Now this is definitely on my shopping list…….

With petrol rapidly becoming a luxury item, the EFuel100 MicroFueler might be just the ticket. You just set this up next to your garage, plug into 110 or 220 volts, route to a waste-water drain, add sugar, yeast and water and in a couple of days you pump ethanol into your tank at a cost of about £0.50p per gallon. It makes 5 gallons per day. Hmm …

The MicroFueler is about £4,995, given the current exchange rate - but in the USA federal tax credits can cut the price to $6,998. £8 buys yeast for 560 gallons of ethanol, each gallon requires 4 gallons of water. In the USA you need a permit from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms to make the stuff and you can’t run E100 in your motorcycle or car, it’s illegal for some reason, so you put in some petrol at your local station then drive home and top up from your ethanol pump to make E85 or thereabouts. There is also a distillation only mode which you use to recover ethanol from discarded liquor and beer. (Who the hell discards beer?) This is crazy cool.

E-Fuel Corporation makes this little refinery which will begin shipping at the end of the year though you can pre order now. Maybe it’s just me but if this works as well as described, I think they’ll sell a ton of these. VERY cool!

http://www.efuel100.com/default.aspx

This entry was posted on 09/05/2008 at 03:08 pm and is filed under Editorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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