Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century | 
 enlarge | Author: David Blume
Creators: R. Buckminster Fuller, Michael Winks
Publisher: International Institute for Ecological Agriculture
Category: Book
List Price: $59.00
Buy New: $50.15
You Save: $8.85 (15%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 4116
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 640
Shipping Weight (lbs): 4.3
Dimensions (in): 10.9 x 8.5 x 1.8
ISBN: 0979043786
Dewey Decimal Number: 333
EAN: 9780979043789
ASIN: 0979043786
Publication Date: November 1, 2007
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Product Description
Alcohol Can Be a Gas! is the only comprehensive book ever written on alcohol fuel production and use for home and farm. Until now, it has been very difficult for farmers, contractors, alternative energy aficionados, those concerned about Peak Oil, and small-scale entrepreneurs to obtain good, accurate information on producing alcohol, or on converting vehicles to run on alcohol fuel. And with all the conflicting news stories about ethanol, the public finds it difficult to sort fact from fiction. This text, which has been reviewed by scientists around the world, is the definitive reference work on alcohol fuel. Alcohol Can Be A Gas! contains 640 8-1/2 by 11 pages, with 514 charts, photos, and illustrations to reinforce the information-dense text. The book is geared for the nonscientific reader, but its 473 endnotes provide the technical foundation behind the accessible prose. A 700-word glossary and a 6300-entry index extend the book's usefulness. This book is the distilled essence of the most pertinent information ever assembled in one place on alcohol fuel, the technology that can help us finally become producers of almost limitless energy, instead of extractors of finite resources. How we produce our energy from here on out will determine how we govern ourselves and how we relate to nature and the environment; it will also create a sea change in where wealth concentrates. It will determine if the future is ruled by a small number of armed dictatorships backed by military and industrial interests (a cabal author David Blume likes to refer to as MegaOilron or the Oilygarchy), or if energy, and therefore power, is held by a diffusion of democratic entities, based on their ingenuity and ability to gather a portion of their daily solar income. As Blume writes in the Introduction to Alcohol Can Be a Gas!: "Various prospective publishers argued that putting all of this material into one large volume might scare off readers who just want a recipe book of how to make alcohol. They said, 'All this history and politics is fascinating, but aren't you afraid that including it in your how-to book would scare away some buyers?' 'Put it in a separate publication,' their marketing experts said. But in the final analysis, I decided that this book should be a complete tool kit to revolutionize our transportation energy system, combining a broad, sweeping vision with intricate detail. "I spent four years working on this book with a small team of researchers. I traveled all over the United States in search of the most up-to-date information. In frozen South Dakota, I talked to Orrie Swayze and his farmer and VFW buddies who are taking on the oil companies, and to alcohol combustion engineer and alcohol aviation expert, Jim Behnken. I went to Decatur, Illinois, to see the largest alcohol plant in the U.S., Archer Daniels Midland's 200-million-gallon-per-year plant. My travels also took me to Brazil to document the world's largest alcohol fuel program. "It took over 25 years to finally get this book to you. It represents the confidence of almost 30 people who collectively loaned more than $250,000 to see this project through. It's the most comprehensive book ever written about alcohol fuel. Its production has been a massive effort that has depended on the cooperation of hundreds of people who contributed both their knowledge and, more importantly, their experiences."
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 This books helps strip away the myths of history. July 24, 2008
This book delves into the kind of information that could help us avoid making the same mistakes over and over. If it can help create awareness of how susceptible the public is to being flim-flammed by the Oil Industry experts and its sycophants imbedded throughout the government and media we could clean this mess up. The book shows that it was the oil interests who politicized energy not the author of this book.
Contrary to the specious complaints of some, this book doesn't pretend to be a "How To" book on making alcohol out of fruit... which is plain from a quick look at the table of contents. Try a brewers store. Besides it is illegal to make alcohol in any useful quantities without an expensive license...ever heard of the ATF? ...good grief
Masterpiece July 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am an environmental educator at the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm community in Summertown,Tennessee and author of Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial (1979); Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do (1990), and most recently, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, from New Society Publishers and Amazon.
Arriving in Sao Paulo, Brazil for the International Permaculture Conference in 2007, I checked the online schedule and saw that the organizers had set me down for a morning session on "making money from tree planting." Caught by surprise, I had to scramble to prepare a powerpoint and one of the ideas I thought to explore was biofuels. Conventional wisdom has it that "agrifuels" are in competition with food production and climate remediation. I dashed off an email to David Blume asking for an example of "permaculture fuels."
He replied, "Well to take a page from the book. In semiarid areas where the temperature goes no lower than 0 degrees F you can plant an overstory of mesquite to provide both 340 gallons of alcohol per acre from the pods and fuel the plant with coppiced branches from the tree. In the understory you plant perennial Opuntia (nopales) thornless cactus, and between there and the dripline and beyond you plant the starchy root crop, Buffalo Gourd, for a total yield of far over 1000 gallons per acre without irrigation."
There you have it, a polyculture for food and fuel. But what about climate change? I wrote him back, "Would you say the guild above is a net carbon sink?"
He responded, "It is absolutely a massive carbon sink. Pretty much all arid country crops put the majority of their growth underground and have a robust mycorhyzzal feeding regime. Perhaps 80+% of carbon produced in the top growth is exuded for rhizosphere associates. Mesquite is unique in that a large portion of its root burrows deep to support it with water extracted from far below. There have been recorded instances of mesquite going down 160 feet for water."
And that, in a nutshell, is Farmer Dave's permafuel thesis. That he takes several hundred pages to flesh it out, in Alcohol Can Be a Gas! Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century, is an enduring blessing for permaculturists everywhere. This six-volume set, bound into one thick paperback, is both required reading and a standard reference on a par with A Pattern Language and David Jacke's Edible Forest Gardens.
