Ethanol For The Car
Tullahoma, tennessee: the still standard equipment of any illegal liquor distiller has a shot at becoming the
must-have accessory of penny-pinching motorists.
An upstart tullahoma business is marketing stills that can be set up as private distilleries making
ethanol 190 proof grain alcohol out of fermented starchy crops such as corn, apples or sugarcane.
The company claims the still’s output can reduce fuel costs by nearly a third from the pump price of gasoline.
Buyers of stills need a federal permit to make ethanol on private property.
In what amounts to an honour system, they are supposed to add a poison to their homemade alcohol so it is not the moonshiner’s favourite white lightning.
"we make it very clear that it is against the law to drink what comes out of it,"said shelley mcclanahan,
a spokeswoman for her family's business, dogwood energy.
Phones are ringing with orders at the business that mostly sold pellets for wood stoves before pump prices bounced high by hurricane katrina focused new attention on a modified still designed by mcclanahan's father, inventor-mechanic bill sasher.
Since word started getting out in recent weeks about sasher's still, dogwood energy has added 10 employees, mcclanahan said.
Sasher's new creekside assembly warehouse in south-central tennessee down a backwoods road, next door to a noisy rooster and less than 8 km from the distillery that makes jack daniel's whiskey has orders for about 45 assembled stills.
The company is building four or five stills a day and has sold 45 in recent weeks, more than 125 since september, to meet the demand from customers ranging from small businesses to thrifty individuals.
"you can save a lot of money. That's what this is all about,"mcclanahan said.a bushel of the fermented starch crop, mixed with yeast, water and sugar, and allowed to sit for about 2.5 days, then strained and heated to boiling, makes about 9.84 litres of ethanol, which is then added to gasoline to produce a blended fuel.
Dogwood energy says it costs about 75 cents per gallon to make ethanol at home. Adding 15% ethanol to $3 gasoline reduces the cost of a fill-up to $2.40 per gallon, mcclanahan said. A blend with 85% ethanol cuts the cost to $1.09 for a blended gallon, she said.
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