Fuel your car with your hobby :)

[Alex Franke]

Gather up your sawdust, ferment it with termite guts, and then add it to your gas tank. Pretty cool...

http://news.zdnet.com/2422-13748_22-191798.html

[dbhost]

Nice thought. But they are talking up straight ethanol. They take the little buggers and make them convert plant fibers into sugars that in turn are fed to yeast, which converts the sugars into alcohol. Which is GREAT if you have a vehicle that can handle alcohol. VERY few vehicles can handle a 100% alcohol fuel, and there are some SERIOUS safety / fuel consumption issues with Alcohol. (You ever seen an alcohol fire?)

I wish I could find the article right now, but there are companies working on converting similar bio-waste into a chemically compatible copy of crude oil, which in turn can be converted into Gasoline, Diesel, Kerosene, etc...

And this can be done at a similar cost to ethanol conversion.

[Russianwolf]

I think they are actually making moonshine. Seriously. Moonshine can be made from pretty much any organic vegtable matter and is pure ethanol once fermented. They will have to add something to make it non-potable, but otherwise I think they are running a big still.

[dbhost]

I think they may have misstated what they produce. If it is WOOD FIBER based alcohol, it is METHANOL, and not ETHANOL (which is produced from fruits and grains and is quite drinkable).

Methanol
Ethanol

Modern automobile gasoline in most regions includes a 15% concentration of ethanol (E-15), to oxygenate the fuel in an effort to make older cars burn cleaner. The side effect of this is typical fuel economy suffers dramatically... The limit of 15% is to reduce damage to the aluminum used in modern engines.