Is anyone making a small business of their stills?

[sgreger1]

I am intirested in creating a small ethanol production company and am wondering if any of you have found buyers for ethanol you've produced or the DDG's left as a byproduct. Has anyone made a small business of this and if so, who are you customers, who buys this, what type of customer are you marketing it to? I live in the Sanf Fernando Valley in CA and am wondering if there is a market for this.


I appreciate anyone who shares some of their business idea with me.




NOTE: When I say small company I mean buying some real estate somewhere that I can legally open up a couple of stills and then marketing it to a certain target group, however I am not sure who is buying ethanol at this time or what they are paying, curiouse if anyone has had any success with this.



I know most gas companies already have their hands in it, im wondering if there is anyone else who has a use for it, what else can it be used for, is there anything that runs just on ethanol like lawnmowers or chainsaws or anything?

[Dnderhead]

I think the gas/oil companies have that tied up, unless you are making for your self / farm fuel.

[dixiedrifter]

Not trying to discourage you, but ealing with taxes and governmental red tape is a nightmare when it comes to legal ethanol production.

The revenoors want their $25 or so in tax for every proof gallon... and the way they think the tax is due as soon as the drop comes out the end of the condenser. Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but itfor the most part its true... they are really really anal about how you handle your product lest they lose some precious tax dollars.

I might be talking out my ass, but with a federal firearms license you give up your right to privacy... I think the same goes for an ethanol distillery. Basically they have the right to enter and search your property at any time of day or night without a warrant and do whatever they please. Yup, its happened to a guy I know with a FFL... they came at 5pm in the afternoon in full tactical gear and machine guns and searched his house.

[sgreger1]

Dixie drifter,

Wow thats a tottally sucky story about your friend but I understand because its part of the ATF type jurisdiction, plus DOE etc. I am hard pressed to believe they want 25$ per gallon since no liquid sells for close to 25$ per gallon so all these ethanol plants producing the nations 11billion gallons of ethanol a year would be in quite a deficit. Still it seems that there is no one who would be wanting to by ethanol froma small producer anyways.

Let me know if anyone else managed to make money with thier still somehow.

[Ugly]

What he means by 25 a gallon is what gov would get were the gallon sold for booze. They obviously don't get that on fuel.

[dixiedrifter]

Ok here is the deal.

To make 10 gallons of PGA or fuel alcohol, you need to ferment roughly 100 gallons of corn. Scale that up to tanker truck quantities, and your looking at 50,000 gallons that must be cooked, fermented, distilled, dried, and what not.

What it boils down to, pun intended, is that for the average distiller here on their own to get anywhere near what one of the big ethanol producers churns out in an hour over the course of a years time, it would be a logistical nightmare.

[Wai‘ona]

The current US Federal tax rate on distilled spirits for consumption is $13 per proof-gallon.

[TopDog]

How big do you have to be to compete with the "Big Guys"? What percentage alcohol is best for fuel?

[Dnderhead]

If your making for your self 80% will work if your running straight alcohol, if mixing with gas it needs to be 99%'
straight alcohol (the last I knew) is against the law for highway use.

[zymos]

The current US Federal tax rate on distilled spirits for consumption is $13 per proof-gallon.

$13.50 actually, but since this thread is about ethanol for fuel, there is actually a tax CREDIT for making the stuff!

[Dnderhead]

Another problem some has run into, is that the oil companies wont sell straight gas, you whould have to use e10,
most gas stations sell several hundred gallons a day . it whould take a bigger still than Iv ever run.
a 500 gallon still whould produce about 100 gallon alcohol at the most. you whould have to run 24/7 just to
keep up with one station.

[Ugly]

Building large output stills is the easy part, really. Nothing fancy and black iron is fine for a fuel still when the wash is ph balanced coming into them. Well casing works great as a column.

The hard part is fermenting enough stuff to keep them fed... big difference between a 200l wash and a 4000l wash.

[truckbed]

Not trying to discourage you, but ealing with taxes and governmental red tape is a nightmare when it comes to legal ethanol production.

The revenoors want their $25 or so in tax for every proof gallon... and the way they think the tax is due as soon as the drop comes out the end of the condenser. Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but itfor the most part its true... they are really really anal about how you handle your product lest they lose some precious tax dollars.

I might be talking out my ass, but with a federal firearms license you give up your right to privacy... I think the same goes for an ethanol distillery. Basically they have the right to enter and search your property at any time of day or night without a warrant and do whatever they please. Yup, its happened to a guy I know with a FFL... they came at 5pm in the afternoon in full tactical gear and machine guns and searched his house.

if he didnt put his house address down as the "premises for conducting business" they wouldnt have gone there... but i do understand lots of people with an ffl do not have a storefront... like me.

