Not Enough Ethanol Already? Why Not Make Your Own?
April 27th, 2008
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Are you tired of seeing others turning perfectly good food into less useful fuel? Is seeing more farm used in the United States than ever in history even as food prices increase just not enough for you? Would you like to be part of the action?
Well now you can! Apparently a company is now coming out with a home ethanol production system. It’s supposed to be about the size of a washing machine and is designed for home use. The company is apparently hoping to crash in on the “ethanol is good” myth before it completely evaporates. The feedstock for the device is supposed to be sugar, however they hope to be able to get around sugar import controls and tarries by importing “non-food grade” sugar from Mexico. Of course, it can still displace other crops and you’re certainly free to use your own feedstock if you’d prefer. And although it’s claimed to be cheap, that remains to be seen, especially with the energy which will be needed to run the device.
My own recommendation to the company is that if they want to be successful they better get this thing out soon because it’s becoming more and more clear to more and more people that ethanol is not going to help the environment or energy supplies. The honeymoon is coming to a close, so they better hurry!
I just have some bad news for those who think this is new, however. There have been plenty of home ethanol producing systems avaliable for a long time. Here are just a few examples:
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Enviornment, History, Humor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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April 27th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
Yes well “non-food grade” sugar from Mexico can make plenty of food-grade ’shine, I would think. Up here in Canada even vapor decreasing installations are considered stills by Customs and Excise Canada (or what ever they are calling themselves these days) and need a license. I don’t how it is elsewhere but I’m sure there is at least one gvm’t agency in every country that will take exception to this device.
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April 28th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Yeah I would think. Of course, I’m also very skeptical at best about the economics and general feisability of cheap homemade ethanol considering you’d have to do the fermentation yourself and have the left over resdeue to dispose of etc etc etc. If dirt cheap non food sugar is avaliable from Mexico I wonder why they would not use it in a central production location to do this with higher effeciency.
It might be that the sugar is not “non-food grade” but is food grade and has been tainted or denatured by adding something to get it by the sugar controls and taxes in the US, which are a vestige we’ve had for decades and are not repealed because of ADM’s lobbying.
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April 28th, 2008 at 12:31 am
Well there’s one thing that is going for them: making ethanol even with store bought sugar is actually starting to look good gallon-per-gallon when you compare it to the ridiculous price of gasoline these days.
Still, it ain’t hard to do and these guys ten grand equipment is not needed. Fermenting is easy and you can do that in a steel drum if you’re not planning on drinking it. Sugar or starch and some yeast and if you don’t let oxygen in and let it sit that’s about what there is to it.
The distilling is the only part that is difficult at all, to turn the “beer” (no notbeer you drink. same idea but you don’t want to drink it) into the 200 proof. You have to get it to be very very dry for use as a motor fuel, which starts off with some high volume distillation. You’d need a lot of the beer because you’d not get much gallon per gallon, but you just need a good chemical still. You can buy those. Hell, I just found one on ebay:
Here’s a 45 gallon one for only $1000
If you are really looking for it on the cheap you could build one. Not too difficult. They used to make them out of model-T radiators. Maybe you could still find plans.
Oh yeah, and ethanol is totally bunk for the enviornment and not economical on large scales. I’m not above making it for selfish purposes though, to put in my car and save money. I just don’t have the time to or a place to put a big still.
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April 28th, 2008 at 1:28 am
The theoretical yield of ethanol produced is around 50%alc per weight of sugar. With sugar at around $0.50/lbs and ethanol at 6.5lbs/gal that’s $3.25/gal. However that’s at 100% efficient and not taking into account the energy invested in the process.
242,740btu is needed to distill 1 gal of ethanol. Natural gas is 1031 Btu/cf so you need ~235 cf at $12.12 per 1000 cf (this month, retail) is $2.84 in gas per gal ethanol for a grand total of $6.09USD/gal for the final product. With U.S. gas prices at an average of $3.332/gal this week it’s almost twice as expensive.
