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."

$10,000?!

[erroneus]

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.

Less than $1 a gallon? Ha.

[SeaFox]

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.

Of course, once this machine is actually available, I predict the price of that inedible sugar will suddenly rise to a level where using it to create ethanol yields a final price-per-gallon that is comparable to just buying E85 at your local gas station. After all, the sugar will suddenly have a much higher value in use as a fuel verses whatever they do with it now.

Probably bad energy return on investment...

[nweaver]

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).

Sounds like they just invented the still

[Whuffo]

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...

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[Loconut1389]

Maybe I missed something, but do you count inedible sugar as food? Would that still cut into edible food supplies? Also, what's wrong with plastic pipelines? They already make plastic water mains- is a plastic pipeline impossible- or is static a problem?

Please fill in the details for me/us?

Cue all the naysayers

[soupdevil]

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.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[zblack_eagle]

I don't think that inedible sugar would cut into food supplies in the US. It is likely that the sugar is rendered inedible so that it isn't subject to tariffs on importation into the US. But if demand goes up, it's going to raise the price of the edible sugar in Mexico and elsewhere. Like corn-derived ethanol is making corn and corn-derived foodstuffs more expensive, so will this with sugar. Really, ethanol should not be made from foodstuffs, only waste. And if we're wasting foodstuffs, we should be reducing that waste, not making ethanol out of it. And the idea of poisoning a foodstuff just to get around import duties should be considered abhorrent.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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:Denatured alcohol

[Afecks]

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:Not very useful.

[potat0man]

Or you could just go buy a new Ford Taurus or any other flex fuel vehicle and let the car self-adjust to account for changes in fuel quality.

Re:Taxation of dangerous products for welfare

[mcsporran]

Sinful ?
What does that mean ? It can vary from faith to faith, and within faiths, and even then changes as religion evolves along with society.
Calling things sinful, is simply meaningless, as it projects your theist views on others, who may have differnet interpretations of sinful.
Some followers of Yaweh, will tell me that the yummy, healthy, normal sex I has last night is wrong and a sin.
I can't take that crap seriously, so I can't take you comment about "sin" seriously.

Bad bad idea.

[ugen]

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.

Re:$1/gal fuel to perpetuate a cheap energy lifest

[buffer-overflowed]

They don't have to live in the cities, but we don't have to support infrastructure to make their lives easier. Suburbia is probably the biggest mistake of the 20th century.

Re:Denatured alcohol

[cayenne8]

"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."

I agree we need drop the sugar tariffs, and stop the corn subsidies, but c'mon....NO one is keeping Mexicans from immigrating to the US. All we ask is for them to follow the rules, and wait in line like everyone else from every other country that wants to come to the US and become a citizen.

It is only the people that come here illegally, and cost us money in services (schools, hospital ER's, etc) and not paying taxes that we have object to. At the present time, the majority of those coming to the US illegally are Mexican, so, these people do give the legal Mexican immigrants kind of a black eye to the general public.

Please...stop this confusion between legal immigraton, and illegal border crossings. The former is welcome, the latter is a crime...and should be treated as such.

Re:Cue all the naysayers

[gz718]

Better yet, don't drive and ride a bike.

Always amazed by the posters on this site never consider that you can live just fine without a car or being car light. Programmers should appreciate this simple, elegant solution to the oil problem by just reducing the number of miles you travel by car.

Get fresh air, get exercise, get sick less often, get healthy, get energy, pollute less, enjoy your commute, use a means of transportation that you can actually repair and maintain. Ride a bike.

Re:Bad bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your analysis assumes also that Ethanol is as efficient as regular gasoline, when this is not the case. If you compare E85 (85% Ethanol + 15% Unleaded gasoline) with regular unleaded, E85 has roughly half the efficiency (http://aaae.okstate.edu/proceedings/2005/Articles/556.pdf).

So with this mix you would assume roughly speaking that the entire sugar output of Mexico will only power the cars in the US for a little over a day.

