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National Geographic : 1981 Feb 28
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Delay and frustration may plague most synfuels, but one has bounded off to a jack rabbit start. Gasohol, a mix of unleaded gas oline laced with one-tenth alcohol, offers a tonic both for the auto and the farmer. "Alcohol is sunshine in liquid form," claim enthusiasts. Thousands of gasoline stations now sell gasohol. Idle breweries and whiskey distilleries find new markets; one time moonshiners respectably advertise their expertise; and scores of companies many woefully short on experience-offer to build plants of all sizes. Sunshine aplenty baked the corn belt when I touched down in central Illinois. In rows of rich green plants, solar energy worked the silent miracle of photosynthesis, transforming water and carbon dioxide into carbohydrate, channeling it to growing ears. Soon some of that corn would be trucked to a brown building I visited on the outskirts of Springfield. Inside, exhaling a saccharine aroma, a still was ingesting corn of a previous season and extracting stored sunshine as ethyl alcohol, or ethanol. "This is a community-size distillery," boomed Alvin M. Mavis, president of the National Gasohol Commission. "It makes 800 gallons a day. It also leaves a mash that contains every ounce of the corn's original protein, for use as livestock feed supple ment. There's room for a thousand of these
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