Small-scale ethanol production plant

Floyd Butterfield, in his research facility in Paso Robles, won an award in 1981 for a small plant that made ethanol from alcohol. Now he’s working to build trash-to-fuel plants in the Midwest and ethanol makers for personal use.

ETHANOL FUEL

• What it is: Ethyl alcohol, the same type of alcohol found in alcoholic drinks.

• Uses: As a biofuel alternative to gasoline.

• How it’s made: Mass-produced by fermentation of sugar from corn or sugar cane.

• Can I run my car on it? Not yet. Today’s auto engines can handle gas mixed with up to 10 percent ethanol. Autos running on 100 percent ethanol fuel are found in Brazil.

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Floyd Butterfield was ahead of today’s need for alternative energy sources when he built a small Paso Robles plant that would produce fuel from alcohol — in 1981.

But not until recently, as gas prices started creeping up, has Butterfield’s contest-winning design for a small-scale ethanol production plant garnered worldwide attention.

The North County man is now designing and consulting for two innovative ethanol-based businesses. One includes production of four small-scale gas-from-trash plants in the Midwest, and another could bring ethanol production into your own backyard.

“To me, the writing on the wall for the oil business has been there for 20 years. It’s going to slowly get more and more expensive because the resource is disappearing. It makes sense to me that we cannot run the world’s economies on a resource that’s finite,” said Butterfield...

As a young geophysicist, Butterfield worked in water exploration for several years after earning a graduate degree from Colorado’s School of Mines. When he tired of the constant travel, he came home to Paso Robles and tried to think of a business idea.

The 1980 gas crisis fueled his thoughts. Prices at the pump had skyrocketed, not unlike today, and rationing had been instituted. He decided to build a small plant that would make fuel from alcohol.

With backing from Santa Ynez investor Stuart Gildred, Butterfield designed an ethanol plant and built it on property on North River Road between Paso Robles and San Miguel. The design won a statewide competition, but production at the plant lasted only three years.

“We couldn’t make any money,” he recalled, because once prices at the pump stabilized, people were no longer interested in ethanol.

The gas crisis faded and prices went back down. People stopped talking about needing oil alternatives. Butterfield went into farming and grew lima beans and carrots. The plant eventually was abandoned.

How it works

Making fuel from foodstuff is similar to wine production, Butterfield explained. The key ingredient is starchy waste foods. The fuel plants on which Butterfield is working in the Midwest will start with outdated soda pop, old bread, tortillas, cereals, or waste grains or sugar from food manufacturing companies.

A process of fermentation and distillation follows. Chemical processes along the way create a vapor gas that becomes liquid ethanol.

Major U. S. ethanol producers make 100 million gallons a year. The plants Butterfield is working on will be much smaller, between half a million to 5 million gallons annually.

Some gas stations sell fuel that is up to 10 percent ethanol now, usually for a slightly lower price than regular gasoline. Some cities in the U. S. have mandated that all gas stations use ethanol-blended gas.

Butterfield’s other job takes the ethanol production process straight to the consumer. He has developed a $10,000 home-based machine for producing gas. The E-Fuel 100 Microfueler machine, about the size of a standard refrigerator with a washing machine attached, produces up to 35 gallons of ethanol a week. In theory, Butterfield says, consumers would be able to make enough fuel at home to power their cars and other gas-powered things and could stockpile extra for use when needed. Of course, car engines would need to have the ability to run on 100 percent ethanol fuel.

“Our vision is it will be a lot like doing a load of laundry. Instead of putting clothes in, you’ll put in feed stock, close the lid, press a button, a few days later you have gallons of ethanol,” he explained.

The machine has a pump system so that the fuel it produces can be put directly into cars...

“Henry Ford started the automobile revolution using ethanol, predicting that this renewable and accessible fuel would become the ‘fuel of the future,’ ” he said during the May launch of the Microfueler. “If not for the Prohibition laws in the 1920s and the subsequent rise of the oil industry, ethanol may never have lost its public appeal. E-Fuel will deliver on Ford’s prediction and enable consumers to bypass the costly oil infrastructure and their reliance on fossil fuels.”...

“I thought in 1980 the world was running out of oil. All the signs were there,” he said. “That was true back then, it’s just we were able to stave it off for 25 years. Now we can’t.”