Think of hillbillies brewing up staggeringly alcoholic moonshine and you're most of the way there. The modern miracle of turning wine into automotive fuel is all down to the fine art of distillation. When Aston Martin heard that Prince Charles wanted to run his DB5 run-around on bioethanol, they contacted Gloucester-based Green Fuels for help. The company bought in 8,000 litres of surplus white wine from a nearby vineyard - for a mere 1p a litre - and ran it through their distillery. Understandably, the vineyard's owner is keeping his head down, for fear of mobs in search of free plonk. By boiling off the wine's 11% alcohol, condensing it and removing any remaining water, Green Fuels ended up with hundreds of litres of 99.8% pure ethanol, which they topped up with alcohol extracted from fermented whey collected from local cheesemakers. A tune of the Aston's carburettors to allow more fuel into the engine, and it was ready to go, on a mix of 85% ethanol and 15% petrol. "Anything that contains alcohol can be distilled in the same way you produce vodka and whisky. The only waste is fruit juice, and that is sent off to make biogas for electricity," says James Hygate at Green Fuels. After covering costs and adding duty, the ethanol was sold for £1.10 a litre. Any car can be converted to run on it, so what's to stop someone turning their failed homebrew or leftover Piat d'Or into ethanol to ease the pain at the pump? "You would need an awful lot of corked wine to make enough fuel to get anywhere," says Hygate. "The best way to produce ethanol on any scale is to effectively brew beer and distil the ethanol out, but with the licensing and health and safety issues, it's not something we'd recommend people do at home. You're producing something that's extremely flammable."
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Can you not get those home brewing kits for buttons? I'm sure my folks made wine once and it wasn't that hard. Maybe you could top up your tank with some ethanol, certainly give you a bit of a power boost :-)
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I loved this story - great news
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