Hey, I was wondering if anyone could buy or grow corn and turn it into ethanol at home using cheap tools at home? If this is not possible could you please enlighten me on the process and explain it thoroughly?

Just do a Yahoo search for "making ethanol" and you'll find thousands of pages on the subject. I have no interest myself(since I don't drive, and that's due to choice, not age) but I skipped though a couple of the pages and it looks fairly simple.

Vas

A lot of people make ethanol out of corn at home, but usually to drink not drive.

You can find more about turning corn in ethanol by searching in some brazilian sites about it.

We use it in our cars since the 70's and nowadays almost every new car produced here can use both gas and ethanol


I Hope it helps you!

you still have to power the compressor to fill the tanks. takes energy to make the electricity, plus limited range. might be good for large cities but can only go 50k before empty

Originally posted by supay


It's a shame that the oil companies will never let this car go out in the streets

Hogwash they are death traps. No air bags, no padded dashes, very poor design. Hell if hit by a Volkswagen they would be toast.

you're better off using wood chips as your source for alcohol. every pulp mill in the usa could be making 10's of millions of gallons a day. the pulp mill that closed in bellingham washington made 20k gallons of 200 proof a day and that was from a mill that did only 700 tons of pulp a day. they used the simple yeast you get from the store in the fermentation process. scale that up to ones that run 4000 tons a day and you into some very large quantities of alcohol. how many pulp mills does the usa have? quite a few here in washington state

currently pulp mills burn the lignin and surgars in boilers to make steam but they could just as well be making alcohol out of the surgars from wood. the lignin could also be used to make alcohol but would take more than a simple fermentation process