No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

Discussion in 'The big picture' started by aslanded, Jun 23, 2008.

  1. aslanded

    aslanded Junior Member

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    Ok, Hi everyone. Before I start the rant I should let you know I'm Jo, I have a property in Cygnet, Tassie, am currently living/working in Sydney getting some funds together to build a house and researching all the stuff you do when you cant live the dream just yet...

    So I stumbled upon this newly released book which has given me hope and rekindled all the anger and fires that reading books about the horrors carried out in our names with our funds and toil brings to your heart, except this book is different because its a permaculture book on how to produce your own fuel alcohol, and as a bi-product make mushrooms, fish, worms, castings, compost, pigs, etc etc etc.

    First up it tells you why we don't run our cars on alcohol, and surprise, its because of Rockefeller and the oil mens hard fought campaigns, not because alcohol inst a good fuel (your engine will last 3x longer on alcohol its so clean) Basically everything you think you know about producing alcohol is probably oil industry propaganda. For example no one need go hungry to produce alcohol in fact it produces more food as whatever you fermented to make the alcohol is still full of nutrients and had the starches and sugars removed so its far superior food for your pigs/ chickens/fish/worms etc. Or it can be applied directly as a fertilizer.

    The next question on your minds is probably 'how do I get my car to run on it?' The really great news is theres a good chance you can put 100% alcohol in your car now and it would run better than before. Either that or you can mix it a bit with petrol ( something like 85% alcohol 15% petrol) You can also make some small modifications like having the fuel supply lines heated by the engine before combustion so that it burns even more efficiently.

    Petrol is actually a waste product from turning the oil into pesticides and other products, it used to be dumped before they managed to get it burnt in cars. Its toxic leftover waste from the chemical processes and varies in composition depending on what was extracted from the oil. So we burn it and inhale it. Alcohol is so safe it can be drunk. it burns to produce carbon dioxide and water vapor. The carbon dioxide is about 1/10 of the amount of carbon dioxide the plants consumed while growing. So its a fuel which will help us with the greenhouse problem.

    We can easily make a micro unit which produces over 35000L of fuel and provides for 20 or so people who drive over 15,000km a year. It improves your permaculture setup so much we would be mad not to do it, and I know youre all as angry and hurt by the killing and war which these bastards initiate to profiteer. I thought that it was a necessity for us to live our comfortable lives and now I find that it was only necessary for the oil men for us to consume their toxic waste and in fact alcohol is traditionally (Model T Ford ran on it) and in other countries (Brazil) is the fuel of choice.

    Theres a few things to work through in terms of legality here in Australia which are unknowns to me as its an American book.

    I've said enough. The book is called Alcohol can be a gas at https://www.permaculture.com/ or https://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/

    I found it while looking through books on Amazon.com and you can get this 600 page book in hardcover delivered to your door for about $50. It took this guy nearly 25 years to make and $250,000. Read his story its amazing.

    If you cant afford the book let me know and I'll buy it for you.

    I'm trying to put together a co-op or collective. Its too daunting as a solo project, and much more fun with a group of people to share the successes with. Plus we all have different skills to offer and different contacts and networks to utilize.

    Get the book and let me know.

    Cheers

    Jo
     
  2. ppp

    ppp Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Hey mate, no need to post your stuff three times! You will be better received if you start with once :)

    Hey, I'm in QLD, so I don't think I can join in on your little "coop", but anyway..
    As a little interest value project, I made a bit of ethanol, just to say that I could, I guess..

    My simple set up was
    1) mix up some sugar solution and yeast
    2) let it sit for 2-3 weeks
    3) get a 20L steel drum, drill a hole in the top, install galvinised water pipe (it's what I had) -- I had no "coil" so I simply used a ~4 metre length (the pipe is angled slightly downwards toward the cup for collecting ethanol)
    4) fill the drum with the solution (sugar has been converted to ethanol through fermentation)
    4) heat up the bottom of the drum with a little fire.
    5) hang a couple of wet hessian sacks over the pipe (we also hung an ice pack near the end
    6) try to keep the drum above 80'C but below 100'C - (we periodically open it up and put in a thermometer)
    7) watch the ethanol drip out the end of the pipe.

    We tasted and burnt it, and it seemed to be ethanol to us.

