Ethanol, the ultimate Home Brew

Floyd Butterfield, 52, is something of a legend for people who make their own ethanol. In 1982, he won a California Department of Food and Agriculture contest for best design of an ethanol still.

Now he thinks that he can, thanks to his partnership with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thomas Quinn. The two have started E-Fuel, which soon will announce its home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler. It will be about as large as a stackable washer-dryer, sell for $9,995 and ship before year-end.

The net cost to consumers could drop by half after government incentives for alternate fuels, like tax credits, are applied.

The MicroFueler will use sugar as its main fuel source, or feedstock, along with a specially packaged time-release yeast the company has developed. Depending on the cost of sugar, plus water and electricity, the company says it could cost as little as a dollar a gallon to make ethanol. In fact, Quinn sometimes collects left-over alcohol from bars and restaurants in Los Gatos, California, where he lives, and turns it into ethanol; the only cost is for the electricity used in processing.

In general, he says, burning a gallon of ethanol made by his system will produce one-eighth the carbon of the same amount of gasoline.

"It's going to cause havoc in the market and cause great financial stress in the oil industry," Quinn boasts.

He may well turn out to be right. But brewing ethanol in the backyard isn't as easy as barbecuing hamburgers. Distilling large quantities of ethanol typically has required a lot of equipment, says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, he says that quality control and efficiency of home brew usually pale compared with those of commercial refineries. "There's a lot of hurdles you have to overcome. It's entirely possible that they've done it, but skepticism is a virtue," Kammen says.

Source