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."
Shortsighted? (Score:5, Informative)
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 (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: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.
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Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 explai
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Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:4, Interesting)
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Please fill in the details for me/us?
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Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:4, Insightful)
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*shrugs*
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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 (Score:4, Funny)
Not in my house!
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So the big downside you're pointing out here is that we have to transport things for it to work. So what? We can convert the transport devices to run off ethanol or other biofuels, or electricity in the case of trains.
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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 mea
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Also of note is the fact that ethanol is a good way to keep having fuel when we run out of fossil fuels, but it still takes carbon that otherwise wouldn't be in the a
Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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 inf
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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 e
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.
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Re:Stop turning food into fuel (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Tell that to the Brazillians who are reportedly 100% free of oil, and are running all their vehicles off ethanol. The problems you sight are legitimate but not insurmountable. If we divert just one-third of the monthly expenditures in Iraq to solving the problems you highlight we will be very far.
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Actually, plastic is generally worse than metal when it comes to ethanol. Still, you just have to select the right form of plastic, metal, ceramic, glass, whatever.
Still, some potential developments I've heard about don't make ethanol from biomass, it makes some sort of gasoline analoge, capable of being us
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The main reason I can see for the scheme to work, is the "saving" from highway taxes embedded in the price of each regularly-purchased fuel...
The inefficiencies of "trade-protection" keeping the regular sugar prices high don't bother you? ;-) Anyway, the cost of the "inedible" sugar will unlikely exceed that of the edible kind, wi
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It might not be sustainable in the long-term, but hopefully it'll finally make us adopt sensible policies regarding farm subsidies and tariffs, which in turn will lead us to a renewable energy source, and actually fulfill some of the goals NAFTA was supposed to deliver.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to be too big of a fan of NAFTA at the moment, which is a shame gi
Oh, lol, internets! (Score:4, Informative)
Oh, and how about calculating in electricity costs?
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$10,000?! (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't strike me as a good alternative.
Less than $1 a gallon? Ha. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Less than $1 a gallon? Ha. (Score:4, Interesting)
Count on other things to go up as well.
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Eventually the price of raw materials MAY make home production of ethanol approach the same price as E85 or whatever other commercially available fuel happens to be offered, including petrol gasoline. But the hassle of buying the raw materials and maintaining the machine, plus the initial investment costs of buying such machines will mean it will always be cheaper to make it yourself. It depends on what your time is worth to you. Though, you get the added security, in this case, of being to produce
Probably bad energy return on investment... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Not only that... (Score:2)
EG, in CA, you'll still have to pay sales tax on the raw sugar. So your only savings are on the dedicated gas taxes:
With the federal gas tax at
While if you could do Ethanol for $1/gallon production, you could make a fortune, as thats energy-equivelent to about
So that would be "make gasoline at $1.25/gallon". With oil prices NEVER looking back, thats a LOT of profit to be made.
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.
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First off, just about any company named E* isn't going to be a company worth doing business with. Didn't anybody learn anything from the dot-bomb bullshit just a few years ago?
Yeah, like eBay. Look how those have tanked. Clearly not something anybody should ever have invested in. Or Electronic Arts.
Not to mention many pre dot-com companies from Edison through Eastman to Exxon.
I think one thing people learned in the dot-com era (or maybe not) is that investment strategies should look at something more than just the first letter of a company name?
A good reason to get rid of the alcohol taxes. (Score:4, Funny)
Sounds like they just invented the still (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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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 simpl
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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.
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danger much? (Score:2)
Not very useful. (Score:2)
If you're going to use biomass fuel, use biodiesel. The petrol engine is dead. Let it pass with some dignity.
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MOONSHINE! (Score:2)
I think this is a ridiculously inefficient process, and people will want to drink the product instead of burning it.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Below 6 a gallon, its a wash or a loss. ( but still worth it if you can, as at least its domestic. )
Conversion isn't the problem (Score:2)
The problem is getting the 'fuel' to feed this thing. To really make it cheap you need to grow your own, which is way out of the realm of possibility for the average person.