Ethanol contains 76,500 BTU/gal, but you need 98,000 BTU make 1gal in the energy to refine the sugar is factored in. For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains about 116,000 BTUs per gallon. But making that gallon of gas—from drilling the well, to transportation, through refining—requires around 22,000 BTUs.
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April 28th, 2008 at 1:43 am
Yeah you may be right on that. I bet I can find suitable carbohydrates at a lower price than that though if I get them wholesale and not food grade. And if I was going to make back yard ethanol then price would be the main thing so forget paying for fuel like natural gas when you can burn garbage, tires, dirty motor oil, old paint, old growth wood cut down from nature preserves, bunnies and so on. that stuff is all free.
I’m just saying IF I were doing it to make for cheap fuel I’d probably cut a few corners.
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April 28th, 2008 at 1:49 am
You can buy feed quality molasses and it’s cheap if you buy it in bulk. A large feed store will sell it in 55 gallon drums. You can get even cheaper if you use corn based stuff which you can get cheap if you look for stuff which is low grade for feed. You can get it dirt cheap if you can find some which is sold off because it’s past the shelf life.
That might work. Look for surplus feed syrups which are sold off because they’re too old or something to be sold at full price.
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April 28th, 2008 at 2:06 am
Chilton said:
I, myself am well acquainted with ethanol from molasses feedstock, although I normally call it by it’s common name: Rum
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April 28th, 2008 at 2:10 am
BTW the calculation I made above is a very rough, back of the envelope guesstimate. Your mileage may vary.
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April 28th, 2008 at 2:24 am
drbuzz0 said:
Well I’m not. An acquaintance of mine has been producing cheap homemade ethanol in considerable quantities for some time now, and I have to say that the economics of the situation are very good!
Mind you, we don’t use it as fuel.
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April 28th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
If you have a mixture of liquids with different boiling temperature, where one of the liquids is water with a higher boiling temperature than the other constituent, then you can separate them (with low efficiency) with common household items. You need a large pot (like a lobster pot), a round bottom wok with a diameter > than the pot, and a bowl of low thermal conductance, like a ceramic or glas bowl with a diameter > 1/2 of the pot.
Fill the pot
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April 28th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
DV82XL said:
Yeah. I’m not sure if you’d want to drink rum that is made from the cheapest surplus past-prime molasses that anyone could manage to find; stuff that is possibly not even suitable for animal feed.
BTW: I’ve actually had rum like that before. It’s sometimes sold under the brand name “Captain Morgans” and some people actually drink it.
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April 28th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Russel said:
Don’t knock it. It has its uses. Yesterday I used to to flambe grilled pineapples from the barbeque. I won’t drink it though.
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April 28th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Russel said:
I have to agree, I prefer Single Barrel rums myself. Like KLA I use the blended dark rotguts for cooking only.
KLA said:
I take it you are referring to refluxing, fine for brandying wine, but keeps too much water in the product for fuel use.
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April 28th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
For fuel use you need at least 180 proof. If you want to use it in a flex-fuel car, where you also sometimes run gasoline, it has to be neat, e.g. 200 proof with no water content. You can’t get there with distillation. I would not use a straight distillation product for motor-fuel in a modern car, unless it’s an emergency. Some of the byproducts from the yeasts, feedstock and so on, without careful quality control, can create havoc with materials in the fuel system not designed for it.
And yes, in my earlier comment I was refering to refluxing. But the rest of my comment was cut off for some reason. I asked drbuzz0 by email to possibly correct it.
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April 28th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
For your exotic home engineering needs there is always Gingery and Lindsay Books:
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/still/index.html
Of course this electrically heated still will be expensive to operate.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
For use as a general purpose fuel in a gasoline engine you need the ethanol to be very very dry (free of water). You can’t achieve this through distillation alone. You would want to concentrate it as much as possible by repeated distillation and in production plants they would probably use multiple condensers and heaters running at different pressures but the final step to get the last of the water out is a chemical drying agent. You could use something like ethylene. I don’t know what they do on the industrial scale for fuel ethanol but there are several ways they could do it.
