ACbaG? Yes ~ Alcohol CAN be a GAS!

You and groups of your friends can become self-reliant in the production of energy.

Imagine if YOUR Village, YOUR Block YOUR Farm or YOUR Family were completely independent of the major fuel suppliers.

Imagine if you were able to have free electrical power! Would your life change?

You can join the ACBAG Renewable Energy Independence Revolution!

With alcohol fuel, you can become energy independent, reverse global warming, and survive
peak oil in style.

Alcohol fuel is "liquid sunshine" and can't be controlled by transnational corporations.

You can produce alcohol from a wide variety of plants and waste products,from algae to stale donuts.

It's a much better fuel than gasoline, and you can use it in your car,right now. you can even use alcohol to generate your electricity.
Alcohol fuel production is ecologically sustainable, revitalizes farms and communities, and creates huge new opportunities for small-scale businesses.

Its byproducts are clean and valuable.

Alcohol has a proud history and a vital future.

1. With alcohol fuel, almost every country can become energy-independent. Anywhere that has sunlight and land can produce alcohol from plants. Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world imports no oil, since half their cars run on alcohol fuel made from sugarcane, grown on 1% of its land.

2. We can reverse global warming. Since alcohol is made from plants, its production takes carbon dioxide out of the air, sequestering it, with the result that it reverses the greenhouse effect (while potentially vastly improving the soil). Recent studies show that in a permaculturally designed mixed-crop alcohol fuel production system, the amount of greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere by plants-and then exuded by plant roots into the soil as sugar-can be 13 times what is emitted by processing the crops and burning the alcohol in our cars.

3. We can revitalize the economy instead of suffering through Peak Oil. Oil is running out, and what we replace it with will make a big difference in our environment and economy. Alcohol fuel production and use is clean and environmentally sustainable, and will revitalize families, farms, towns, cities, industries, as well as the environment. A national switch to alcohol fuel would provide many millions of new permanent jobs.

4. No new technological breakthroughs are needed. We can make alcohol fuel out of what we have, where we are. Alcohol fuel can efficiently be made out of many things, including waste products like stale donuts, grass clippings, food processing waste-even ocean kelp. Many crops produce many times more alcohol per acre than corn, using arid, marshy, or even marginal land in addition to farmland.

Just think... in America our lawn clippings could replace a third of the auto fuel we get from the Middle East.

No need to get into your buggy...

Simply go here. All will be revealed.

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ACbaG for Everyone!

5. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, we can easily use alcohol fuel in the vehicles we already own. Unmodified cars can run on 50% alcohol, and converting to 100% alcohol or flexible fueling (both alcohol and gas) costs only a few hundred dollars. Most auto companies already sell new dual-fuel vehicles.

6. Alcohol is a superior fuel to gasoline! It's 105 octane, burns much cooler with less vibration, is less flammable in case of accident, is 98% pollution-free, has lower evaporative emissions, deposits no carbon in the engine or oil, resulting in a tripling of engine life. Specialized alcohol engines can get at least 22% better mileage than gasoline or diesel.
7. It's not just for gasoline cars. We can easily use alcohol fuel to power diesel engines, trains, aircraft, small utility engines, generators to make electricity, heaters for our homes-and it can even be used to cook our food.

8. Alcohol has a proud, solid history. Gasoline is a refinery's toxic waste; alcohol fuel is liquid sunshine. Henry Ford's early cars were all flex-fuel. It wasn't until gasoline magnate John D. Rockefeller funded Prohibition that alcohol fuel companies were driven out of business.

9. The byproducts of alcohol production, instead of being oil refinery waste, are clean and are worth more than the alcohol itself. In fact, they can make petrochemical fertilizers and herbicides obsolete. The alcohol production process concentrates and makes more digestible all protein and non-starch nutrients in the crop. It's so nutritious that when used as animal feed, it produces more meat or milk than the corn it comes from. That's right, fermentation of corn increases the food supply and lowers the cost of food.

