Is there ever a lot to catch up on! So many things have changed since the 80’s when the book was written. Back then we were outlaws just for making alcohol, much less using it. There really wasn’t any alcohol you could economically buy for fuel, you had to make your own before you could even begin to experiment with your car. Oil companies were even fighting to prevent addition of 10% alcohol to gasoline much less using alcohol as a straight fuel. Cars had carburetors and only a few had that newfangled fuel injection.

So some problems are much easier to deal with now and in other ways we have new hurdles. Decades of disinformation disseminated by Big Oil, such as the Food Vs. Fuel myth and the Takes-More-Energy-to-Make-Than-You-Get-Back myth have infiltrated our culture in the last twenty years. Our main bureaucratic adversary nowadays isn’t the ATF (alcohol tobacco and firearms) but the EPA and Cal Air Resources Board, making it difficult to legally convert your own car if you don’t want to buy a new flexible-fuel vehicle.

As in the past we are working to both figure out how to get some things legalized while doing the tough research to figure out the loopholes to exploit in the meantime.

For instance, the ARB is currently holding up E85 stations in California saying that no one has certified gas station dispensing equipment for alcohol fuel. This is silly because equipment has been certified for methanol use, which is far more corrosive than Ethanol. Also what about all the current Union 76 gas using 10% alcohol? We dug into the regulations and found that the reason why they think they can regulate E85 is because it has 15% petroleum products and has a Reid Vapor Pressure of over 4 pounds. We have been investigating other denaturing formulas, which are petroleum free, and if we use one of them such as 5% ethyl ether replacing the 15% gasoline we are exempt from regulation because ethyl ether is made from alcohol not petroleum! Much to their chagrin, the ARB had to confirm in writing to us that they have no right to regulate us with this formulation.

On the conversion front, one of our investors, Carson Blanton, has already converted his chainsaw, a 1965 168cc two-stroke trail bike, and his generator to run on alcohol. Several other smaller engines are in the works.

You might ask, “Well Dave if you convert all this stuff where are you getting the alcohol?” Carson Blanton, the investor who I mentioned above, just jumped in with both feet and bought a fuel delivery truck. He’s getting himself licensed to drive it and he will go to either LA or Oregon to get a 2500-gallon load of alcohol to bring back. We have found an inexpensive tank setup to purchase so we can have alcohol here in Santa Cruz. We will distribute fuel from a 1000-gallon tank so we can get started in a small way. We will have alcohol to do the conversions this way too. Carson is willing to do some delivery to others as well while he gets his Nevada County coop going.

Car conversion is the biggest new area to address and we are making steady progress on updating this information. Fuel injection systems are turning out to be an area where street and track racers have been developing ways of exercising full control of modern vehicles. The amount of control possible using new programmable automotive computers instead of the car’s stock computer has been used to configure both gasoline and alcohol-powered racecars for some time now. It’s looking far easier to work with modern fuel injection than the carburetors of yesteryear. In fact modern FFV’s, which can run on both fuels, are mainly a product of SOFTWARE and not much in the way of devices.

I visited EFI technology in LA about this. They are engineers that design new fuel injection systems from the ground up. They gave me a lot of insight into what is possible nowadays. There are now several companies making units we will be reviewing for the book that can do the job of efficiently converting engines. Over the Fall/Winter we hope to convert two or three vehicles, depending on funding, with these devices and photograph the process for use in the book.

Dave with Marty Andreas of ADM.

Two months ago I went on a red carpet tour of the Archer Daniels Midland plant in Decatur, Illinois. I not only got to see the plant but also interviewed several vice-presidents and a variety of plant staff. We toured their hydroponics facility, their vegetable producing greenhouses, and even saw some of the new experimental shrimp farms they were developing. Lots of good green design in the plant including all non-pesticide control of insects, delivering their fish to markets live in trucks running on Biodiesel, and recycling all of the plant’s waste water in their productive greenhouse. Some of the intelligent engineering at this plant would make William McDonaugh or Paul Hawken drool. For instance the who 200 acre plant is so good at recycling and reusing “wastes” that they don’t even have a sewer line leaving the property. Of course we took tons of photos and it will make a nice part of the chapter on Biorefining.

Hybrid Egyptian/Israeli Tilapia being raised on by-products of corn and soybean processing in tanks at ADM.