuels, well - we are talking less than 1% of total gasoline requirement from entire Mexican crop. This would hardly make a dent in oil consumption, but sure as heck would wreck havoc on the sugar and food markets.

Didn't you see the Family Guy episode?

We Irish had an advanced civilization long ago based on this technology, but then we started drinking the damned stuff...

Denatured alcohol

And what sad material is "inedible sugar?"

Probably the same sort of material as denatured alcohol [wikipedia.org]. It contains poisons that don't affect the majority of uses but do interfere with human consumption.

Re:Denatured alcohol

Denatured sugar exists mostly because of the corn sugar lobby, to whose influence we owe the incredibly high price of Sugar in the US. We pay this high price directly, due to incredible tariffs on the importation of sugar, and indirectly, due to tax dollars funding subsidies; furthermore, the fact that domestic producers can charge exorbitant prices and still compete with international product thanks to the tariff further exacerbates the problem.

Additionally, some studies suggest that cane sugar is better for you than the high fructose corn syrup most commonly used in substitution for it, although according to some the jury's still out on that.

Re:Denatured alcohol

Unfortunately, there was sin tax error on line 1.

Re:Denatured alcohol

Can we just permanently ban Wikipedia references here and stop the madness?

Why? Because you can't understand the difference and don't understand how to check citations? Go ahead and just ignore the citation that links directly to the Oxford Journal of Occupational Medicine. Clearly you're the medical expert and not those idiotic MD's at Oxford...

Re:Denatured alcohol

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?

Wow, both snarky and unjustified. Attitude aside, the wikipedia article is technically correct from a biochemistry view, and practically correct from a medical view as well -- the distinction is what allows Methanol and Ethylene Glycol poisoning to be counteracted (if caught sufficently soon after ingestion).

Block the metabolic conversion with the appropriate enzyme inhibitor (or a competitive substrate like lots of regular ethanol) and you block the toxicity. The Methanol and Ethylene Glycol will gradually be excreted, and do relatively little harm in the meanwhile due to their low inherent toxicities.

Re:Less than $1 a gallon? Ha.

After all, the sugar will suddenly have a much higher value in use as a fuel verses whatever they do with it now.

Answer: In addition to ethanol production already underway, it's used as sweetfeed for horses, pigs and some other livestock.

Count on other things to go up as well.

Re:higher prices for everything

A shortage of bread eventually? I don't think you've been reading the news recently.

how to solve global food crisis [bbc.co.uk]
end of cheap cotton is near [bbc.co.uk]
walmart restricts rice purchases [bbc.co.uk]
government to examine effects of biofuels on food prices [bbc.co.uk]
action to help poor with food prices [bbc.co.uk]