10. Locally produced ethanol supercharges regional economies. Instead of fuel expenditures draining capital away to foreign bank accounts, each gallon of alcohol produces local income that gets recirculated many times. Every dollar of tax credit for alcohol generates up to $6 in new tax revenues from the increased local business.

11. Alcohol production brings many new small-scale business opportunities. There is huge potential for profitable local, integrated, small-scale businesses that produce alcohol and related byproducts, whereas when gas was cheap, alcohol plants had to be huge to make a profit.

12. Scale matters-most of the widely publicized potential problems with ethanol are a function of scale. Once production plants get beyond a certain size and are too far away from the crops that supply them, closing the ecological loop becomes problematic. Smaller-scale operations can more efficiently use a wide variety of crops than huge specialized one-crop plants, and diversification of crops would largely eliminate the problems of mono-culture.

13. The byproducts of small-scale alcohol plants can be used in profitable, energy-efficient, and environmentally positive ways. For instance, spent mash (the liquid left over after distillation) contains all the nutrients the next fuel crop needs and can return it back to the soil if the fields are close to the operation. Big-scale plants, because they bring in crops from up to 45 miles away, can't do this, so they have to evaporate all the water and sell the resulting byproduct as low-price animal feed,which accounts for half the energy used in the plant.

ALCOHOL CAN BE A GAS!

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ACbaG for Everyone!

The International Institute for Ecological Agriculture is pleased to announce publication of the first comprehensive book ever written on alcohol fuel production and use for home and farm, Alcohol Can Be A Gas! Fueling an Ethanol Revolution for the 21st Century.

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 the fuel.

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, seeks to be the definitive reference work on the subject.

Alcohol Can Be A Gas!is written by David Blume, an ecological biologist who first began teaching others to produce and use alcohol in the late 1970s, while working at Mother Earth News Eco Village and Research Center. An early version of the book was written in 1983, to accompany the ten-part PBS television series Alcohol As Fuel, which Blume hosted. That version was never printed, due to conflict between PBS and its sponsors. The 2007 edition is completely rewritten; it is based on four years of full-time research, and visits to alcohol production sites in the U.S. and Brazil, by Blume and his team. It retains the original foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller.

Alcohol Can Be A Gas! contains 596 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.

More information, the table of contents, reviews, the index, excerpts from each of the chapters, clips from the DVD, and online ordering are available at ACbaG for Everyone!.
~ The first and the definitive book on alcohol fuel production and use for home and farm
~ By David Blume
~ 596 8-1/2" by 11" pages
~ 514 photos, illustrations, and charts
~ 700-word glossary
~ 6300-entry index
~ 473 endnotes
~ Posthumous foreword by R. Buckminster Fuller
~ $47 paperback, $59 hardcover
~ Published by:
The International Institute for Ecological Agriculture , 309 Cedar Street #127, Santa Cruz, CA 95060 USA, phone 831-471-9164

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ACbaG for Everyone!

Alcohol Can Be a Gas! is divided into six "books."
~ List of Figures
~ Front Matter
~ Introduction

BOOK 1: UNDERSTANDING ALCOHOL: VISIONS AND SOLUTIONS
* Chapter 1: A History of Alcohol
* Chapter 2: Busting the Myths
* Chapter 3: The Permaculture Solution to Fossil Fuel Dependency
* Chapter 4: Darker Visions of Our Energy Future
* Chapter 5: Brazil

BOOK 2: MAKING ALCOHOL: HOW TO DO IT
* Chapter 6: Selecting Feedstocks
* Chapter 7: Feedstock Preparation & Fermentation
* Chapter 8: Information on Various Feedstocks
* Chapter 9: Distillation
* Chapter 10: Designing Your Fuel/Feed Plant

BOOK 3: CO-PRODUCTS FROM MAKING ALCOHOL
* Chapter 11: Alcohol Fuel Is Only the Beginning: Turning Waste into Profit
* Chapter 12: Micro-Distillery Model Farm

