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?

[moosesocks]

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...

Oh, lol, internets!

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Denatured alcohol

[tepples]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Did Someone Miss The Memo????

[Skeetskeetskeet]

Stanford proved Ethanol is more pollutive than standard gasoline... http://www.therawfeed.com/2007/04/ethanol-pollutes-more-than-gasoline.html [therawfeed.com] I guess Al Gore was asleep during that press release.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[wpiman]

I hear you. This is a very solvable problem. Solutions for converting gas pipelines to hydrogen pipelines have already been devised-- this is a far smaller issue.

A bottle of tequila will sit indefinitely in a glass bottle, one could simple line existing pipe infrastructure with glass or any other material that ethanol doesn't corrode.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[$inisterAngel]

Oh you're damn right you change the oil on an EMD! The boat I worked on had oil changes on the mains every 2000 hours, filters at 1000 hours. Also, just because EMDs have large displacement (the boat I was on had 2 GM EMD 20-645-E7s - 645 Cu inches per cylinder x 20 cylinders x 2 engines = big propulsion) doesn't mean you can feed them crap. There's the entire fuel system you have to take into account as well when dealing with an engine.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[vhogemann]

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

[TubeSteak]

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:Sounds like they just invented the still

[TubeSteak]

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.

Yeast cultures have gone a long way from the days of 7%, especially if you're distilling.

At home, with a modern turbo yeast, you can get ~14% alcohol in 24 hours and 22% alcohol in 5~10 days if you add extra sugar.

Some yeasts ferment cleaner than others, but if you're distilling, you might as well go as hot and as fast as the yeast will tolerate, since the impurities will come out in the fractionating column. With fractional distillation, you should never have to make more than one pass to get 95% alcohol.

/On a commercial scale, the top performing yeast does better than 22% because it eats cellulose and xylose.
//It also happens to be owned by Purdue University.

Re:Denatured alcohol

[Guppy]

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:Stop turning food into fuel

[Gibbs-Duhem]

I would direct interested people to the following article at the oil drum. It discusses why Brazil's ethanol program is energetically feasible while the US program is impossible. Basically, they demonstrate that as soon as the energy gain is less than around 5:1, the economy spends all it's money on maintaining current energy needs instead of expanding. A ratio of less than 5:1 results in gradual degradation and stagnation of the economy.

The Oil Drum [theoildrum.com]

It's an *extremely* interesting read. It also explains why, regardless of how much oil might exist, as soon as it costs 1/5th as much energy to explore and drill for it, it is energetically no longer worth doing. It makes "peak oil" a lot scarier, as oil is currently only at around 13:1 at best.

Re:Denatured alcohol

[uglydog]

inedible sugar is not rendered inedible by using poison. it is an intermediate in the process for making sugar from sugar cane. [foodmarketexchange.com] So yes, increased production of inedible sugar could cut into production of sugar from sugar cane (or beets according to link). presumably, corn works the same way? either way, hey so we have the options for fuel. like in Brazil, we can see if the markets can work it out for themselves. maybe itll work in some countries. maybe not in others.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[LadyLucky]

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:Denatured alcohol

[FlyingCheese]

Not true. The quotas DO matter. The exception-rule is not outside of the quota. If you have family in the U.S., you get pushed up to near the top of the list and someone else gets bumped off and has to wait longer.