Anyone here distill their own ethanol? Does anyone know if this is a possibility without a huge operation? I am wondering about corn stalks as a source of the oil/sugar. Would it theoretically be possible to build a small system that a farmer could use for his own fuel supply, or maybe even sell?

 

It takes a huge amount of corn to distill ethanol. It would take even more massive amounts of stalks. There are websites that talk about production on the web, use Google to find them. There are also a few threads here.

 

To put it into perspective, 1000 kilograms (2200 lbs) of pure sugar would procude about 167 gallons of pure ethanol, under ideal circumstances.