BOOK 4: USING ALCOHOL AS FUEL
* Chapter 13: Surprise! Ethanol Is the Perfect Fuel
* Chapter 14: Alcohol Versus Gasoline in Your Engine
* Chapter 15: Carburetion
* Chapter 16: Fuel Injection
* Chapter 17: Cold-Start Systems
* Chapter 18: Ignition Timing
* Chapter 19: Assorted Adjustments
* Chapter 20: Converting to High Compression
* Chapter 21: Smaller Engines
* Chapter 22: Flexible-Fuel & Dual-Fuel Systems
* Chapter 23: Methanol & Butanol
* Chapter 24: Cogeneration & Other Systems to Provide Energy from Alcohol
* Chapter 25: How Diesel Engines Can Run on Alcohol

BOOK 5: THE BUSINESS OF ALCOHOL: HANDS-ON ADVICE
* Chapter 26: Economic & Legal Considerations
* Chapter 27: Practical Experiences with Alcohol Production

BOOK 6: A VISION FOR THE NATION
* Chapter 28: Fueling a Revolution: Proposed Incentives and Regulatory Changes to Rapidly Make the U.S. a Renewables-Powered Country
* Chapter 29: Community-Supported Energy (CSE)
* Back Matter
* Glossary
* Index
COPYRIGHT

MYTH #1: IT TAKES MORE ENERGY TO PRODUCE ETHANOL THAN YOU GET FROM IT!
Most ethanol research over the past 25 years has been on the topic of Energy Returned On Energy Invested or(EROEI). Public discussion Has been dominated by the American Petroleum Institute's aggressive distribution of the work of Cornell professor David Pimentel and his numerous, deeply flawed studies. Pimentel stands virtually alone in portraying alcohol as having a negative EROEI-producing less energy than is used in its production.

In fact, it's oil that has a negative EROEI. Because oil is both the raw material and the energy source for production of gasoline, it comes out to about 20% negative. That's just common sense; some of the oil is itself used up in the process of refining and delivering it (from the Persian Gulf, a distance of 11,000 miles in tanker travel).

The most exhaustive study on ethanol's EROEI, by Isaias de Carvalho Macedo, shows an alcohol energy return of more than eight units of output for every unit of input-and this study accounts for everything right down to smelting the ore to make the steel for tractors.

But perhaps more important than EROEI is the energy return on fossil fuel input. Using this criterion, the energy returned from alcohol fuel per fossil energy input is much higher. In a system that supplies almost all of its energy from biomass, the ratio of return could be positive by hundreds to one.

MYTH #2: THERE ISN'T ENOUGH LAND TO GROW CROPS FOR BOTH FOOD AND FUEL!
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. has 434,164,946 acres of "cropland"-land that is able to be worked in an industrial fashion (monoculture). This is the prime, level, and generally deep agricultural soil. In addition to cropland, the U.S. has 939,279,056 acres of "farmland." This land is also good for agriculture, but it's not as level and the soil not as deep. Additionally, there is a vast amount of acreage-swamps, arid or sloped land, even rivers, oceans, and ponds-that the USDA doesn't count as cropland or farmland, but which is still suitable for growing specialized energy crops. Of its nearly half a billion acres of prime cropland, the U.S. uses only 72.1 million acres for corn in an average year. The land used for corn takes up only 16.6% of our prime cropland, and only 7.45% of our total agricultural land. Even if, for alcohol production, we used only what the USDA considers prime flat cropland, we would still have to produce only 368.5 gallons of alcohol per acre to meet 100% of the demand for transportation fuel at today's levels. Corn could easily produce this level-and a wide variety of standard crops yield up to triple this. Plus, of course, the potential alcohol production from cellulose could dwarf all other crops.

MYTH #3: ETHANOL'S AN ECOLOGICAL NIGHTMARE!
You'd be hard-pressed to find another route that so elegantly ties the solutions to the problems as does growing our own energy. Far from destroying the land and ecology, a permaculture ethanol
solution will vastly improve soil fertility each year. The real ecological nightmare is industrial agriculture. Switching to organic-style crop rotation will cut energy use on farms by a third or more: no more petroleum-based herbicides, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. Fertilizer needs can be served either by applying the byproducts left over from the alcohol manufacturing process directly to the soil, or by first running the byproducts through animals as feed.

