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Make your own ethanol for fun and profit
You should check out this article from our sister publication, Design News. For a mere $10 grand, you can have your own E-Fuel 100, a mini brewery capable of making fuel grade ethanol. This device is a truly fascinating bit of technology. You really have your own process plant in a box that can ferment sugar and then extract the ethanol, or you can load it with old booze and extract the ethanol from that.
The process by which it separates water and ethanol is particularly interesting. It does not use distillation, but something that sounds similar to reverse osmosis. The article suggests that the process is not suitable for large scale installations, but that might merit more investigation. (See more detailed product information.)
The part of the discussion that strikes me as even more interesting is that the machine can extract pure ethanol from old beer, wine, etc. I'm not one to waste beer myself, so I won't get much of that around the house, but the article makes an interesting claim: "Quinn says E-Fuel did an informal survey of the bars and restaurants in the company’s Los Gatos hometown and found that 60,000 gal of leftover beer, wine and drinks were wasted every year."
Now that is an extraordinary claim to my thinking. If you bought an E-Fuel 100, you could fuel your car by hanging around wedding receptions and the like collecting half-finished drinks and partial bottles of leftover wine. Making friends with a few well placed busboys could keep the old Suburban on the road for a few more months. Just like the folks that run Diesel cars on used fryer fat from restaurants, maybe you can talk your corner tavern into dumping the dregs into a big jug for you to take home.
And another thing, could you drink the product from one of these machines?? Now that could get really interesting. Cut the ethanol 1:1 with water, and you could be the hit of the neighborhood cranking out 60 or 70 gallons of 100 proof "vodka" every week. If you sell this moonshine for even $10 per gallon, you could pay for one of these machines in no time. This fuel crisis is not without its opportunities.
Make your own ethanol for fun and profit
July 24, 2008
You should check out this article from our sister publication, Design News. For a mere $10 grand, you can have your own E-Fuel 100, a mini brewery capable of making fuel grade ethanol. This device is a truly fascinating bit of technology. You really have your own process plant in a box that can ferment sugar and then extract the ethanol, or you can load it with old booze and extract the ethanol from that.The process by which it separates water and ethanol is particularly interesting. It does not use distillation, but something that sounds similar to reverse osmosis. The article suggests that the process is not suitable for large scale installations, but that might merit more investigation. (See more detailed product information.)
The part of the discussion that strikes me as even more interesting is that the machine can extract pure ethanol from old beer, wine, etc. I'm not one to waste beer myself, so I won't get much of that around the house, but the article makes an interesting claim: "Quinn says E-Fuel did an informal survey of the bars and restaurants in the company’s Los Gatos hometown and found that 60,000 gal of leftover beer, wine and drinks were wasted every year."
Now that is an extraordinary claim to my thinking. If you bought an E-Fuel 100, you could fuel your car by hanging around wedding receptions and the like collecting half-finished drinks and partial bottles of leftover wine. Making friends with a few well placed busboys could keep the old Suburban on the road for a few more months. Just like the folks that run Diesel cars on used fryer fat from restaurants, maybe you can talk your corner tavern into dumping the dregs into a big jug for you to take home.
And another thing, could you drink the product from one of these machines?? Now that could get really interesting. Cut the ethanol 1:1 with water, and you could be the hit of the neighborhood cranking out 60 or 70 gallons of 100 proof "vodka" every week. If you sell this moonshine for even $10 per gallon, you could pay for one of these machines in no time. This fuel crisis is not without its opportunities.
Posted by Peter Welander on July 24, 2008 | Comments (0)
Industries: Information Control
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