EFuel100 MicroFueler - Home Ethanol Micro Refinery
May 9th, 2008 by Paul Crowe - "The Kneeslider"
With gasoline rapidly becoming a luxury item, the EFuel100 MicroFueler might be just the ticket. You just set this up next to your garage, plug into 110 or 220 volts, route to a wastewater drain, add sugar, yeast and water and in a couple of days you pump ethanol into your tank at a cost of about $1.00 per gallon. It makes 5 gallons per day. Hmm …
The MicroFueler is $9,995, but federal tax credits can cut the price to $6,998. $16 buys yeast for 560 gallons of ethanol, each gallon requires 4 gallons of water. You need a permit from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to make the stuff and you can’t run E100 in your motorcycle or car, it’s illegal for some reason, so you put in some gas at your local station then drive home and top up from your ethanol pump to make E85 or thereabouts. There is also a distillation only mode which you use to recover ethanol from discarded liquor and beer. (Who discards beer?) This is crazy cool.
E-Fuel Corporation makes this little refinery which will begin shipping at the end of the year though you can pre order now. Maybe it’s just me but if this works as well as described, I think they’ll sell a ton of these. VERY cool!
Posted in Alternative Fuels, Alternative thinking
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17 Responses to “EFuel100 MicroFueler - Home Ethanol Micro Refinery”
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May 9th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
So is anybody out there making a home petroleum refinery kit available yet?
I don’t mean to insult you Paul, but this is ridiculous. One can buy a mashing and fermentation setup that doesn’t need to be plugged into the wall at all. Plans for homemade distillers are widely available on the web. This looks like a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s huge, looks like it was made with petroleum based products itself, as well as having it’s supplies probably harvested with petroleum based farm equipment, and all for an end product that makes your vehicle less efficient.
I only poked around their website briefly, and watched a 2 minute sales pitch, but this looks to me like a hooch factory that masquerades as a “Green” product.
I’m really hoping you’re open to the conversation here, and I’m simply stating what looks obvious to me. I’m also a homebrewer (Beer & wine only, no distillation) , and this looks like a waste to me. I could get the same product of 5 gallons of ethanol a day made for alot less than $10k, it just wouldn’t have a fancy gas station pump handle, but I might rig one up with a March pump for a few $$ more.
My crack about home refining is only half a joke. How much would it cost to sink your own oil well? If you had crude on your property, and had the means to refine it, would you have a problem with that?
May 9th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I am really frustrated with E85 being forced on us. I live in Central NY and many gas station are converting to E10 for all gas (because all cars run E10 fine I guess).
Now we are starting to see the effects of E85 production. Food prices going up and fuel economy going down (although auto emissions are cleaner, but I have read conflicting reports on if there is a net benefit to emissions when production of E85 is considered as well).
I wish E85 was the answer (especially since we are getting a big fancy new factory to produce it), but I really don’t think it is.
May 9th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Matt, relax, no offense taken, the whole ethanol topic is worthy of discussion.
Home petroleum refining? I’m all for it. Here in PA where the oil industry began, a lot of very old wells are being restarted for the small amounts they yield because it’s now worth it. If folks could turn it into a finished product themselves with a little plug in setup, why not? I think it would be neat but it might be a lot more complex.
Ethanol is a simple fuel that’s easy to make, you, as a home brewer, know that, an all in one machine and pump for fermentation, distillation and everything is pretty cool. Maybe the price is too high at $10K but there’s the “tax credit” to take the price down, it’s the same trick that makes the Prius more price competitive with any other car that gets high mileage and costs less and otherwise makes more sense.
Is this just a home sized plug in hooch factory? Well, of course it is, that’s what ethanol is, moonshine by any other name. You could just say all of the big ethanol plants are hooch factories, too, so I’m not sure what the objection is there.
So, other than price, do you have any other objections to this?
May 9th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
ridiculous! the oil market is creating ‘bathtub gin’ for your car. revenoooers?
May 9th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
I think somebody somewhere will have an objection to Joe Public making his own fuel.
In my opinion, mass produced U.S. automobiles will never run on any fuel that can be self-made cheaply by the end-user.
May 9th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
“So, other than price, do you have any other objections to this?”
Well, I have problems with ethanol as a fuel for internal combustion engines as a whole. I don’t honestly think it’s a real solution, and I think it does more harm to the vehicles running on it than it does good for the environment. I was just reading a story about older boat with internal tanks having to have their decks ripped out to replace tanks because of ethanol. Apparently there were a number of boats made prior to ‘75 that had tanks made from other materials than aluminum. These tanks have a nasty tendency to come apart when fuels with any ethanol are stored in them. Big problem is that many marine fuel pumps aren’t required to list ethanol content if it under a certain percentage.
My ‘00 Buick Century, don’t laugh it’s paid for and gets an honest 26mpg around town on decent gas, runs like crap on the 15% ethanol fuel from Wal Mart. The idle is rough, and the car stumbles while driving along at any constant speed between 20 and 50 MPH. I go fill up at Costco, with ethanol free fuel, and the car runs like a champ. I get less than 25MPG on ethanol mix, and over 26 on the good stuff.
All that said, I am really pro-alternative fuels, but I’d much rather see new battery technology, and cleaner diesels, and solar charging stations, and fuel cells, and any other number of actual solutions rather than the ill fitting Band-Aid that ethanol is. I’ve said it before, GM started off down the wrong road with the whole E85 Flex Fuel thing, and I’d swear that they have a major holding in large agriculture ventures, like Con Agra or something, to be pushing this agenda. I’ve got farmers in the family, so I don’t think they totally deserve the shaft here, but our government really needs to get out of the farm subsidies business altogether.