Impurities (Score:2)
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Cue all the naysayers (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
That's because bicycles don't consume (Score:3, Insightful)
$1/gal fuel to perpetuate a cheap energy lifestyle (Score:2, Funny)
Re:$1/gal fuel to perpetuate a cheap energy lifest (Score:2)
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In a free society, you have to work with people, not against them. There's still plenty of dependence upon people in suburban or rural areas, and any manner of uprooting them that could work fast enough to create the needed benefit would be completely unfeasable. Even if you could get people to move, you'd just trade in long car drives for suburban blight (which we're starting to see already as a result of reurbanization and mass-relocation-- more as a result
instead of trying to make the fuel... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sugar as fuel? (Score:4, Funny)
And bees (Score:2)
Its a set up for making you look like a ...... (Score:2)
Lets not forget about them mobile WMD plants we saw pictures of.
This will help make the spying on US citizens seem legit.
If this works, why not set up production plant? (Score:2)
if this is such a great idea, why not just set up a medium-sized production plant, make ethanol from "inedible sugar", and make some money?
What do they mean by "inedible sugar", anyway? Bagasse [wikipedia.org]? Ultra-high cellulose sugar cane? [grain.org] It's not a standard term.
Besides, shipping a solid material to homes to make ethanol, then getting rid of the solid waste, is an incredibly inefficient process. You're going to need maybe 150-200 pounds of sugar to fill up the tank of an SUV. Then you have to get rid of mayb
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Because that would require much more capital and is more work than milking suckers out of mad cash for home production appliances.
There are worldwide food riots, right now. (Score:2)
Bad bad idea. (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:4, Funny)
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:
- Batteries - $1,000 to $2,000
- Motor - $1,000 to $2,000
- Controller - $1,000 to $2,000
- Adapter plate - $500 to $1,000
- Other (motors, wiring, switches, etc.) - $500 to $1,000"
The advantage here would be a form of daily transportation with zero-emissions, using a quiet motor that's cheaper to operate per mile (3).References
"Consumer Ethanol Appliance".....? (Score:2)
It's called a Beer Bong.
Moonshine (Score:2)
Slurpee wisdom (Score:2)
For the last hundred years, getting fuel for internal combustion engines has basically been a matter of sticking a giant slurpee straw into the ground and pumping it out. We're having a hard time grasping that the Slurpee cup is running dry, and our first instinct is to go to desperate measures to maintain the status quo. The first - and most obvious - source of replacement fuel is biomass, so we're go crazy about corn, sugar and cellulose ethanol extraction. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as cheap or easy
Denatured alcohol (Score:4, Informative)
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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:Denatured alcohol (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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:Denatured alcohol (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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it is infact a poison.
Humans are just stubborn enough to use this poison
for "sinful purposes".
Plenty of stuff that grows naturally, or might be
part of a suburban landscape plan, is quite
poisonous to humans and not something you want to
even consider eating.
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Its a rather toxic pesticide.
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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 U
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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 othe
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Absolutely correct. Though I think the quotas are too low (and put there partially to compensate for the influx that isn't counted toward the quota.)
We've got fixed-size quotas that date back to the nineteenth century, when the quota should be based on the maximum number of people we can reasonably e
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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.
Re:Taxation of dangerous products for welfare (Score:4, Funny)
Wheras on Slashdot you'll be told it was imaginary.
Re:Denatured alcohol (Score:5, Funny)
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Are they adding the poison to the sugar or will the poison be a byproduct of their process?
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inedible sugar (Score:2)
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I'd consider $10,000 an investment if it could do that. Not only would I run my car with the fuel but I'd heat my home, make hot domestic water and find a way to cook with it too.
=Smidge=
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]
Sorry, you have been reading the news (Score:2)
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There's only one fuel for producing ethanol that simply doesn't make sense and probably won't make sense for decades to come: corn. So what does the US choose as its main ethanol source? Yeah, you guessed it.