    So, yeah, ethanol is an option, but the energy in Sugar and wood burnt was FAR- FAR more than I got out. (I reckon I probably recovered less that 1%).
    I hope you proposed plant is more efficient than this one that we put together in an afternoon..
    Have you got plans?

    good luck
    PPP
     
  3. aslanded

    aslanded Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Its all in the book, theres hundreds of things you can make alcohol out of from cattails grown in sewerage, which will give you 10,000 Gallons/ acre/year to waste fruit, sugar beets, Jerusalem artichokes, wheat, corn, old donuts, basically whatever is going to waste where you live. Initially as I have a lot of firewood it would be wood burning, and a properly built fire box is a lot more efficient than a slapped up experiment. After a year or so we could add a methane digester which could be run from the waste of pigs fed on the waste products of the fermenter or again whatever is available. You then get more methane than you use and can use it to produce electricity or sell it.

    They used to bust the illegal moonshiners in the States by going to the county fairs and checking out who had the fattest, healthiest hogs.

    The thing about this project is we are not just producing alcohol. The other products which the fermenter produces are actually far more valuable. Its a perfect example of a permaculture system and as such cant be viewed in isolation, which is what the oil guys will do when they quote the costs of producing alcohol. Its something which is better produced in small, manageable co-ops than in massive centralized industrial operations. Thats why its up to us to make the change, we cant sit around and wait for a corporation to do it for us. I love it, its so empowering.

    Also you make it sound like its never been done before. There are thousands of people doing this in the US and even more in South America.

    Yes I have plans. Grand ones!

    Cheers

    Jo
     
  4. ppp

    ppp Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    no, it's DEFINITELY been done before, I was trying to say that it is so easy that it can be slapped up in an afternoon.. obviously there will be HUGE improvements with a properly designed and built system. That said, it is still true that the system will probably use more energy than it produces.. however of course, the benefit is that it is converted from non-mobile fuel (wood etc) into a fuel that can drive a car.
     
  5. MonteGoulding

    MonteGoulding Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Hi Jo

    I'm in Geeveston, due west and over the river from you. I'm sure there's heaps of people around here that would be interested. It's unfortunate that it's illegal to own a still larger than 5L capacity and it's illegal to use even that to make spirits. You can buy them though from home brew shops and they sell some other gear separately that will turn it into a 25L thing but nothing the size of what your talking. Having said that there would be tons of waste apples down here every year. I wonder how much a license would cost? I've been thinking that a servo owner might be a good partner. Given they already have a property with the correct zoning for the council to allow a decent size setup to be built. I might drop the idea to the owner of my local and see if he flinches. I'm not sure if he's peak aware but he told me four months ago that we were heading for $2 diesel.

    Cheers

    Monte
     
  6. aslanded

    aslanded Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Great Monte,

    Youre right, I think the greatest hindrance to producing fuel is the council and govt regulations. I've seen an application for an experimental still online, but thats as far as I've gone.

    I'm of two minds about alerting the council. Its something we need to discuss as a collective. Obviously its better in the long run, but I have a feeling they will find a million different reasons not to allow it, to protect themselves legally, all of which are rubbish. I also realize that the council down there watches everyone like hawks ....

    We could get the media involved to get things moving. I think the timing is great as the entire country is freaking about their petrol costs but dont know there is an alternative. Its kind of why I'd like a working example to show people before they try to shoot the idea down.

    I'm not sure about building it at a petrol station as theres a bit of space required for feedstocks, it might make a bit of smoke in the beginning, making fires and alcohol near all that petrol would make me nervous, and its something which integrates better onto a farm since thats where all the ingredients are and where all the waste products will be used. Much better if you dont need to truck too much stuff around. Its also further away from the general public.

    Personally at his point I'm leaning towards not alerting the council but getting the required license for a still.
     
  7. MonteGoulding

    MonteGoulding Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Hmm... what about a mobile still then. I guess your right about the petrol station. I was thinking that they might have a substantial block at the back for playing with.

    With a mobile still each person in the co-op could brew their own ferment then the still could be passed around. I guess the license for the still would need to be in the name of the co-op. Maybe build it onto a trailer.



    Cheers

    Monte
     
  8. boylesg

    boylesg New Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    There is one big problem with producing your own ethanol. At best, fermentation can only produce an ethanol concentration of around 15% by volume, i.e. 15ml of ethanol for every 100ml of fermentation mix.

    That means you have a very large volume of water and impurities to get rid of to obtain a very small volume of ethanol. As you have pointed out this is done by distillation which consumes a very large amount of energy. In fact the energy consumed in order to distil 15ml of ethanol from every 100ml of mix is far greater than the energy contained in the resulting 15ml of ethanol.

    Putting it in lamens terms, you would have to burn many hundreds of tons of fire wood each year to produce enough ethanol to fuel your car for perhaps a month or two. Clearly that is simply not sustainable - ecologically or economically. In fact this is one of the key barriers to large scale adoption of ethanol as a fuel. Its production is not yet effcient enough to make it economically and ecologically viable.