Whoa, sorry about that, I guess I needed to vent a little…
May 9th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Isn’t this primarily about the economics? $1/gallon of fuel that is diluted to a tenth, where’s the savings? How many watts a day does it take to make 5 gallons (granted, enough ethanol for 50 gallons of gas)?
55 gallons of E10 homebrew mix (5 eth, 50 gas) would cost $205, vs $220 for straight gas. A 25mpg car could travel 1375 miles on that amount. That’s a $0.01 savings per mile. If it runs for 12,000 miles/year it’s $131/year savings. So we’re looking at a 53 year break-even for the $6998 assuming the power consumption is a component of the $1/gallon and the pump never gives you any problems.
At E85 it makes a little more sense taking a little less that 6 years to break even.
-todd
May 9th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
OK, quick math aside, 5 gallons of ethanol would be good for 45 gallons of gas…
-todd
May 9th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
The deal with ethanol is that to use it in more than 5-10% requires a different engine setup than conventional gasoline. The cool part is that you can run a much higher compression ratio (or more boost with forced induction) and more aggressive timing curve than you can with gasoline. The upshot here being you can make more power from the same engine displacement. The crap part is that even with those things, the mileage you will get will be less than with gasoline.
I’ve got to agree with B. Case’s statement that home made fuels will be so discouraged legally to only be made by a handful of truly devoted people. Currently, I could grow japhora and use it to make biodiesel (more usable oil than soy, and it’s not edible by humans). However, I’d have to completely engineer my own setup, then pay regular fuel taxes on it even though I made investments in planting, harvesting, and processing.
May 9th, 2008 at 10:16 pm
I just saw this was posted on Autoblog Green as well, and I’m quite sure you scooped them. They give thanks to “Matt” for the tip. That’s not me.
May 10th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
If I had a setup like this, I’d probably just stay drunk all the time.
Ethanol is a huge boondoggle designed to funnel large dollars into the pockets of corporate agribusiness concerns. The corn lobby is hugely powerful — ever wonder why we have high fructose corn syrup or some other corn product in just about everything we eat? It’s also a big part of the obesity epidemic in America…
When I’m in charge we’ll have solar shingles on every single roof, wind farms will be everywhere, all new cars will be electric, and gasoline will be reserved strictly for old hotrods and motorcycles and such. We’ll also have a proper American Autobahn, sports involving a ball will give way to motorsports (electric NASCAR anyone?), college education will be both free and manditory, and Tom Waits will be given some sort of high ranking cabinet position.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
Let’s pretend that the vehicle you’re riding/driving can accept E100, and get as good or better MPG than a gasoline equivalent. Let’s also assume that crops and farm land weren’t used to make said E100. Would there be any objections to it then? All that stuff is being worked on by a lot of very smart people. This MicroFueler is one persons idea of a step in the right direction. Would i buy one? Um, no. But the whole alternative fuels thing is about evolution, not revolution. We’re on our way. And yeah, i’m a fan of Ethanol, so i’m a little biased.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:24 am
470 lbs of sugar for 35 gallons of fuel? Who’s going to deliver this to my house? Who’s going to shovel the sugar into the cooker? I will need about 1 ton (200 gallons?) of sugar ever month to make 140 gallons of fuel?. Where the heck am I going to store 200 gallons of Sugar?
If a trucker is going to deliver 50 gallons of sugar each week and they drive 30 miles to my house and get 5 miles/gal they are going to use 6 gallons of gas and $50 for the trucker salary or about $70 delivery fee at the very least. That’s $2/gallon JUST for the delivery of the sugar!
Maybe someone should start a liquid sugar pipeline!
Is my math wrong?
May 12th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Their website does say it takes 470 lbs of sugar to make 35 gallons of fuel. So, yes, having that much pure sugar delivered to your house on a weekly basis does seem ridiculous.
However, this unit is designed to process any type of feedstock, not just table sugar. Which means, you can grow your own feedstock. But they don’t exactly advertise that.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
imagine the ant problem you’d have.
-todd
May 12th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
imagine cars/bikes that run on Kudzu!
If you live in the south, you know what it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu
It’s everywhere. It’s a fast growing (12 inches per day) leafy vine that’s very destructive to other vegetation. Turns out, it can be made into cellulosic ethanol fuel.
Once people get it out of their heads that CORN is actually a POOR crop to use for ethanol fuel, and that there are much better sources, then maybe we can stop talking about how ethanol has no future.
And because Kudzu, and/or similar nuisance plants, already costs the United States more than $500million annually to control, perhaps government agencies would not have a problem if the public started using it for their own private ethanol production.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Far better solution for bio fuel are the organic oils - the biodiesel. After all to extract the oil from plants you just need to press them which is far more efficient than destilation which requires huge ammount of energy and water.
Another great bio fuel is the natural gas which can be produced garbage, farm waste etc.
Both solutions can be used without major modifications to the current car engines and can be transported using the existing supply lines. They are being successfully used in Europe and probably in other places in the world.
Probably everybody knows nowadays that event the famous Ford T had a switch on its carburetor to use gasoline or ethanol and that every time there is an energy crisis in the US the politicians bring the ethanol on the table, unsuccessfully so far.