How is Ethanol Made?

It takes some mechanical aptitude, but you can make your own fuel by fermenting appropriate feed stocks into 96 proof alcohol.

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by Adobestock/chokniti
For small producers, the best choices as ethanol feedstocks are crops with a lot of starch or sugar, such as corn or sugar beets.

How is ethanol made? It takes some mechanical aptitude, but you can make fuel by fermenting appropriate feed stocks into 96 proof alcohol.

What if there were a fuel that was affordable, renewable, and produced right in your own community? If you’d lived 100 years ago, you would have known all about such a fuel. It was called alcohol, and it was a clean-burning fluid generally sold as lamp fuel. Only recently have we taken a renewed look at alcohol fuel — now more commonly known as ethanol — and its potential as a domestically sourced fuel for transportation.

I’m not here to tell you about the agri-industrial agenda to produce ethanol on a massive scale. What I am going to tell you is how to make your own fuel to use in your vehicle or in other gas engines, such as a motorcycle, tiller, or lawn tractor. You can modify these gas engines to run on straight alcohol (more on engine modifications in “Run Your Car on Ethanol,” below).

If it’s produced on a small-scale, ethanol can be made from grain you grow yourself — or from a wide range of other local and sustainable feedstocks including food waste and crop culls. With a little specialized equipment and know-how, you can turn these materials into alcohol fuel, and it will cost less than you would pay at the pump for gasoline or commercially produced ethanol.

You can produce your own ethanol for an ongoing cost of less than $2 per gallon. If you grow your own corn, you can distill more than 300 gallons of ethanol from 1 acre of corn. If you drive less than 10,000 miles per year, you could produce all your own fuel from 2 acres of corn — and, granted, a lot of labor. In short, when I talk about ethanol, I’m talking about do-it-yourself fuel, and practicing local self-reliance on an individual and community scale.

  • Updated on Jan 6, 2022
  • Originally Published on Feb 23, 2010
Tagged with: Alcohol Fuel, biomass, corn, ethanol, fermentation, fuel, Grain, still
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