MYTH #4: IT'S FOOD VERSUS FUEL- WE SHOULD BE GROWING CROPS FOR STARVING MASSES, NOT CARS!
Humankind has barely begun to work on designing farming as a method of harvesting solar energy for multiple uses. Given the massive potential for polyculture yields, monoculture-study dismissals of ethanol production seem silly when viewed from economic, energetic, or ecological perspectives. Because the U.S. grows a lot of it, corn has become the primary crop used in making ethanol here. This is supposedly controversial, since corn is identified as a staple food in poverty-stricken parts of the world. But 87% of the U.S. corn crop is fed to animals. In most years, the U.S. sends close to 20% of its corn to other countries. While it is assumed that these exports could feed most of the hungry in the world, the corn is actually sold to wealthy nations to fatten their livestock. Plus, virtually no impoverished nation will accept our corn, even when it is offered as charity, due to its being genetically modified and therefore unfit for human consumption. Also, fermenting the corn to alcohol results in more meat than if you fed the corn directly to the cattle. We can actually increase the meat supply by first processing corn into alcohol, which only takes 28% of the starch, leaving all the protein and fat, creating a higher-quality animal feed than the original corn.
MYTH #5: BIG CORPORATIONS GET ALL THOSE ETHANOL SUBSIDIES, AND TAXPAYERS GET NOTHING IN RETURN!
Between 1968 and 2000, oil companies received subsidies of $149.6 billion, compared to ethanol's paltry $116.6 million. The subsidies alcohol did receive have worked extremely well in bringing maturity to the industry. Farmer-owned cooperatives now produce the majority of alcohol fuel in the U.S. Farmer-owners pay themselves premium prices for their corn and then pay themselves a dividend on the alcohol profit. The increased economic activity derived from alcohol fuel production has turned out to be crucial to the survival of noncorporate farmers, and the amounts of money they spend in their communities on goods and services and taxes for schools have been much higher in areas with an ethanol plant. Plus, between $3 and $6 in tax receipts are generated for every dollar of ethanol subsidy. The rate of return can be much higher in rural communities, where re-spending within the community produces a multiplier factor of up to 22 times for each alcohol fuel subsidy dollar.

MYTH #6: ETHANOL DOESN'T IMPROVE GLOBAL WARMING! IN
FACT, IT POLLUTES THE AIR !
Alcohol fuel has been added to gasoline to reduce virtually every class of air pollution. Adding as little as 5-10% alcohol can reduce carbon monoxide
from gasoline exhaust dramatically. When using pure alcohol, the reductions in all three of the major pollutants-carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, and hydrocarbons-are so great that, in many cases, the remaining emissions are unmeasurably small. Reductions of more than 90% over gasoline emissions in all categories have been routinely documented for straight alcohol fuel. It is true that when certain chemicals are included in gasoline, addition of alcohol at 2-20% of the blend can cause a reaction that makes these chemicals more volatile and evaporative. But it's not the ethanol that's the problem; it's the gasoline. Alcohol carries none of the heavy metals and sulfuric acid that gasoline and diesel exhausts do. And straight ethanol's evaporative emissions are dramatically lower than gasoline's, no more toxic than what you'd find in the air of your local bar. As for global warming, the production and use of alcohol neither reduces nor increases the atmosphere's CO2. In a properly designed system, the amount of CO2 and water emitted during fermentation and from exhaust is precisely the amount of both chemicals that the next year's crop of fuel plants needs to make the same amount of fuel once again. Alcohol fuel production actually lets us reduce carbon dioxide emissions, since the growing of plants ties up many times more carbon dioxide than is created in the production and use of the alcohol. Converting from a hydrocarbon to a carbohydrate economy could quickly reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.