Now You Can Brew Your Own Fuel

Image credit: IHT

What if you could make fuel for your car in your backyard, and that too for less than what you pay at the pump? Would you take it? Of course you would, or at least most likely would.

Floyd Butterfield could become a legend for people who want to make their own ethanol. With his with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Thomas Quinn, he has started E-Fuel, which soon will announce its home ethanol system, the E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler. The system will be about as large as a washer-dryer, and sell for $9,995 and ship before year-end. The net cost to consumers could drop by half after government incentives.

Ethanol has been on the alt energy radar long enough now, and has had its share of bouquets and brickbats - more of the latter in the recent past. But the entire blame is not on the product itself, most times it has been owing to the shortsightedness of the politicians who hyped feedstock such as corn without much thought about the ripple effects on other parts of the economy. That is, ethanol itself is not a bad idea - ask Brazil - and it could well be one of the key components of our energy puzzle for quite some time to come.

The MicroFueler from E-Fuel will use sugar as its main fuel source. 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. If you were to left-over alcohol from bars and restaurants to turn them into ethanol, the only cost is for the electricity used in processing. The company's dream is to have millions of people pumping their own fuel out of their homes.

Sounds just too tempting, doesn't it.

Is the MicroFueler going to cause an upheaval? Will this be a game changer in the alternative energy industry? Will the MicroFueler become to the energy industry what the PCs became to the computing industry? Is it even remotely possible that a shift from refinery-based fuel production to home-based production will mirror the shift from mainframe-based computing to personal computing?

One would desperately hope that such parallels exist, but in reality it is a long shot. Here are some of the reasons why:

1. Ethanol has long had home brewers, but there are plenty of reasons to question whether personal fueling systems will become the fuel industry's version of the personal computer. Brewing ethanol in the backyard isn't as easy as one might think. Distillation, refining and quality control are tedious processes and home-brew ethanol might not ever achieve the kind of quality that ethanol from large refineries can.

2. Sugar-based ethanol doesn't look much cheaper than gas, as things stand today. This could be the real problem. Ethanol has become the favorite whipping boy of the industry precisely because of the effects its production had on the prices of corn etc. Will sugar as a feedstock make the situation any better? Until the world finds a feedstock that is sustainable from the environmental and food-chain perspectives, it will be difficult for ethanol to become a favorite of every home that owns a car.

3. While there was a clear need for people to own computing resources for personalized work, it is not clear that people have a need to own their fuel resources. Well, fuel is fuel, whether you get it from your home or from the pump station; given this, many might rather prefer to take it from a wholesale supplier than take the trouble of brewing it themselves, unless the cost difference is REALLY significant. (What could happen however is that a number of small-scale producers might crop up, so rather than home-based refineries, what we could see are micro-refineries. There is a much more specific economic need for such micro-refineries, especially among the farming community worldwide).

Butterfield and Quinn are trying their best to address the above problems, and have some ideas and innovations up their sleeves that could take care of some of these issues.

There are many consumers who want to reduce their carbon footprint, are willing to invest and make compromises in order to achieve this. Given this consumer enthusiasm and the increased worldwide momentum of alternative energy research efforts, Butterfield and Quinn might well be on to something, in spite of the hurdles.

And who knows, if they get a bit lucky (make that a lot lucky), Quinn and Butterfield might indeed become the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the energy industry.

Source: International Herald Tribune

Via: Green Auto Update

Labels: ethanol

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