Good info on making and running Ethanol. Read up

http://running_on_alcohol.tripod.com/id1.html

 

That site is for the Charles 803 still, I actually bought the plans to build that still and then opted to buy a still made from stainless.

I have everything I need here now except for the corn and boiler.

 

Man the more I think about it the more I convince myself to get back to your shop and get a tune on E85 and meth.

 

While Dave has shown great performance benefits from the use of E85 you have to consider the efficiency of converting corn to E85 is poor. For the hobbyist you will most likely consume more oil based fuels in the harvesting and conversion than the actual ethanol produced. So from an environmental standpoint the pollutants have doubled.

The point of my response is that it takes oil to produce ethanol.

 

what if you run your farm equpiment off of the ethanol? haha
dave you should swap your tractor with a gt40r 4g63. 10 second tractor ftw!

man thats sweet though. i wish i had the resources to do something like this.

keep us posted man good luck.

 

the point is it takes more energy to produce alky than it makes. why else would it take the government to pay for it.

on the other hand how can you stand in the way of the evironuts, its lemings to the lead.

BUT if it works in the evo I'm all for it.

 

The way I see it there is no way possible for it to cost more to produce it than you get out of it. It will depend on which douche bag of the week you choose to listen to I guess, this goes for both sides of the debate, not just the one that I don't agree with.

If I drive 15 minutes south of my house I can buy corn from the Amish, they use not tractors, no gasoline, no oil. Arguement finished. You can run the boiler burning wood, which I have a lot of, arguement backed up and finished again. So "you" can't say how much fossil fuel it takes to produce the corn as it can actually take 0.

Personally, I am not going to smell a horses *** for hours to make fuel to run in my EVO. However, if I decided to plant the property I have in corn it would take me let's say 10 hours to fit the ground, 10 hours to plant it, 10 hours to pick it. That's 30 hours (which is WAY longer than it would actually take). My tractor can run easily for 8 hours on 5 gallons of diesel, that means it is going to take 18.75 gallons of diesel to produce the corn I need. If my yields are just mediocre I will get 150 bushels in this area per acre. Should be able to yield close to 2.4 gallons per bushel so around 1100 gallons of pure ethanol.

Farming on a larger scale is more productive, very little time is spent in the fields actually and you could no-till the corn which eliminates plowing/fitting the ground.

Yields per acre on corn in this area can get up to 200 bushel per acre that's 480 gallons of ethanol per acre. 200 is an awfully good crop though and not common.

Just making points.

Depending on how hard you want to work the entire process could be done without any fossil fuels. It's an awful lot of work though.

 

that may be true if you look at it from a no alternatives to oil energy perspective. if the united states started using as much alternative electricity generating resources as it should... this would not be a problem.

remember what goes in your car is just a deffering of energy production. the key is to get the sun to susidize as much of this energy production as possible. this is why electric cars are bull****, cuz they still run off oil firing powerplants. but if oil firing power plants went away................ who killed the electric car indeed. same story with hydrogen, same story with ethanol.

there's a uniqueness associated with each defferal fuel. hydrogen has very good storage efficiency. ethanol gives us the classical, traditional feel to motorcars. electric cars are zero emissions (alcohol and biodiesel still produce emissions even in closed loop carbon cycle, they make the NOX stuff which is still "bad")

the largest problem is ADAPTING. ethanol is not used by the populus because the populus can't use it. make sense? so don't discourage a man making a change in the "right direction"

 

Let me preface my comments by saying I am not bashing what you are doing and it will be interesting to follow the progress of your science project.

It appears to me that you have some fetish with douche bags

If this was the scenario whereby you produced ethanol then I would probably agree with you from the standpoint of using fosil fuels to produce ethanol. I would assume that you drove your electric car to pick up the wood and that you cut down the trees in your back yard with an axe, but I get your point and somewhat agree. However, in such a case the conversion cost will most likely be much higher and you will no longer be able to compete with the cost of gasoline for your small scale effort. I only say this because I assume that you pay yourself as the president of Busher Racing, therefore your time is worth money and not on the same scale as a day laborer.

For large volume production of ethanol the numbers are known so I did not make my comment based on intuition. The ethanol yield from corn is only slightly higher than fosil fuel consumed during the conversion, something on the order of 1:1.5 fuel:ethanol. These numbers are based on economies of scale and not your home brew. As you pointed out your labor will be quite substantial whereas on a large scale they will rely on automation which requires power.

Agreed, and your $20/gallon ethanol will be tons of fun in the EVO.

Again, not bashing just debating....good luck.

 

what has to be taken into consideration here is the total energy capital invested.

your tractor took energy to make, your fertilizers that you'll eventually need to use are gonna be made by energy, your watering is fed by some form of energy (i hope you're not relying on the rain)

all this must be computed for the energy return on investment (which for ethanol IS POSITIVE!!!! for the haters. this is an important point because this brings in the SUN SUBSIDIZING i talked about in the post above)

 

it takes more energy to make ANYTHING than that thing puts out. ever consider that??? OIL IS JUST SOLAR ENERGY STORED. what happens when it runs out???? you're arguing naivety. stickin' with oil is stupid, foolish, short sighted, lazy and most of all confounding.

we happen to be in this lucky situation where it lasted a long time... once it's gone guess how much energy you'll have to use to use oil. it'll be a lot more than ethanol.

 

an article from MIT from past February:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/biofuels.html


Two Years Ago from Cornell University:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/...ostly.ssl.html



Technology is a waiting game.

 

240Z Twin Turbo, are you in love with David?

Whatever he posts you have something negative to say...dude give the guy a break...

 

lets do this

 

Because I respond to Dave you think I love him? Based on this same logic, because you respond to me does that mean you love me? I have never dated a Peurto Rican before and you definitely seem to be more my type

Anyway, I assumed David was already spoken for by Al.

I post in response to things that spark my interest such as this post....

"On my way to fuel independence.........."

I read this and think, hmmmm, it takes fuel to make ethanol so I post a response and state my $0.02. I also prefaced by saying this is not a bash, but a debate based on his post. This is why the "Technical Forum" was created so that people can have "Technical" debates. Does this create some type of problem for you? I am sure there are hundreds of threads started by Dave that have no response from me. You can search my posts and see that I also respond to other threads that are started by other folks.

Anyway, call me