[pounsfos]

my mate uses my alcahol in his bike sometimes at the track, he waters it down to 80% and runs it straight

(it has been tuned for alcahol, he likes some water in their to keep the turbo cool, says it helps heaps)

on ecomodder.com

someone got sick of running e85 in his car so he started filtering it all off and running straight petroleum in his car, and even though he now technically had less fuel in his car (as he has syphoned off the ethanol) his fuel economy increased!!!

as well all know, ethanol has a lower energy content than petrol so you have to use more of it to get the same result,

i will see if i can find the thread sometime

[Bushman]

sgreger1, search around there are better forums for making and selling ethonal for fuel.

[rad14701]

someone got sick of running e85 in his car so he started filtering it all off and running straight petroleum in his car, and even though he now technically had less fuel in his car (as he has syphoned off the ethanol) his fuel economy increased!!!

as well all know, ethanol has a lower energy content than petrol so you have to use more of it to get the same result,

i will see if i can find the thread sometime

As for the better mileage with gasoline than ethanol, that would be expected... Nobody ever said that ethanol based fuel provided better mileage... E85 gets almost 25% poorer mileage than straight gasoline because it takes more fuel to do the same amount of work... This is a common yet little known fact that is often overlooked when the use of ethanol as fuel is discussed...

[ahto]

rad14701 is right. Avarage 4 cylinder European or Japanese EFI gasoline car converted to E85 with electronic "controller" kit gets about 25% overconsumption compare to RON 95 gasoline. But E85 is so much better fuel for ICE that some "worm holes" are available.
You can use quite lean mixture when cruising (low rpm and engine load) without torque/power loss and exhaust temperature elevation.
There are kits in Europa available with lambda channel emulation (narrow and wide band!) which drop overconsumption from 25% closer to 15% only. At high rpm and engine load you still have all E85 power and torque available.

[thumper50]

Todays fuels that have alcohol in them, have lower octane in the fuel before the alcohol is added to INCREASE the octane to 87. If you were to take the alcohol out of the fuel, it would not run good because the alcohol is the octane booster in the fuel! Ever notice that most cheap octane boosters in the parts stores are "Ethanol"?
Anyway, it's easy to get the ethanol out of the gasoline but it is too weak of an octane (78-82) to run properly.

[King Of Hearts]

Alcohol is used in a lot of products but I think it has to be very high percent. A distillery just had an explosion making it. I would stick to drinkable product and start small.

[tvdawgs]

not sure where this fits in but we in the last few years had a multi million dollar company come into our area and build an ethanol plant of which the city put in for half the bill and got stuck with, they were in production for maybe 6 months. It was a prime location farms all around for corn and right beside a railroad. Id say maybe a 3 million dollar or so facility that is sitting vacant as we speak and has done so for about a year now. I guess they couldnt get the price they wanted for the corn that they wanted and the farmers were making more selling it to feed mills than they were to the ethanol plant. It would be a good investment for a alcohol production facility but as of now the demand for e-85 isnt there yet.

[Koula]

There's a website in the US selling organic ethanol. They seem to have a target market or natural remedy therapists, herbalists, alchemists. I certainly can't imagine they're part of a large company, therefore I'd be very curious to know how they're doing this legally, with what equipment, etc. Any insights would be much appreciated. Regardless of how they're doing this, it's definitely an example of something that probably started off as a hobby and evolved organically into a successful small business. They can be found by searching for "organic ethanol", seems to be the first result every time (I use duckduckgo.com as a search engine).

[knightmare1015]

The only ones that will give you any grief in starting an ethanol refinery is the state. You need to find and either buy or lease property first because the federal and state licenses require a certified copy of either the property deed and/or lease agreement for the licensing process. They'll also want a copy of your driver's license (front and back) and since you'll be applying for a large AFP (alcohol fuel producer) license, they'll also need a copy of the bond which is required for medium and large AFP's. As far as federal inspections go, don't expect to seem them but it wouldn't surprise me if they did for a large AFP (the feds never did in my case). You'll also need to obtain a property diagram from the courthouse that shows the property lines and land marks in the surrounding area. The still will also have to be registered, if you don't have one yet use the following serial number on the application: 001. My actual license didn't cost me anything but I did have to obtain the nessecary records which cost me around $35 bucks at the local court house. Here's my Federal Distiller's License:

http://s299.photobucket.com/user/knight ... ort=2&o=67" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

The reason it says amended is because I was required to register my still. I'm also required to keep track of every run I make as well. I was told that I have to use wine gallons (which is a standard U.S. gallon) to calculate how much you make each year. I also have to fill this out and mail it in by January 30th each year:

http://www.ttb.gov/forms/f511075.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

I recently read this really good book which includes a spread sheet that was submitted by a distillery in California:

http://s299.photobucket.com/user/knight ... ort=2&o=70" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" rel="nofollow

The owner told the author that over a 12 month period, he spent right around $108,601.00 bucks. This book would be extremely useful to you because it does outline how to start up a legal distillery in the Appendix listings. I hope this helps you, best wishes in your endeavor.

[DieselGuru]

I work for a company that builds and sells ethanol distillation equipment designed for motor vehicle use, as well as biodiesel production equipment. Our ethanol production equipment is essentially what you guys do here, just on a larger scale.