Our bodies quickly make energy out of
alcohol. Our engines can do the same thing. Of course, our engines will
not go blind or die because of small amounts of contaminants in the batch,
so we don’t need to be quite as careful as the big distilleries that make
drinking alcohol.
The first fuel used in the internal
combustion engine was alcohol. Shortly after the internal combustion
engine was invented petroleum distillation was discovered. At that time
gasoline was much cheaper to produce than alcohol, there was little
concern over air pollution and oil supplies were thought to be
inexhaustible. Only a few foresighted people realized the disadvantage of
using a fuel that had to be searched for and mined from underground. Henry
Ford was one of these. He fought long and hard for the use of alcohol as
fuel.
OVERVIEW OF ALCOHOL PRODUCTION
Making alcohol is not far removed from
chores farmers are used to. What we are doing is growing a yeast crop for
the alcohol it produces. Grain is ground to make the starches more
available. Enzymes are then added to break the starch down to sugars.
These are the same types of enzymes that are found in saliva. The sugar
is then fed to yeast plants that digest the sugar and water and produce
alcohol and carbon dioxide (along with more little yeast organisms.) The
yeast finally starves to death or kills itself off by overpopulation and
too much alcohol. We then remove the liquid, which is alcohol and water,
and distill it. The solids - the protein that was in the grain and the
dead yeast organisms - are fed to animals as a protein supplement.
Substrates
The substrate is the material from
which the alcohol is made. If you were just starting to farm, without any
land or equipment, you would go out and look for land that would grow the
crops you were interested in, and that you could afford. Rich, black
bottom-land will grow more than rocky, yellow hillsides. Carbohydrates
are what make an alcohol crop. Sugar and starch are carbohydrates. Crops
with more carbohydrates will produce more alcohol per pound. Table I-1
gives the amount of alcohol that can be produced from several different
crops.
If you are buying the substrate,
calculate the cost of the alcohol by dividing the cost per unit by the
number of gallons that unit will produce. For example, lets say you want
to produce alcohol from pure cane sugar and you can get that sugar at $12
per 100 pounds. You can make 6.92 gallons of alcohol from that sugar so
the cost would be $1.63 per gallon of alcohol. If you were buying wheat
at $4.50 a bushel and could make 2.56 gallons of alcohol from that wheat
the substrate cost of the gallon of alcohol would be $1.75.
If you are growing the crop yourself,
the more carbohydrates per acre, the more alcohol per acre would result.
If a crop will produce many gallons of alcohol per bushel, but will only
produce a few bushels per acre, or if it has a very high production cost,
it might be better to choose another substrate. To figure the amount of
alcohol per acre multiply the average production per acre by the amount of
alcohol that crop can produce. (Make sure the units are the same.) In
order to figure the cost of the substrate for each gallon of alcohol
divide the cost of production per acre by the number of gallons that can
be produced from the substrate grown on that acre. For example, if you
can grow 65 bushels per acre of wheat, which will produce 2.56 gallons of
alcohol per bushel, the yield will be 166.4 gallons per acre. At a
production cost of $250 per acre the substrate will cost $1.50 per gallon.
There are several things to consider
when deciding what substrate to use. In addition to expense, you should
consider how dependable the crop is in your area, whether the equipment is
available to plant, care for and harvest the crop, whether you can store
it until you are ready to use it and whether you have the equipment to
prepare it. Will you use the culls from your potato or fruit crops? Will
you plant what would once have been your set-aside acres into grain? Will
you use different crops at different times of the year? Each operation is
different and you must decide for yourself what is best.
There is a residue left over after the
alcohol is made that is two to four times as rich in protein as the
material going in. Certain other nutrients are concentrated also. With
some substrates this is a high quality, high protein animal food. With
others, it is not usable. Could you formulate a supplement for your
animals that would provide an amino acid balance?
