How much does it cost to produce 1 gallon of ethanol?
It will cost about $1.10 to $1.20/gal to make the alcohol from various feed-stocks like corn, barley, potatoes, or Jerusalem artichokes. You will also have by-products which you can sell or use as animal feed, reducing the total cost down to about $.95/gal.

Or, you can make it the cheap and easy way for only $1.20/gallon on a large scale, buying molasses by the ton (if it is a high sugar molasses). See my page on Molasses and Rum.

What materials are required to make ethanol once I have a still set up?

First, you need a good source of feedstock. By feedstock, I mean a good source of sugar or starch (carbohydrates) which can be fermented in the same process as which you make beer or wine. You aren't going to drink it, so it can be somewhat contaminated: For example, we once made a batch from a weeks' garbage from a low-security prison (one of our CAPFA founders worked there), so he separated it out for us. It was mostly lumpy mashed potatoes and stale bread, and we had to fight off the flies while we ran mixed it with water and dumped it into a larger fermentation tank. Then we covered it with window screen to keep the flies away.
  Another time we used 5 year old dehydrated prunes, which I soaked for a week to get them soft enough to grind by hand, with a baseball bat. Realistically, you want to do all this on a farm where you have access to hammer-mills, large tanks, and various means of handling large amounts of feedstock (and the resultant waste). Corn (dry kernels) is one of the best, as it is over 70% starch. Also,you can use sugar beets, Jerusalem artichokes, rotten apples, grape skins from a winery, and much more. Molasses works great, too.

3. Can you buy a car already set up to run on Ethanol?
There are lots of cars you can buy that are already set up for E-85: Ford Taurus, Chrysler Voyager Minivan, Ford Explorer, dodge Ram pickups and Mazda 3000 pickups, and much more. Go to my web page, "Converting your Engine" and click on the photo of the Sebring convertible to find out which cars are already factory-ready for E-85 fuel, which you can make yourself.

4. How much feedstock does it take to produce one gallon of ethanol?
180-proof is 90% pure ethanol. To make it, start out with something cheap and readily available to make your own beer. I suggest you start with ordinary corn, wheat or barley, and start by following an ordinary recipe for making beer at home. Corn is best, with more starch. Grind it with a 1/8th inch screen mill (if it is too small, it is like flour and will ball up in water, so a course grind is better). For starters, use two 50-pound sacks of grain (40 kg). (I don't suggest buying this on a regular basis, but just for your first run if you dont have anything else available for free).

If you make 80 litres (20 gallons) of beer at a 10% alcohol content (which is about what you get working with corn) you end up with a little over 2 gallons of high proof (.10  x 20 gal/.9 = 2.2 gal of 180 proof).

You will soon discover that for making fuel, you will want to start with a minimum of 100 gallons, hopefully at a 10% sugar concentration, to get 10 gallons of fuel to be efficient. This is not a project for the your kitchen, as it will get a bit messy, Better to do it in the garage.

5.  Does ethanol have a shelf life, and will it lose its octane level like gasoline does?
If it is sealed, it will last for years and years. If opened to the atmosphere, it will suck moisture out of the air and get a little bit diluted.

 6. Isn't ethanol bad for certain fuel system components in fuel pumps and carbuerators?

 No. Todays cars are built to be compatible with ethanol-blended fuels. When ethanol was first introduced in the 1980s, some cars experienced deterioration of some elastomers (rubber-like parts) and metal fuel system components. Very quickly, manufacturers upgraded their fuel systems so that today, they are now all compatible with ethanol fuels.

Yes and no. Alcohol is now being made from straw by a Candian company, Iogen, which is using a genetically modified organism (GMO),in this case,yeast to do just that. See my page on making Ethanol from Straw.

http://www.alcohol4fuel.com/id37.html

But this yeast product is not for sale and certainly will not be available to small scale producers. Other techniques have been tried--I even have a 25 year old book on making ethanol from sawdust-but they tend to be expensive, dangerous (involving strong acids) and have toxic waste products.

 8. Can your still be used to make methanol? Isn't methanol a better fuel than ethanol, which is why it is used for racing?

No. Methanol or "wood alcohol" was made in the 18th and 19th Century by "destructive pyrolysis", which is burning wood chips inside a closed chemical retort container in the absence of Oxygen. This process used 15 times more energy than contained in the end product of methanol, but they were interested in the methanol for other purposes, such as for paint thinners and other chemical needs. Actually almost any still will have small traces of methanol along with the high proof ethnanol. The triple distilling action of the Charles 803 still that I use, will remove most of the methanol, but that doesn't mean it is safe for drinking. If you want to build a still for drinking alcohol, there are a lot of smaller and cheaper stills you can build. The Charles 803 still is for making moderate quantities or ethanol for use as a fuel. You can make 5 to 8 gallons an hour of 180 proof. If you want to sell your fuel, this is probably too small a still for you, but it is nevertheless a good tool for learning about fuel productions and for experimenting with different feedstocks for fermentation. The thing is, you don't need super pure alcohol if you aren't drinking it. But for the sake of your engine, it is quite good to have high proof, triple-distilled alcohol as made in the still I designed. You may not have removed the all the methanol, but this is a good fuel, and burns clean. The fusil oils and various other impurities have mostly been  removed, but any minor impurities will also burn, much cleaner than gasoline, with no carbon build-up. In fact, ethanol will dissolve build up carbon as it burns, so the end result is a clean engine. Now, as for the question, which is a better fuel, ethanol or methanol, ethanol is clearly the better fuel: it has 38% more available energy (86,000 BTU's per gallon for ethanol, while methanol only has 62,000 BTU's/gallon). Methanol is commonly used for racing as it is a cheap and easily available byproduct of the Natural Gas industry, and is cheaper than ethanol because they don't have to pay the distillation taxes. Ethanol is also used in racing, and the Indie 500 has used this fuel for over 80 years, now. Ethanol is less corrosive than methanol, and burns very clean, with only CO2 and water as the main byproducts of combustion (there is a slight amount of aldyhides in the exhaust, but it is 300% cleaner than burning gasoline.