    Perhaps its production could be made efficient enough if some one manages to genetically engineer yeast strains that will survive in far higher concentrations of ethanol - say 50% or 70%. 70% aqueous ethanol is in fact a very efficient antiseptic and disinfectant. Another way might be to develop a technique of chemically synthesizing ethanol from the same raw materials by means of a catalyst. In this case you would produce pure or near pure ethanol without any need for distillation. I am sure there are scientists currently working on these methods.

    You would be better off growing Canola or another oil seed crop and producing your own biodiesel. The energy required to compress the seeds and release the oil would be much less than distilling your ethanol. In fact the compression could be done with a manual press as opposed to a mechanised one that runs on electricity.
     
  9. aslanded

    aslanded Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Its possible that if you look at the figures for producing alcohol and canola oil bio-diesel in terms of energy consumed to produce each that the canola oil would appear a better choice. I don't know, I haven't looked into it and probably wont because I think huge mono culture farms using fertilizer, massive tractors, gm modification and soil depletion to produce an oil that shouldn't even be classified as a food.

    In isolation it may produce more energy but we are permaculturists and we go beyond looking at the world in isolated cells. For us everything is a part of a renewable cycle or system, and as such alcohol production is a far better, as it returns far more than just a bit of fuel. The alcohol is one of the least valuable products we gain from the process. The large volumes of water and impurities you speak of are actually the first stage in producing large volumes of oyster mushrooms, high quality feed for pigs and fish and fertilizer to increase the depth of your soil.

    Separating the alcohol from this does require a lot of heat, but not nearly as much as you stated. There are alternatives to burning wood, which I happen to have a huge quantity of, and my forests as a renewable supplier of firewood would probably produce far more oxygen and definitely give far more habitat than a field of canola.

    There are also many alternatives to burning wood to get the required heat, such as heat pumps, siting the still near a large heat pump, aka a large refrigeration unit which currently just blows the heat into the air, or running your own compressor on alcohol and using the heat to distill and the cool to condense the alcohol out. It gives 3-10 times more alcohol back than the compressor uses. Also methane can be used from pigs fed on the fermented mash.

    The heat can be also transferred to your house using heat exchangers and hydronic heating coils in your slab.

    As for gm modification to produce a yeast that can tolerate high levels of alcohol, its a really bad idea. We have been fixated on looking at the world empirically, as in breaking things down into smaller and smaller parts to get a better understanding of it. Its the basis of science. Our understanding of the relationships between these small parts is way too limited for anyone in the world to be able to say that modifying yeast, one of the fundamental parts of so many systems will have no impact on the world other than make it a bit easier to make alcohol. We almost lost the ability of clouds to form inland because someone modified a bacteria to stop strawberries from getting frost on them. It was just blind luck it was stopped because it also made a nearby weed live better too. The same sharp needle on the bacteria being removed by gm, which collected a drop of dew which froze is what seeds the clouds from treetops and allows rain to form inland. They didnt know this at the time.

    Nothing exists in isolation.

    Cheers

    Jo
     
  10. duanejen

    duanejen Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    My friend has a diesel van....he runs it on cottonseed oil...a waste product....cost is @ 50cents a litre. Now if he could work out how to cook hot chips as he drives along...when he stops I am sure that hot chip sales would cover the price of the fuel.....

    We have also 1000 years reserves of Natural Gas here and currently selling it to China for 7 cents a litre....why cant the car moguls set their cars torun on NG...they already have LPG.....you could fill up at home

    Just a thought!
     
  11. aslanded

    aslanded Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    I liked the idea of using natural gas filled up from your home gas supply, so i just did a quick look around the net.

    Its different from LPG because it is mainly methane, where LPG is mainly propane, butane and propylene. For some reason this make it harder to store, although there are over 5 million natural gas vehicles worldwide. Methane is a good fuel as it only produces water and carbon dioxide.

    Not sure where you got the 1000 years from, I found this: "Current known and probable reserves are expected to supply Australia with gas until about 2050"

    on this site:

    https://www.countryenergy.com.au/interne ... atural+gas

    When hearing numbers like 1000 years its always best to do the math yourself, thats probably at the current rate of consumption. If we increase usage by 7% per year in 10 years we've doubled our consumption. In 20 years its four times what we use now and we are down to only 250 years of gas left. Unfortunately because of the way the economy is geared we will always be increasing our consumption, or we would have no economic growth. The population is increasing, and the world is short of oil. There isn't enough natural gas or uranium to power the world for anything longer than a band aid amount of time, and we should be using the last of the cheap energy to build the infrastructures needed for the new world.

