Making Alcohol and Hydrogen for Fuel

I have been reading up on this and have orderd a couple of books. I have been visting this website for years and found it a wealth of information: http://www.knowledgepublications.com/

Their passive solar stuff is some of the best I have ever come across.

I ordered the "
Alcohol Can Be a Gas book", and "
Hydrogen Generator Gas for Vehicles and Engines: Volumes 1 and 2".

Theses guys have done some amazing stuff. They also have a video of making hydrogen gas from wood chips. Folks were running internal comubustion engines on this stuff a hundred years ago, becuase there were no gas stations. If you wanted to run an engine or a car back then you had to make your own fuel. They sometimes call it producer gas. Check out this video:
Hydrogen Generator Gas for Vehicles and Engines: Volumes 1 and 2

Awesome, I have to go ahead and read these. I've been thinking about how to make vinegar, vegetable oil, etc etc. I am gardening, I plan to add fruit soon...I want to learn to ferment my own ciders and beers. If I had the land, I'd be keeping bees, and going as far off the grid as possible.

As another FYI, I Googled "root cellar" and found plans on how to convert a corner of my basement into a root cellar. I need to incorporate that into my basement finishing plans. I want to keep a whole bunch of hidey holes in there

Retrocon wrote:Awesome, I have to go ahead and read these. I've been thinking about how to make vinegar, vegetable oil, etc etc. I am gardening, I plan to add fruit soon...I want to learn to ferment my own ciders and beers. If I had the land, I'd be keeping bees, and going as far off the grid as possible.

As another FYI, I Googled "root cellar" and found plans on how to convert a corner of my basement into a root cellar. I need to incorporate that into my basement finishing plans. I want to keep a whole bunch of hidey holes in there

My understanding is that vinegar is not the different then making alcohol. Can you post the link for the plans?

don't bother trying to make vinegar. Your failures at winemaking WILL be vinegar. I made some strawberry wine, failed, and it is the tastiest strawberry vinegar ever! LOL

hopefulfilled wrote:don't bother trying to make vinegar. Your failures at winemaking WILL be vinegar. I made some strawberry wine, failed, and it is the tastiest strawberry vinegar ever! LOL

LOL that's ok wait till you get it down...

Got my book today "Alcohol Can Be Gas. I'll post some excerpts when I get a chance.. On thing caught my attention and that is grass clippings could replace a 3rd of the auto fuel we get from the Mid east...

Making ethanol for fuel just got easier for the average bear - http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/make-your-own-e.html

Here is a few myths I am learning about from the book:

It is a myth that crops grown for fuel are causing people to starve.
Brazil is energy independent and runs half it cars on ethanol and only
uses 1% percent of of its farmland to grow crops used to make it.
Ethanol is actually much more feasible and economically sound then
we are being led to believe. Now who would benefit from putting out
misinformation about ethanol? I recommend reading Alcohol Can be A Gas
by David Blume for the inside scoop He explodes the myths about Ethanol.

Here are some of them:
Myth: It takes just as much energy to make ethanol as you get out of it.
Fact: The most exhaustive (and least-cited) study on the energy
balance, by Isaias de Carvalho Macedo of Brazil, shows an alcohol
energy return of more than eight units of output for every unit of
input—and this study accounts for everything right down to smelting the
ore to make the steel for tractors.

Public discussion of this issue has been dominated by the American
Petroleum Institute’s aggressive distribution of the work of Cornell
professor David Pimentel and his numerous studies. Other researchers
have shown conclusively that Pimentel distorts key calculations, and
cite his unfamiliarity with farming in general, his ignoring of studies
from Brazil that disagree with him, and his poor understanding of the
value of co-products and their contribution to an accurate portrayal of
energy accounting in the ethanol manufacturing process. In fact, he
stands virtually alone in portraying alcohol as having an energy return
on energy invested (EROEI) that is negative—producing less energy than
is used in its production.

Myth: Renewable fuel will cost us jobs.

Fact: A conversion of the nation’s transportation system to ethanol would mean millions of new jobs and full employment.

