Homemade 100% cheap ethanol for running gasoline engines
Recently I came to learn from this new home ethanol systems soon to be put into sale. It is call the Efuel100 MicroFueler the world’s first portable ethanol micro-refinery system. The unique component of the system, it replaces the traditional ethanol reflux column system with a solid state distillation technology, making it possible for homeowners and small business to safely and cost-effectively create their own fuel, on-site. While doing me research on the new system, I got very interested, and wanted to share the information.
The systems locks more or less like a regular gas station pump, with a hose and nozzle. Within the appliance size unit is the ethanol distiller, and pump. The user can interact with the system by a front panel LCD (display). To simply the distillation process for consumers, the MicroFueler uses sugar instead of starches, which cuts the distillation period considerably.
The feedstock for starting the process of producing your own ethanol at home starts with simple table sugar and ethanol grade yeast mixture. The entire process is autonomously controlled by the system after that. For producing a gallon of ethanol that will run your gasoline engine, the system would need 10-14 pounds of sugar. The system is capable of producing 5 gallons of ethanol per day once the formation is complete.
Also the system is able to produce ethanol from discarded alcohol using a recovery mode. The user can pour discarded beer, wine or any distilled drink in the fermentation tank and convert it to ethanol.
The questions now are, would the common home user be able to find a reliable local source of sugar that is cheap enough to produce its own ethanol? How the government will react to people adopting systems likes these in their houses? Would the ethanol be the required quality to not damage your gasoline engine? We’ll have to check on those first. Until then, I see the system offering as an appliance, very user friendly, a great market opportunity and a way to reduce our dependence on imported gasoline. On my part I would keep my eye on the development of the system and do my how information gathering to analyze if this indeed would be a good economical and environmental energy solution from wish I could take advantage of.
What do you reader think about it?
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How is the product and byproduct shipped to and from your house? Probably by diesel trucks at some point down the chain, which seems to make it very dependent on the product it’s trying to free people from. In addition, the electricity consumed (probably from coal-fired power plants), would seem to negate additional cost savings and environmental value.
AJ
June 17, 2008
Well you have some point there, but also the current infrastructure use the same logistics. Isn’t the gasoline delivered in diesel trucks?, like you try to point out, and you need to also drive to some place to get it. At least with this method you reduce the energy required to go an fill your tank.
Regarding the electric power, with the information provided on the systems website, the computer is indeed a very low power embedded system, that does not consume much power. From what I made out from the information provided, the machine need 150Watts that most all is for the heating and pumps, something that can be very easily provided with solar panels if you are concerned where the electricity comes from.
The biggest concern right now is where to get the sugars cheaply. Sugar these days is very expensive. I wonder if you can input into the fermenter any type of fruit juice that is abundant in particular region or season (example: orange juice, or some tropical fruits that are high on sugar content) and convert the sugars in the juice to ethanol. If that is possible, maybe it would be an option for regions where sugar is not as easily available or cheap to obtain even low grade.
But nice the discussion you just jump started.
German Armando Rios
June 17, 2008
It is an interesting concept, and considering that sugar is so plentiful that we have price supports, it may be that ethanol would be cheaper than we think, since using the excess sugar being produced in the world would allow us to remove the artificial price supports. Could creating another market for excess sugar actually cause food prices to decline? Another consideration is that it is apparently a fallacy that using corn to produce ethanol would cause food prices to rise because it would take away corn needed for animal feed. It turns out that the corn can be used to produce ethanol, and the resulting by-product is actually a higher quality animal feed than the corn. Ethanol production uses the starch in the corn, but leaves the protein, which is what the animals actually process for nutrition. So corn can be both ethanol and animal feed.
Michael
October 7, 2008
The idea is good,but how to produce ethanol
from sugar is not told.
qwer
October 21, 2008