Excellent book, and a great resource and compilation that "pulls it all together."

However, I decline to give Blume 5 stars, due to his propagation of the myth of "global warming," the silly farce built on junk science.

Still, the book is well worth it, and there are many other wonderful reasons to use clean-burning alcohol as fuel in your vehicle.

This book has a lot of food for thought(and gas). I truly wish it could happen because we could be free of foreign oil dependence, use our own and nature's waste for fuel! The logistics could be done but the entrenchment of oil companies would never allow it. Very thought provoking with facts or data I had never heard of before, but it makes sense. Wish Henry Ford were here to fight again for the better way!

This book is the bible for using a resource that we have in endless supply to end our dependance on foreign oil, curb global warming and adapt to a new economy that will create jobs for our country. Big oil has made most people skeptics and this is not new technology or a new idea. It does work and would only be improved upon with support. Fuel would be half the present price, energy would be clean and renewable, and our agriculture system would be sustainable!

I have read this book cover to cover and it inspired me to start my own alcohol distillery. It will tell you how to convert your vehicle to E-85 which is %85 alcohol and %15 gasoline, which puts out only %13 of the harmful greehouse gases that %100 gasoline does, and only takes $1 per gallon to make and sells for about $1.50 to $2.50 all over the US. It will give you the full history of alchohol in the USA since the turn of the century. I will explain how hydrogen, coal, nuclear, and all other alternative energy sources work and why they pale in comparison to switching to alcohol. If you hate filling up your car with overpriced and planet warming gasoline then buy this book!!! It will give you the knowledge to join the alcohol revolution that is growing everyday all around the world.

This a awesome book. If your not open to sources of enegry that our farmers can make so we can keep our money at home, then just write the check and send all you money over sea's. I have read the book. I also make some of my own fuel now. People the country is being strangled by high enegry prices. Who care if you agree with the authors politic's or view or history . You missing the whole point. We need to put our enegry future back into the hands of the american people . Your freinds and neighbors. Would you not like to buy fuel from your local farmer for $3.00 a gallon , then he finds out you lay bricks, fix computers, trim trees , pays you for your services . We need to support our local ecomony regardless of your political affiliation. On the other hand just keep fighting with each other and pay the mega faceless corportion .

I've been interested in Ethonol production for a while. This book spells it out in excellent detail. A must have for the alternative energy set.

I work on the forefront of the biofuels industry for an engineering design firm that works with rising biofuel technologies. First let me says that I HAVE NOT read Mr. Blume's entire book. The sections that I have read, however, make some rather untrue statements. For example, in Myth #1 Blume states that oil has a negative net energy output, meaning that it requires more energy invested than it puts out. That means that it takes more than 1 barrel of oil to produce one barrel of oil. If this were true, then it would take more than one barrel of oil to extract one barrel of oil out of the ground and refine it. Realistically, the oil companies use the barrels of oil that they extract to produce and refine their oil. Let's use an example and say that it takes 2 barrels of oil to produce 1 barrel of oil. Where do those 2 barrels of oil come from? They come from the ground. Let's be clear on something. Whenever you extract oil from the ground, you are adding to your total output. Those 2 barrels are NOT energy investments. So when you need 2 barrels of oil to produce 1 barrel, you are extracting 3 barrels of oil and using up two of them for a net output of 1 barrel of oil.


Another untrue claim is that we can completely replace 100% of our motor fuel consumption. This is not true. The USDA and DOE published a report saying that we can displace about 30% of our motor fuel consumption using farmland and forest lands. At best we can displace maybe 40%. And realistically, the displacing probably won't happen for quite a while.

Like I said before, I have not read the entire book. Maybe the rest of uses sound logic and diligent research. Maybe not. Make sure you check your facts and do research. Many people make claims and state them as facts, when in reality, they did not do their homework. And make sure to do your homework on the things that I have said too.

The most informative and comprehensive book on this subject that has ever been written. It definitely resolves the issues on how and the best ways to absorb ethanol in our fuel obsessed economy. If you have any questions, then look no further for the answer. If you are skeptical, then look no further for the answer. It will change your mind on ethanol, that is a fact. A must read for everyone living in the world today if you meet the following qualification: you eat, you drive, you work, and you buy.. Buy this book.

This book is a copy paste compilation of old, past due information. Mostly 3 to 4 decades old. Five dollars worth. It was another good sale pith example of people making money of those who look for a positive change.

This book is a copy paste compilation of old, past due information. Mostly 3 to 4 decades old. Five dollars worth. It was another good sale pith example of people making money of those who look for a positive change.

So full of garbage and NO real information. DON'T waste your money. My mother bought this book and I have gone through it along with the dvd (just him talking, no plans). The book is disorganized with no real schematics (plans) for building a distillery. I did better searching online for free. Plus who has a ton of corn, wheat, donuts, or any of the substances mentioned available. Save your money and fill-up your car. Because this book is useless.

So full of garbage and NO real information. DON'T waste your money. My mother bought this book and I have gone through it along with the dvd (just him talking, no plans). The book is disorganized with no real schematics (plans) for building a distillery. I did better searching online for free. Plus who has a ton of corn, wheat, donuts, or any of the substances mentioned available. Save your money and fill-up your car. Because this book is useless.

So full of garbage and NO real information. DON'T waste your money. My mother bought this book and I have gone through it along with the dvd (just him talking, no plans). The book is disorganized with no real schematics (plans) for building a distillery. I did better searching online for free. Plus who has a ton of corn, wheat, donuts, or any of the substances mentioned available. Save your money and fill-up your car. Because this book is useless.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 [...]

This book changed my life. It sounds so cliché to say that, but it did. I have known about ethanol for some years. I bought a duel fuel vehicle, not because it was popular or environmentally sound...it was all that was available at the time. Never thought about using alcohol till I bought this book. Now I am looking for somewhere to start producing my own as well as other avenues for alcohol. Other members in my family are jumping on board with me. Its time to fight the high prices at the pump, and this is one way to do it.

Alcohol Can be a Gas is the book to have if you want to be ready for the future. The future is here and now. Be ready early.