The six books contained in one are, in order, Understanding Alcohol: Visions and Solutions (including "busting the myths," polyculture and photosaturation, and Brazil's national program dissected), Making Alcohol: How to Do It (including 30 odd feedstocks from algae to whey, the sugar method, the starch method, fungal and bacterial enzymes, fuels, and distiller construction), Co-Products from Making Alcohol (animals, aquaculture, mariculture, mushrooms, methane, etc.), Using Alcohol as Fuel (carburetion, injection, small engines, flex-fuel conversions and cogeneration of heating, lighting and cooling, and typical conversions), The Business of Alcohol: Hands-On Advice (legal and economic considerations and case studies); and A Vision for the Nation (state and federal incentives, Community Supported Energy and permaculture).
Just exactly what is the appropriate role for alcohol fuels is an old, but ongoing discussion, and it has been known to get heated at times. The Tortilla Rebellion in Mexico, catastrophic overplanting of maize and soya, gene splicing by multinationals for cellulosic substrate alchemy, forest clearing worldwide -- these are serious concerns.
Recently, the U.S. Senate passed legislation to increase ethanol production by giving generous subsidies to the U.S. farm belt. The Act mandates the use of 15 billion gallons of biofuels annually by 2015 and 36 billion gallons by 2022 (up from 8.5 billion subsidized gallons now). Nearly all of this would be corn ethanol, taken from grain stocks, with the stover burned or plowed in. Beginning in 2016, the government would ask farmers to add the corn stover, along with switch grass or wood chips, to make annual increases of 3 billion gallons in "cellulosic" ethanol. This legislation passed over the opposition from Big Oil and food manufacturers, but is just the kind of massively soil-destroying, economically bankrupting, petro-addicted type of legislation that was ideal for harvesting votes in the Iowa caucuses.
By showing how ethanol can be ethically produced in combination with food, soil, carbon sequestration and other objectives for healthy system design, Blume provides a rescue remedy for our planet at a time when it could scarcely be needed more.
Loek Boonkamp, who studies agricultural trade and markets for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, estimates replacing just 10 percent of the world's current petroleum use with biofuels would consume about 30 percent of all the grain, oilseed and sugar produced in the U.S., Canada, the European Union and Brazil, not to mention a huge volume of water. Blume takes Boonkamp's argument head-on.
The US has 1500 million acres of agricultural land and uses 70 million -- about 5 percent -- for corn. Mesquite covers 70 million acres of desert land. Harvesting mesquite pods would yield more alcohol than corn without any inputs of soil, fertilizer or water. The US could achieve similar yields from the lawn clippings coming off suburbia on any given Saturday (30 million acres at last count). There are dozens of these examples in the book. Moreover, one has to consider how much of that corn produced in the US is actually used as a food, and how much is used in floor wax, plywood, crayons and other products.
But then, why use farmland at all? Why not harvest ethanol from cattails or dried seaweed? Willows and bamboo planted on berms separating long canals of cattails, with greywater, spent mash and fermentation carbon dioxide returned to the roots could yield 10,000 gallons of ethanol per acre.
The Chinese are getting 4.8 dry tons per acre off seaweed from coastal waters, and the Vietnamese, who farm shrimp from April to September, harvest algae from the same shallow lagoons and estuaries the rest of the year. Kelp grown on nets can cover hundreds of acres of ocean and provide bread flours, carrageenan, agar and other ethanol co-products while also restoring health to over-nitrified "dead zones." Blume estimates the energy return on marine ethanol is on the order of 15 to 1, significantly better than current returns on petroleum exploration and production.
Alcohol Can Be A Gas! goes beyond helping the mechanically adept convert their internal combustion engines to ethical fuels. It provides clear operating manuals for the farmers who will grow those fuels, the fermenters who will build and operate the stills, and the artisans who will create and trade myriad co-products.
 What a Waste July 14, 2008
19 out of 37 found this review helpful
I purchased this book with the primary intention of learning how I could convert all the waste fruit I generate in my grove into alcohol. The author is well educated and does know his stuff and shares his experience in creating alcohol to be used as fuel. However, the book includes chapter after chapter of political information (and mis-information) which really hurts the books ability to inform. When will people realize and understand that mixing in your political beliefs into a "how-to" type book just doesn't work. Like most people that would but this book, my primary goal is to learn how to make alcohol to use for fuel. I could care less about how evil the Bush administration is or how big oil is ruining our lives or how almost every topic he covers seems to always come around to blame someone for something ie. global warming.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Blume could not control himself enough to hold back his bias and simply write a cookbook style how-to book. He would have saved a ton of paper if he would heed my advice and drop the political stuff. The book would be about a third of the size it is now.
I wish that Mr. Blume would have taken his publisher's advice and wrote two books; one for his political agenda and the other that teaches how to make and use alcohol as a fuel. Then he would have a winner.
In conclusion, please strip out the political stuff which does nothing to advance your ideas and only causes more divisiveness. Think of it this way: if you limit your audience to only those that agree with you politically, the only people that will read your book are you and your mother. Make it universal by making it neutral.
Great Book! June 28, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book is Huge! Full of really great information, everything from the history of alcohol fuels to how to convert any gas engine to alcohol. This is a must read for those that want to get off foriegn oil.
Great Resource - Super Informative June 14, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
I am one person that is truly going to make ethanol for gas, whether or not I continue this adventure is another question. But where we live in Europe we pay about $8 per gal for diesel- just so you know what is coming your way USA. I also happen to live in the corn belt of Europe- so it's dumb not to try and we have a small farm. Therefore I am so thankful that I bought this book. I would also recommend for further study [...]
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