So what about the rest of the world? Global sugar output in 07-08 was a record 168.44 million metric tons (http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/news/Stock%20News/1288887/). Assuming metric and imperial tons are roughly equivalent (the original poster's measurements were probably in imperial tons, but it doesn't matter for the orders of magnitude), and the original poster's calculations on the yield for Ethanol from sugar are correct (I haven't bothered to check) that gives us the capacity to produce approximately 26 billion gallons of ethanol, yielding 22.1 billion gallons of E85 which is *still* not enough to run US cars for a whole year (by my calculations you need about 27 billion gallons of E85).

And that's *just* to run cars in the US.

Ethanol is a crock. While Ethanol from sugar is at least efficient in the sense you get more energy out than you put in, the ability to wholesale replace gasoline with Ethanol just isn't feasible. It's possible as a short term strategy, cellulose-derived ethanol will suplement gasoline as a transition strategy. But the only long term solutions are: 1. Reduce consumption, and 2. Move to EVs transitioning via efficient gasoline-electric hybrids.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[Mr. Slippery]

Not only is Ethanol shortsighted it is exactly the wrong direction for us to take. Ethanol is taken from food sources...

But ethanol doesn't have to be, and should not be, taken from food sources.

We should be working towards decentralized production of cellulosic ethanol from waste biomass. Decentralized production - you (or maybe your neighborhood) have your own still, feed it your lawn clippings and vegetable peels and autumn leaves, out comes alcohol. No piping.

Ethanol from food crops is indeed stupid, and has more to do with enriching agribusiness than solving energy supply issues.

That's because bicycles don't consume

[bigtrike]

Most of the current "green" momentum is about encouraging more consumption rather than less. The "green" movement these days is mostly driven by corporations looking to sell more products, so any solution which reduces consumer spending will be marginalized.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[TheLink]

That's only good for the poor if:
1) They are farmers
2) They farm significantly more than they (+their friends+relatives) can eat.
3) The stuff they want to buy with the "doubled" income, does not itself increase in price (due to other people having to pay more for food and thus charging more for their goods+services).

What we have here is an increase in energy/resource costs coupled with the dollar losing its value.

To guess what happens when energy and resource costs go up, all you have to do is compare the ecosystem of a tropical rain forest, with that of a temperate rain forest, and also the ecosystem of the Arctic.

So on the whole, I don't think it is good for the poor.

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[DriedClexler]

Both the USA and the Europe destroyed their own native forests a long time ago.

Europe, maybe. The USA, no. The US has about as much forestland as it did 100 years ago, and yet still imports lumber to avoid cutting them down.

Why don't you stop complaining about the Amazon forest and start complaining about how your farmers aren't giving away their lands for re-forestation?

Actually, they pretty much are. The West has experienced a massive exodus. Most of it has lower population densities than in the 1890s. It's gotten so cheap that there are serious proposals (Buffalo Commons) to buy up a lot of it to let buffalo run free!

And can you please explain me how YOUR government, or any other, would be more competent to keep the Amazon from being destructed?

Have you seen the Endangered Species Act? On very little evidence, land can be locked out of use to protect endangered species, of which there are plenty in the Amazon. Second, the US has a strong economy and relatively non-corrupt government. That means the best option for the poorest among us is to leech off the freebies (welfare, homeless shelters) or get a low-wage job that lets you earn more than you could squatting some forest land. Note that a lot of Brazilian people come to America to take crappy jobs rather than rape the rainforest. Now imagine how much of the Amazon would get raped if Brazil had the US's economy and government!

Re:Stop turning food into fuel

[ThousandStars]

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.

This is why it's hard to read /. comments at times: highly moderated comments with no substance to back them up. The problems with world food distribution have far more to do with trade barriers [nytimes.com] than food production or any other issue save perhaps inflation. To the extent the U.S. is responsible, it's responsible for its food bill (explained in some detail here [nytimes.com] and its anti-trade stance.

Apparently everyone has forgotten the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff [wikipedia.org] and never learned basic economic theory to begin with.