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April 28th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Pure 100% ethanol (200proof) cannot be obtained via conventional distillation of a water-ethanol mixture because a constant boiling mixture forms consisting of 95% ethanol-5% water (190 proof). Such a mixture is referred to as an azeotrope (azeotropic = a liquid mixture that is characterized by a constant concentration and constant minimum or maximum boiling point which is lower or higher than any of the components). Further concentration of the ethanol can be achieved by shifting the azeotropic point via vacuum distillation or addition of another substance to the mixture such as benzene. Most of the ethanol dehydration plants for production of absolute alcohol are based on Azeotropic distillation. It is a mature and reliable technology capable of producing a very dry product but it is not suitable for home use.
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April 28th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
KLA said:
Unless my spam filter got it for some reason I don’t see any emails. But the comment is cut off when I look at it in the editor. It’s not like it has a tag or something in it that makes it look cut off. It ends where it appears to end
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April 29th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Yeah when I said “at different pressures” I probably should have added “or lack there of” because the drying of chemicals like that relies on vaccums or partial vacuum distillation frequently. It’s usually in a continuous system so it’s not like you have individual stills.
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April 29th, 2008 at 2:57 am
What may be dark horse technologies are Direct Ethanol Fuel Cells (DEFC) and Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFC) which may replace things like laptop batteries and other medium load applications. If so than these fuels will gain greater utility than they enjoy now.
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April 29th, 2008 at 11:50 am
drbuzz0 said:
Yeah, the spam filter kicked in when I tried to post the rest as:
“Fill the pot
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May 4th, 2008 at 2:49 am
Chilton said:
Some years back a fellow wrote a book on how to make alcohol from grass clippings. It was named Fuel Your Business
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May 29th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Russians used potatoes, sugar beets can be used, and probably garbage to make mash, beer, then ethanol. All these methods will require scale that only governments or municipalities can afford, to see any reasonable results. Once oil gets costly enough, if it ever does, we may have to resort to these methods to supplement our fuel supplies, but these methods depend on large scale to become practical. A fellow in Ontario, Canada, in the mean time, has a cattle poop digester that gives enough methane gas to power his car. Folks in the cities will be the hardest hit by rising fuel costs, since they don’t have access to resources or room to do anything like solar heating, geo thermal heating, waste digestion, animal raising, gardening etc., and are at the mercy of higher rents and rising cost of everything else too.
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May 29th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Uncle B – It boils down to the question of if we can make enough ethanol from scraps or will we have to cut into our own food stocks to keep our cars running.
We realy don’t have to. We can make enough electricity with nuclear power to supply our transportation needs as well as service the regular load. There is just no need to turn to biofuels.
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September 4th, 2008 at 5:02 am
drbuzz0 said:
A home fermenter could be a useful device for someone with enough land to grow their own feedstock and keep cattle. Not too long ago, I had the enjoyment of getting to tour the Jenever Museum in Hasselt, Belgium, which is still an operating distillery today. Along with the exhibits of industrial-scale distillation apparatus and measuring apparatus (according to the tour guide, the popularity of jenever as a drink led to the development of high-accuracy equipment for measuring alcohol content, so that the tax assessors could collect taxes based on the alcohol content of the liquor), quite a fascinating glimpse into the history of chemical engineering right there, they had exhibits about the influence that jenever distilling had on the local economy. Hasselt became famous for its oxen because the leftover mash from making jenever made for excellent ox feed. All those oxen of course produced a lot of dung, which they used to fertilize the grain fields to grow more grain to make more jenever. It was a great little ecosystem, and very profitable for a long time!
Of course, I doubt very many people have enough land to pull off an operation like that. If I did, I would much rather drink the jenever than make moonshine to burn!
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