Community Forum For "Alcohol Can Be A Gas" Readers
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Aaron Kline
- 42, Male
- Selmer, TN
- United States
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- What do you have to say about Dave's book "Alcohol Can Be A Gas"?
- I got the book from the library yesterday and I can't put it down. It is one of the most intriguing books that I have ever read.
- About Me:
- I live in a Christian community of about 300 people and we are good friends with a missionary to Mexico. He asked me to look into ethanol production for him and that is how I got hooked! I am hoping to start a small business making ethanol for my community and others in the area. For my friend in Mexico, we are looking into harvesting Agave cactus to use in his operation there.
- I am located in:
- Selmer, TN
- Website:
- http://www.rosecreekvillage.com
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My husband and I are in north central Alabama and we haven't even received the book yet, but we're definitely interested. We have about fifteen acres and we're looking for something productive to do with it without being farmers....we're both retired and that's a bit labor-intensive for us.
I'm looking into the possibility of using switchgrass for fuel right now....it's drought and flood tolerant and easy to grow. Wayne will have to read Blume's book thoroughly and do a lot of research before he'll be willing to commit, and he'd like to see someone's working operation first, too. Maybe you'll be up and running by the time we're ready to move on, and we can drive over to see what you're doing.
I can't wait to get that book!
Wayne and Judy
Hey there. I would like to go but right now it's up in the air. My production schedule at work is crazy & I just lost 2 guys to "the grass is greener..." so I have to do their work as well as my own until I can find replacments. Memphis is slim pickings for decent machinists.
We are working primarily with apples. Reason: they're free. One of the partners has an old, neglected orchard on his property. It produces, but not good enough to market. We will do some pruning, fertilizing and general clean up this spring in order to boost output. I expect we will process about 20,000 lbs this year. As for output, figure you get about 10-12% etoh from any given volume of fermented juice. So a 55-gal barrel will yield about 5.5 -6.5 gallons of etoh.
In addition, a partner wants to try potatoes. Probably will just be enough to run a batch or two to test the process. I would like to add Jerusalem Artichokes but finding fairly priced seed stock is proving hard.
We currently have a 3.5" still modeled on the Charles 803 design. I run it without the automatic control valve (assuming you know about this) only because the bugger costs $200+. Contrary to common advice the still is steel. Many will steer you away from this but they have obviously not tried it. It works fine. However.....it does rust and will need to be rebuilt sometime in the future. Considering the pipe is cheap salvage grade electrical conduit I don't mind. The price is right and I have time to do it in the off-season.
Our first year 2008 was a trial and we cobbled together much of the process. The biggest problem was mashing the apples. I mounted a simple garbage disposal to a small sink basin and placed it over a 55gal barrel on wood blocks. It had plenty of power to grind apples as fast as you could toss them in, but it overheated frequently. This year we have upgraded to an extremely heavy duty compost grinder, not a chipper. It runs off a 1.5hp motor which should be plenty. We are also building a press to extract the juice. It will be powered by a simple 20 ton hydraulic cylinder pressing inside a 24" heavy steel pipe mounted to some sort of catchment basin that we still need to figure out.
We found that yes, you can ferment the mashed apples then extract the juice to boil off the etoh, but we want to instead first extract the juice then ferment. This will leave us with nice clean, sediment free liquid to work with and much less bulk during the ferment stage.
We used plastic 55 gal barrels to ferment in. They worked fine. This year we'll do the same but I may add a couple of steel barrels as a test. They are literally free out here in Seattle.
Last year we boiled the fermented juice (wine?) in an old water heater over a wood fire. It worked exceptionally well and again the price was right....free. The tank was stood upright on a grate over the small fire that was banked so the flame only touched the tank bottom. The tank is a gas version so it has a flue up the middle. This acts as a chimney and helps heat the liquid. This year I hope to use the same heater to simplly boil water into steam. The steam will then be piped to a separate barrel (55 gal) where it will heat the juice to the required 175°+. This will be piped to the still column. The reason for this is better control over the heat. A wood fire is hard to control. If you get too much heat going into your boil it will overwhelm the still column, requiring lots of cooling water in the condensation section or even lost etoh vapor. With a steam setup I can simple throttle back the heat with a simple ball valve, letting the excess heat escape the boiler as water vapor.
We will also add a stripping column to the one we now use which functions both as a stripper and a finisher. The difference is that a stripper can be run fast. There is little or no reflux action. The etoh vapor enters, rises to the top cooling as it goes, and is then condensed into etoh leaving a fair amount of the water behind. This low proof liquid is then piped into the finish column which is fully packed with copper mesh. Here it is refluxed into high proof etoh.
Why not do it all in one column? Time. We can quickly run a fresh batch of wine and store the low proof etoh without fear of the wine going all the way into vinegar. While you can add what's called Cambden Tablets to the wine to kill off the process and protect it, doing so just adds more chemicals that may or may not work. The finish distilling can then be done as time permits.
One final improvement that I'll play with if time permits is a waste motor oil burner. It's possible to either build from scratch a drip system or to modify a residential type furnace pump/blower unit to use this stuff. Again the reason is cost. We have lots of this oil (farm ops) that's just looking for disposal. Cutting, hauling splitting firewood for both home, shop and now still gets old fast and costly.
If you decide to use apples or fruit I can pass along our enzyme & yeast dosing quantities.
I'll stop there and see if you have any questions. Please feel free to ask.
~Dennis
So, this first year I and a couple of other guys are testing the production process. We have built a still, obtained a license and successfully brewed&distilled a large batch of apples. Over the coming year we will be working on improvements. Cleaning up/pruning our orchard, building a hydraulic press, apple grinder, and modifying the still. Our individual investments in terms of time, money and materials are being tracked in a spreadsheet. Our inputs will determine our share of the ethanol.
Currently we are working under a gentlemens agreement without a formal co-op organization. If we hold it together over this next season then we will know we have what it takes to organize for the long term. When that day comes I will followup with a local USDA field rep who specializes in forming co-ops. There is one here who works through Washington State Univ. and he has agreed to help. I encourage you to investigate the same in your area. We will also be chatting up our project with others in the immediate locale and enlisting them if they're inclined.
Our records are being maintained with the aid of Google Docs and some are then linked to a Google Sites website under the name Fruitland Ethanol Fuel Co-op. It's all free :). Records are important if for no other reason than they prevent inevitable arguments over shares.
All in all I have found that focusing on building an organization first is often a complete waste of time. It is much better to focus on binding a group of people together with a common purpose then organize them as a co-op, non-profit, LLC, etc. Otherwise you find yourself in the classic situation of having a solution that's looking for a problem.
Good luck on your project and I hope you'll post progress reports, as I will.
~Dennis