Alcohol can be produced safely and sustainably from the backyard to
large-scale commercial operations. It can utilize many high-energy
crops, and co-products from the micro-distillery can be used to support
raising many valuable crops and/or livestock, each of which provides
revenue streams and the associated new jobs. Ethanol opens up new
industrial job opportunities, new market opportunities, new
agricultural opportunities, and creates no toxic by-products in
production or fuel use.

Myth: If we use all our corn to produce fuel, we won't have enough food.

Fact: The ability of the US to expand into combined
fuel/food/product crops is enormous due to the huge amount of farmland
we have. We need to revisit what we define as farmland and energy
feedstocks. There is no question we can grow enough food and fuel. The
root of the food problem is poverty and lack of social systems to
ensure that people without money can get access to food.

Alcohol Can Be A Gas! describes at least 30 crops, most of which are
more viable for ethanol production than corn, and many of which do not
compete with food production. In fact, some of the most significant
feedstocks for ethanol production are plants that are not food crops at
all. Examples are cattails, buffalo gourd (an arid climate crop),
mesquite (which grows all over the arid southwest), and even ocean kelp.
Alcohol Can Be A Gas! makes it clear that by using just the example
feedstocks listed here, we can easily produce enough ethanol to
eliminate our Mid-East oil imports and probably replace all our US
automotive consumption with ethanol without having any impact on our
food supply. And that's not to mention the many high energy fuel crops
that can be grown in rotation with currently grown crops.

Myth: Cars burn hotter on ethanol and that is bad for my engine.

Fact: Car engines actually burn cooler, cleaner and with less
vibration on straight ethanol and this generally triples the life of
the engine. Car engines routinely last up to 500,000 miles burning
ethanol.

Myth: It would cost too much to build all the ethanol production
facilities needed to offset the U.S. consumer's thirst for petroleum.

Fact: It takes about a dollar per annual gallon of alcohol
production capacity to build alcohol plants. With the money we have
spent in Iraq we could have built enough ethanol plants worldwide to
permanently solve the fuel issue for every single person in the world
renewably, and increased the food supply to in theory feed everyone.

Myth: Ethanol is more polluting than gasoline.

Fact: Alcohol fuel has been added to gasoline to reduce virtually
every class of pollution. Adding as little as 5–10% alcohol can reduce
carbon monoxide (CO) from gasoline exhaust dramatically. When using
pure alcohol, the reductions in all three of the major
pollutants—carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides (NOx), and hydrocarbons
(HC)—are so great that, in many cases, the remaining emissions are
immeasurably small.

Myth: It would be too expensive to retool all the cars on the road to run on an alcohol fuel mix.

Fact: Generally fuel injected cars (the predominant engine produced
since 1980) can run on a 50% blend of alcohol and gas with no
modification. There are a variety of ways to convert virtually any car
to run on 85-100% alcohol for a few hundred dollars.
Current flexible fueled vehicles made by US Automakers can run on
both fuels and the additional cost is less than $100 on the assembly
line.

Myth: Ethanol production is an ecological nightmare.

Fact: Raising ethanol feedstocks using an organic-style crop
rotation will cut energy use on farms by a third by eliminating
petroleum-based herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers.
Fertilizer needs can be met either by applying the byproducts left over
from the alcohol manufacturing process directly to the soil, or by
first running the byproducts through animals as feed. In the latter
case, manure is run through a methane digester producing methane that
can be used as a fuel source in the distillery; the resulting liquid is
then sprayed back on the land that the crop came from— via an
inexpensive pipeline, or by using trucks, or by making compost for
later application.

Myth: You will get less mileage and use more alcohol

Fact: The mileage myth assumes a simple but spurious comparison of the two
fuels heating values (BTU/gallon) as the basis for low mileage figures
for alcohol. It is not the amount of heat generated it's the amount of
work it takes to drive the piston. It's the octane and speed of the
burn that is important in IC engines. Alcohol outperforms Gasoline [in engines optimized for alcohol] in these respects and can get up to 22% better mileage then gasoline, not
to mention engines that run it last 3 times as long.