Would you be willing to pay $10,000 for an ethanol fuel generator?

Question

This generator would be placed in your back yard and would use sugar as its base material to generate ethanol fuel at about $ .40-50 a gallon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/technology/27proto.html?ref=science

Answer 1

You can build a still for about $100 bucks. Quality control is an issue; even with a good feedback mechanism (add a few hundred bucks) you can't do better than 196 proof.

$10000 is way too much. Even with the price of gasoline soaring, $10000 plus cost of materials and energy for heat will buy several years worth of gasoline.

Answer 2

why spend $10k to build a still when you can do it for about $1k? plans from mother earth news are available to do just that.

Answer 3

I wouldn't buy it, because I don't believe ethanol is the car fuel of the future. My bet is on either electricity from renewable sources, or biodiesel made from non-food biomass.

Answer 4

Wow. Only $10,000?!  What a bargain.

Answer 5

No, but I'd pay $1500 for one.

Answer 6

no

Answer 7

First, the article says $1.00/gal not $0.40-0.50.  Secondly, you need to factor in the cost of equipment.  Simply dividing the $10,000 by the number of gallons of ethanol you produce over its life is not sufficient.  You must also add the time cost of money.  All in all, I don't see this being an economically viable approach, so no, I would not be willing to pay $10,000 for it.

Answer 8

That is also called a still and can be built for a whole lot less.  You have never worked near moonshiners, have you?

The article cited makes a LOT of suppositions, including something like a blanket license to allow people to manufacture 'pure' alcohol and run vehicles on it and the general importation of inedible sugars, which will inevitably drive up their prices.  This will take major redesign of the internal-combustion engine as currently constituted because the fuel is also used to convey protective additives to moving parts such as the valves.

Something like this will happen, but the article about it is overly optimistic and, I feel, severely understates the associated costs.

Answer 9

My grandpaw was building these 70 years ago, and I hate to tell you but with the cost of sugar, it is no where near .40-50 a gallon.

Course we just called it the still, not some fancy term like ethanol fuel  generator.