>> Marjory: Hi. This is Marjory Wildcraft, and I am absolutely delighted today to be
interviewing, my guest today is David Blume. David is amazing person. He's, for 35 years
he's been looking at a solution that we're all very interested in, and an idea of community-supported
fuel. Dave has a solution for how we can create our own fuel for cars and generators and other
electrical needs out of making alcohol. It's sustainable. It has a zero carbon footprint.
It's something that is best done on a community or local scale. David was a previous editor
for the Mother Earth News. He has written this book. It's actually six books in one,
called "Alcohol Can Be A Gas." In this book he talks about everything from the history
of alcohol and how it's been used for a long, long time, long before petroleum options actually.
How you actually distill the fuel. How you convert your automobiles to run on the fuel.
Economics of starting an alcohol fuel business in your community or in your small town or
in your network. And a whole wealth of information all about how you would create fuel. This
is a wonderful alternative as the prices of petroleum-based fuel are going up and up.
Not to mention that this is a sustainable alternative. So David, welcome. Thanks so
much for being here.
>> David: I'm glad to be here, Marjory.
>> Marjory: One of the first things that comes up with alcohol or ethanol fuel is, everybody
says it takes more energy to make alcohol or ethanol that it does that you actually
get out of it. And you're telling us that's a myth, that that's absolutely not true.
>> David: There's two things to say about that. One, whenever you change one form of
energy to another, there's always loss. So when you take crude oil and bring it to the
United States, 11,000-mile round trip, and then refine it, you lose 20% just to get started.
So it's not unusual to not get as much energy out as you have to start with. But with alcohol,
we get to cheat the accountants, because alcohol is made from solar energy. Plants go ahead
and combine carbon dioxide from the air, water, and sunlight to make starch and sugar. Those
are carbohydrates. Carbon dioxide, water, sunlight. So when we make alcohol from a carbohydrate,
we start off with this huge bank of free solar energy, and use a little bit of energy to
distill the alcohol fermented from those carbohydrates into fuel that we can use. So the return on
energy for the fossils, excuse me, the return on energy for fossil fuel input can be as
high as 15 or 20 to 1, and typically 8 to 1 is normal for chemically raised crops. In
other words, fossil fuel raised crops.
>> Marjory: And so you're talking about distilling fuel on a 10,000 to 150,000 gallon basis.
For reference, an average American right now is using about 1,000 gallons of fuel just
for transportation in their car. So you're talking about creating a small-scale system
that would serve anywhere from a dozen to a couple hundred people. And then of course
if we were more careful with our fuel usages it could serve a much larger population. And
you say this could be done everywhere in the United States, that pretty much everywhere
there's going to be some type of material that we could use. I saw that you use everything
from corn to fruit, or even using wood, wood products, or basically waste products from
farming activities.
>> David: And there are crops that grow in every climate. I mean, if you go into the
far north, you can find cattails growing around lakes in Minnesota. If you go to the deserts
of the southwest, you can find mesquite pods growing wild. You can make it from cactus.
You can make it from kudzu in the south. You can make it from so many different things,
because plants make starch and sugar very well. I mean, look at sugar beets. Look at
sorghum for molasses. All these things can be very good energy crops on your own piece
of land, or in your community. And so, it's really practical to make enough alcohol for
a few people rather than just one person, because it's efficient with your time. As
we all know, on a homestead, time is the most limited resource, more than anything else.
>> Marjory: Absolutely.
>> David: If you have food sovereignty, that's great. But energy sovereignty is equally important.
Because food is a commodity. How much food are you going to have to trade with somebody
to get fuel for an energy need at your place? So it's important to make sure that you, at
least on a community level, are producing both. For instance, let's say you want to
process your family's sewage from your septic system or whatever in a marsh, which is a
standard way of doing it in many places. Well, you could grow an energy crop in that marsh,
and even a 10th of an acre of cattails could probably generate enough fuel to power your
vehicle for the whole year. That's just a simple couple of afternoons of hand harvesting
of cattails a couple of times a year to have the raw material to make your fuel. There's
a lot of starch in cattails. And if you're growing potatoes or if you've got a fruit
orchard, and fruit orchards typically yield 20-30 tons of fruit once they're three, four,
five years old. The waste products from that, or if there's a surplus, because for some
reason there isn't a market, all that can go into making fuel, and that's. it's kind
of the way of taking your surpluses and making something permanent, storable, and valuable
out of the them. Because, once fruit's ripe, it's either sold or you've got to do something
with it.
>> Marjory: Clear. Yes.
>> David: So what I would say to folks is, think beyond your vehicle. Because, you know,
if things get rough, travel's not going to be your primary thing. It's going to be heating,
cooking, lighting. That's your energy uses.
>> Marjory: Well, I tell you, I know for me, that we heat with wood. And a gallon of gasoline
to run that chainsaw, I would easily pay $100 for that. I'd pay $200 or $300, because I
know what it's like to go out there with an axe and try and cut the wood I need to heat
my home.
>> David: Absolutely. You know, it's often calculated when it comes to working the land,
1 gallon of fuel is equal to 120 person hours of work. So, you know, I love all those people
who say, "Hey, I'm going to double dig my whole 3 acres." And I wish them the best of
luck, but I'm putting a gallon or two of fuel in my tractor and doing it in an afternoon.
Energy's really important to maintaining a decent lifestyle when you're trying to really
get things done. You know, wood's great, but it pollutes like all get out. Alcohol is pollution
free. We use it in your house as a cooking fuel, which is a very nice cooking fuel. It's
similar to natural gas. You can make electricity with it. With electricity, you could make
hot water. In other words, the co-generation of electricity from your generator can heat
your hot water and your electricity. Alcohol is a very flexible fuel, and it never goes
bad. It's like, you think about people who say, "I'm going to put in 10,000 gallons of
gas tanks, so when the end of the distribution of fuel happens I'll have all that fuel."
Well in six months it's all tar and varnish, and it's no good.
>> Marjory: Actually it's a lot less now. With the ethanol that they've been putting
in it, gas is going bad in about three months. It's been...
>> David: Actually, oil companies take the gasoline back from gas stations in 30 days
because the volatile parts of gasoline evaporate and then it's no longer useable commercially.
So yes, fossil fuels don't last. You can open a bottle of gin from the Roman Empire and
still drink it, because alcohol never goes bad.
>> Marjory: Wow. Well, I just want to open this possibility. There's a tremendous amount
of resource in David's book, "Alcohol Can Be A Gas." And if this is something that's
intriguing to you or interesting to you, I'd highly recommend, take a look at David's book,
or get in contact with David Blume. This is such a useful scenario, regardless of whether
you believe in peak oil or not, we certainly are having fuel prices increasing, and that's
the trend. So this is Marjory Wildcraft, again with David Blume. Thanks so much for watching,
and we'll see you on the next segment.