Farmer fires up still to brew his own fuel

VANCEBORO-A Craven County farmer is among the first in Eastern North Carolina to receive a state permit to make ethanol.

As Rusty Woolard likes to tell it, he is the first in his family to get the state's blessing for doing something that got his ancestors in trouble with the law.

"There isn't a whole lot of difference between moonshine and ethanol," he said, holding up a Mason jar to show the clear-liquid proof.

It looks and smells like moonshine. The ingredients are the same: corn, water, yeast and sugar.

Add some gasoline and you get ethanol that will run a car - at about half the price you'd pay at the pump.

"In the '20s and '30s and on, making moonshine was a way of life," Woolard said. "My own ancestors did it until they got caught and had to stop. If only they had known what they were stumbling onto."

Woolard's permit allows him to make 10,000 gallons of ethanol a year, but he doesn't plan to sell it.

He has set up an "educational still" on his family farm in Wilmar, a rural community near the Craven-Beaufort County line just north of Vanceboro.

He plans to give demonstrations on ethanol making, offer tours of his family's log cabin and feed students a "country lunch"- all for $8 admission.

He'll use the ethanol to run the lawn mowers and four-wheelers he uses on his 200-acre farm.

Woolard got his recipe for ethanol from a "reformed moonshiner," he says.

"Basically, it's the same stuff, with a little less sugar," he said.

It takes about three days to make ethanol, but most of that is fermentation time.

"You mix up your corn and all your other stuff, add a little water and then put it in a warm environment and let the yeast go to work," Woolard said. "Depending on how warm it is, you can speed up or slow down the fermentation. It might take six days to do in the winter."

After the mixture is fermented, it goes into a still made of three 55-gallon steel drums that are connected by pipes.

Woolard used parts from a junkyard to make his still, which he built in about a week with help from a friend.

 In the still, one drum is the cooking tank, one drum collects any sediment in the mixture, and the last drum allows the chemical to cool.

"In that last tank, you hear a lot of popping," Woolard said. "When hot meets cool, what you have is a thunderstorm - and it sounds like it."

The cooking-to-cooling process takes only 15 minutes and can yield up to 30 gallons of ethanol. But producers have to be careful with their proportions to ensure that larger batches of the almost-moonshine mixture can produce ethanol that is strong enough to power a car. One bushel of corn is used in every 2.5 gallons of car-fueling ethanol.

"You know it's right when you pour just a little bit in a jar and shake it and beads come to the top," Woolard said.

"You know, people used moonshine in their Model A's and Model T's if they needed to," Woolard said. "If they ran out of gas, they could get out of the car and put a little moonshine in and take a drink and keep on going.

"Today's cars are too computerized for that, but when you add a little gasoline, you get a mix that works."

The ethanol-making effort is a second career for Woolard, who recently retired from being a magistrate. He learned how to make ethanol by taking a 30-hour course at Craven Community College.

"No activity in business-building has focused on biotechnology like it could and we wanted to change that," said Bob Ericksen, director of the college's small business center. "Biotechnology means a lot to this region, this country and the world."

Ethanol is just one of the viable energy alternatives that need to be studied in Craven County and in the state, said Mike Carroll, Craven County's agricultural extension agent.

"We need to be looking at windmills and solar energy and energy producers besides corn, too," Carroll said. "It will take a mix of traditional and tropical crops so that you can get this green energy, while at the same time keeping corn at a price reasonable enough that farmers can feed their animals and feed everybody else.

"There are still questions to be answered, but to have an educational operation like this in Craven County is great," he said. "It shows people that ethanol in North Carolina is not just a pipe dream."