How To Make Gasoline At Home Meme

People were making ethanol at home long before there were cars. They called it moonshine. With gas prices going through the roof and everyone worried near global warming, a California company is betting people will jump at the run a risk to use the same engineering to plough sugar into fuel for less than a buck a gallon.

E-Fuel Corporation has unveiled its EFuel 100 MicroFueler, a device about the size of a stacking washer-dryer that uses sugar, yeast and water to make 100 percent ethanol at the push of a button.

"You simply open it like a washing automobile and dump in your sugar, close the door and button one push," company founder Tom Quinn told united states. "A few days later, you've got ethanol."

Is it really that easy?

According to Quinn, information technology is. The MicroFueler weighs most 200 pounds and hooks up to a water and 110 or 220 volt power supply and wastewater drain just similar a washing automobile. It uses raw sugar (non the refined white stuff) and a proprietary time-release yeast mixture as feedstock. Yous can also employ left-over booze if you've got any lying around. Toss it all into the fermenting tank, turn on the car and in 7 days yous've got 35 gallons of ethanol. The MicroFueler has its ain pump and hose - just like the pump at your corner gas station - so yous can hands fill up your car.

"It's and then simple, anyone tin can make their own fuel," Quinn says. Depending upon the cost of electricity and h2o, he says, the MicroFueler can produce ethanol for less than $1 a gallon. Quinn likens the MicroFueler to the personal figurer and says it will cause the same sort of "paradigm shift."

"Just as the PC brought desktop computing to the home, East-Fuel volition bring the filling station to the home," he says.

Maybe. Perhaps not. Making ethanol at home is not as easy every bit Quinn might accept you believe, says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at UC-Berkeley. Making a lot of ethanol has generally required a lot of equipment, he told the New York Times, and quality control can be uneven.

"In that location's a lot of hurdles you accept to overcome. It'southward entirely possible that they've washed it, but skepticism is a virtue," Kammen says.

Quinn is not some moonshiner trying to make a quick buck on the alt-fuel craze. He'southward a longtime entrepreneur who patented the motility-control technology Nintendo uses in the Wii. His partner in the Eastward-Fuel venture is Floyd Butterfield, who has been distilling ethanol for more than 25 years and in 1982 won a California Department of Food and Agriculture contest for all-time pattern of an ethanol still.

They say they've overcome many of the hurdles to making ethanol at domicile cheaply, hands and efficiently. Quinn says the biggest breakthrough is the MicroFueler's membrane distiller, which uses an extremely fine filter to split water from alcohol at lower temperatures and in fewer steps than conventional methods. Using sugar equally a feedstock makes the process near odorless, he says, and leaves the wastewater and so clean yous tin can drink it. It likewise avoids the nutrient-for-fuel debate that plagues corn-based ethanol because we're in the midst of a worldwide carbohydrate glut.

A allow from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms will allow you to make ethanol legally, but running 100 per centum ethanol in your car is confronting the law. No trouble, Quinn says. Mix it with gasoline to create E-85. Only put a few gallons of gas in your car, then drive domicile and superlative it off with ethanol. Quinn says running saccharide-based ethanol will produce about 85 percent fewer carbon emissions than using gasoline. Y'all're all set if you've got a flex-fuel vehicle.

It's an open question whether switching to domicile-brewed ethanol will save you much money. The MicroFueler costs $9,995, although federal tax credits tin cut the price to $vi,998. Some other $16 buys you enough yeast to make about 560 gallons of ethanol, and you'll take to pay for the sugar and water. You'll demand as many every bit 4 gallons of water to brand 1 gallon of ethanol.

The sugar is where the math could break downward - it currently sells for about 20 cents a pound in the United States, and you need ten to fourteen pounds of information technology to make a gallon of ethanol. Factor in the cost of electricty and h2o and you may not be coming out ahead. But Quinn says changes in the North American Free Trade Agreement allows the importation of inedible or "ethanol-grade" sugar from Mexico for as little as 2.5 cents a pound and E-Fuel is creating a distribution network to sell information technology to consumers.

That aforementioned distribution network will evangelize and install MicroFuelers when E-Fuel begins delivering them at the end of the year, he says.

Photos by Flickr user Streetwalker and Due east-Fuel Corp.

Source: https://www.wired.com/2008/05/make-your-own-e/

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