Beer Waste Becomes Ethanol
Filed Under: green automotive technology, Green Technology on August 8, 2009
How do you take beer production and make it environmentally friendly? Besides making people happy with good brew, that is.
You team up with GreenHouse in California and the E-Fuel MicroFueler. That’s how.
Karl Strauss Brewing in Sand Diego, California is working with the GreenHouse Development Pilot Program to convert the waste yeast from beer making into ethanol. The yeast will be distributed throughout California to those homes and businesses that have the E-Fuel MicroFueler, which converts the yeast into ethanol.
The MicroFueler itself is a pretty remarkable little unit too. It uses about 3kW of electricity to produce a gallon of E-Fuel 100 (or E100, 100% ethanol). This can be mixed with gasoline for vehicles, burned on its own for various applications, etc.
The GreenHouse program is in Southern California (for now) and will spread as it grows and is perfected. This program is looking for sources like Karl Strauss Brewing to get the basis for fuel from for the MicroFueler. Customers who purchase the MicroFueler get delivery, setup, servicing, etc. of the units and access to the GreenHouse sources for the basis to make the fuel for them.
The MicroFueler began shipping in July to customers in Southern California. Their first customer was the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, California, which uses the unit to process their own waste yeast into etahnol for their brewery vehicles.
The MicroFueler stations are small, efficient, and cost only about $10,000 to purchase (before federal or state rebates). An optional “GridBuster” electrical generator can be added to burn the fuel to produce electricity as well.
The units are obviously not zero-emissions nor are they meant to be. The idea is to provide a way to use waste products already being dumped into our garbage facilities and make petroleum-replacing fuels from them. This may not be a permanent solution to the problem, but it’s an innovative stop-gap that has a lot of promise for the foreseeable future as we move away from fossil fuels and on to other options.
You can find out more about the MicroFueler concept at E-Fuel’s website.
