Home-Brew Fuel
Chugging along on alcohol
A Wonder Fuel that can not only drive cars, heat homes and produce electricity but may also be brewed out of kitchen garbage? All this is possible with Ch2H5OH, which is better known as grain alcohol or ethanol, the stuff that provides the kick in gin and whisky. Ethanol was used decades ago to power early automobiles, only to fade when plentiful supplies of cheaper gasoline became available. Now that gas is getting scarce and costly, the fuel is coming back.
Best known is the diluted variant called gasohol, the blend of 90% gasoline and 10% alcohol that is sold in the U.S. at more than 1,000 service stations, and is widely available in Brazil in an even richer mixture of 20% ethanol and 80% gasoline. Now, however, a number of alky-boosters are touting the virtues of using the ethanol undiluted. Besides being out of OPEC's control, the fuel can be made in backyard stills that can cost as little as a few hundred dollars to build and almost nothing to operate.
Modifying an engine to run on ethanol requires only simple carburetor adjustments. One recent convert is Manhattan cabby William Bly, who last month logged more than 1,000 miles on alcohol from a still built by The Mother Earth News, a North Carolina counterculture magazine. Says he: "The car ran beautifully--no knocks, no stalls, no nothing."
To make at least 180-proof ethanol, which is strong enough to power a typical car motor, a home brewer needs only to throw some vegetable matter such as corn, potato peels, even rotten garbage, into a vat. He then adds a couple of commonly available brewer's enzymes (to speed up the conversion of starch into sugar) and some baker's yeast (to bring about the fermentation). After fermentation is complete, which takes less than a week, the mess is dumped into a still, where the alcohol is boiled off. Basically just moon shiner's gear, the device consists of a steel drum with a chimney-like funnel and a condensing vat to catch the distilled alcohol. A bushel of vegetable matter can yield two to three gallons of fuel. A small still may produce ten gallons a day.
A federal permit is needed to run a still, but the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms issues one routinely when the applicant posts a bond promising not to sell or drink the alcohol. Automakers approve of ethanol power, but caution that it does present some problems. Though it has a higher octane level than even high-test gas, ethanol contains somewhat less overall energy to the gallon, and the mileage it yields is up to 20% less.
When temperatures drop to about 45DEG F, alcohol-powered cars are hard to start. But this problem is not insoluble. Scott Skylar, Washington, D.C., director of the National Center for Appropriate Technology, a federally funded energy research group, beat the 45DEG barrier in his alcohol-powered 1964 Rambler by running a tube from a discarded automobile's window washer to the mouth of the carburetor, and filling the washer tank with gas. To start on cold days, he squirts a booster shot of gas into the carburetor by pushing the windshield-washer button.
Washington is sensibly encouraging the use of ethanol in spite of its modest technical problems as a replacement for gasoline. The Administration has already budgeted $11 million in loan guarantees for stills, and the Senate has approved a bill that would increase the funding to a full $500 million.
An Energy Department study has concluded that by 1982 the use of gasohol will have spread to the point where it will be supplanting about 3% of gasoline consumption. As output of alcohol rises to meet demand, its high cost--commercially distilled pure alcohol now sells for as much as $1.85 per gal.--will come down, making the price competitive with gasoline's. Eventually, alky fans hope, the U.S. will catch up with Brazil: by the early 1980s some 15% of all automobile fuel used there will be straight alcohol.
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