    If we're not careful its going to be used in a fight to the death for the last of it, and the centralized power will try to convince us to keep it all centralized even though its not sustainable any more and theres no energy left to keep the wheels turning. Its been happening for a long time, and they know it which is what worries me the most.

    Its time to re-localize, move out of the cities and start sustainable communities, or even better communities that produce an excess. We need to stop growing cash crops and start producing what we need locally just like they used to, but now with all our great technology. If thats not utopia I don't know what is. Centralized power wont like it because they don't get to tax you every time you draw a breath, which is why you wont be encouraged to do this by the TV.

    Peace

    Jo
     
  12. gblakemore

    gblakemore New Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Fair bit of discussion about distillation and high energy inputs. Firstly sugar beet can yeild up to 25% more sugar than sugar cane and the green tops are a valuable livestock fodder. This means that Boi fuels are not exclusive to food production. Distillation can be achieved at much lower temperatures using solar energy.
     
  13. aslanded

    aslanded Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Right on. All the facts are there. The only thing stopping us from doing it is ourselves.
     
  14. Raymondo

    Raymondo Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Seems to me that if you want to use solar energy to move a vehicle it'd be more efficient to charge a battery via a PV panel than to use the energy to create alcohol via a solar still. Just my opinion.
     
  15. Ojo

    Ojo Junior Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Sugar cane will regrow and the sugar is easier to extract. and the sugar content varies in both. Beets grow best in a tempurate climate and cane does better in a tropical climate.

    In the right climate the cane will grow in 12 months and, when cut, will re-grow in another 12 months provided the roots are undisturbed.
    https://www.sucrose.com/learn.html

    Sugar beet is a large pale brown root crop similar to the parsnip, and has a sugar content of about 17% when it is harvested. It grows in the temperate climate of Europe and North America.

    When the cane is harvested it has a sugar content of about 12%. The roots are left in the ground as they will eventually sprout and grow to form the next crop.
    https://www.britishsugar.co.uk/RVE759fc5 ... c2d,,.aspx

    sugar cane, which is grown extensively in Brazil, India, Thailand, and Australia. Sugar cane is a crop that requires a nice topical or sub tropical climate to grow well, and these countries all boast such climates.
    https://www.vhpsugar.com/very-raw-sugar/

    another book on alcohol production
    https://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_lib ... l_ToC.html
     
  16. ho-hum

    ho-hum New Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    I think that something that should be considered here is; what you can you for yourself. Of note, the world's hydrocarbon fuel providers will ALWAYS point out the environmental/economic downfalls of producing your own fuels.

    Do not get involved, seriously, in this debate. You will probably lose, feel disollusioned and lack motivation to 'be independent'. This works for them, it 'supports' their research.
    Think about it, if you could drill a 6'' hole in your backyard and have other people do the work and pay you squillions a year - you might well do it.

    There have always been 2 problems with 'oil'. Firstly, it was easy to find. Secondly, pumping an oilwell was always going to be your cheapest cost. Other folks paid for the research and refining. Can you imagine being a mango/banana farmer whereby someone else paid all of your costs and research?

    cheers,
     
  17. kiko

    kiko Junior Member

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  18. cindy000

    cindy000 New Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    Although fossil fuels have become the dominant energy resource for the modern world, alcohol has been used as a fuel throughout history. The first four aliphatic alcohols (methanol, ethanol, propanol, and butanol) are of interest as fuels because they can be synthesized biologically, and they have characteristics which allow them to be used in current engines. One advantage shared by all four alcohols is octane rating.
    -----------------------------------------------
    Cindy

    Alcoholism Treatment
     
  19. adabc

    adabc New Member

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    Re: No Need to Buy Petrol! Make Alcohol!

    It improves your permaculture setup so much we would be mad not to do it, and I know youre all as angry and hurt by the killing and war which these bastards initiate to profiteer. I thought that it was a necessity for us to live our comfortable lives and now I find that it was only necessary for the oil men for us to consume their toxic waste and in fact alcohol is traditionally (Model T Ford ran on it) and in other countries (Brazil) is the fuel of choice.
    ------------------------------------------------------------
    https://www.alcoholtreatmentclinics.com
     
  20. Michaelangelica

    Michaelangelica Junior Member

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    Anyone doing any distilling of any kind?
    [video=youtube;g_WKT3UXan4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_WKT3UXan4[/video]


    [video=youtube;n9nld-bswHU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9nld-bswHU[/video]
     

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