Consumer Ethanol Appliance Promised By Year's End 365
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."
Re:Denatured alcohol (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Less than $1 a gallon? Ha. (Score:4, Interesting)
Count on other things to go up as well.
E* (Score:2, Interesting)
Secondly, this will fly when somebody comes out with a gadget that will accept all kinds of organic household waste, not just some product that you have one source for. If there's a device that'll take all of the stuff I normally throw on my compost pile, I'll buy one.
you won't save on taxes in some states (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Stop turning food into fuel (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Denatured alcohol (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:5, Interesting)
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:higher prices for everything (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
Re:Denatured alcohol (Score:3, Interesting)
and denatured sugar has more to do with farm subsidies and protectionism than food quality or safety. The fact that when they denature grain alcohol or in this case sugar, suddenly the price plummets, tells me that those "food grade" products are horribly over priced.
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."
instead of trying to make the fuel... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:3, Interesting)
Even then you might argue that increased food prices are even GOOD for the rich people in the world since the development of the third world is ultimately good for everyone. More people with money means more customers which means more business which means faster improvement in technologies, etc etc etc.
Re:Sounds like they just invented the still (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't think this is a problem at all. In fact I think it probably explains the "inedible sugars" mentioned in the article.
Chances are the sugar by itself isn't inedible. It is probably treated to make it inedible with something that won't easily be distilled out.
So yeah, it'll make a lot of alcohol. But I'm willing to bet it wouldn't be alcohol you'd want to drink very much of at all.
Re:Sounds like they just invented the still (Score:3, Interesting)
For distillation, you don't use "two or three passes". You use a distillation column with a few (20-40) trays. Ethanol comes out the top, water out the bottom (usually).
It takes energy, but usually you can do heat integration to save a lot of energy in a chemical plant. If you have a stream that need to get hotter and another that needs to cool down, you put them through a heat exchanger to save on utilities.
EtOH has another problem, it forms an azeotrope. You can't easily get above 95% EtOH using simple methods. You can put in an organic and break the azeotrope, but then you need to distill twice. I doubt your engine can run with 5-10% water...
Butanol is an interesting one, it settles out from water without distillation. Or rot anything and collect methane. Or algae based biofuels. If oil stays above $100
The latest I hear was coal for gassification. Methanol can apparently be made at about $0.40 / gallon. But volumetric energy content is lower, so it is really like $0.80/gallon. And they can sequester a lot of the CO2 in the process. Lots of interesting options...
For 10k one can convert to an electric car (Score:3, Interesting)
The premise of the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler is you pay 10K to have a pre-made still (for lack of a better word) to make ethanol. Then you take your home-brew and put it into your car. I'll let others poke holes in this approach.
For $10,000 you can convert your gas powered car to be powered by electricity. "A typical conversion, if it is using all new parts, costs between $5,000 and $10,000 (not counting the cost of the donor vehicle or labor). The costs break down like this:
References
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:2, Interesting)
Diesel locomotives, on the other hand, are a yearly tax write-off due to depreciation.
If the government were smart, they would tax the land and rail improvements only, and electrification would be tax-free. It would be better to get the improvements of electrification tax-free than let the tax stand and get nothing.
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:2, Interesting)
Ethanol is BAD BAD BAD!!!
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:4, Interesting)
You really have no clue what you're talking about, do you?
From Wikipedia:
2004 top three producers: China 26%, India 20%, and Indonesia 9%.
2004 top three exporters: Thailand 26%, Vietnam 15%, USA (11%)
Those numbers haven't changed much between 2004 & 2006
(the last year for which the UN has numbers available) [fao.org]
Now, out of those 6 countries, only one has not banned rice exports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007-2008_world_food_price_crisis [wikipedia.org]
Unsurprisingly, there is a short paragraph [wikipedia.org] that looks like it is agreeing with you. However, if you go to the source, they have this to say just 4 short paragraphs later:
High food and oil prices leading to inflation and low economic growth.
Gee... that sounds an awful lot like what the USA is going through.
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:yummy, healthy, normal sex (Score:2, Interesting)