maybe but oil will have to go much higher in price.
Consider how much a gallon of your local microbrew in beer would cost you to buy. One gallon is 128 ounces, that's about 11 bottles, at $7/six pack that's about $12.80/gallon for beer.
Now multiply that by 20 since beer is generally around 5% alcohol: $256/gallon. This doesn't even count any additional cost of the distillation process.
Now, granted, beer you buy at $7/six pack doesn't cost the local brewery $7 to produce. But if they were to be competitive selling ethanol at $4/gallon they would have to be able to produce their beer for less than 20 cents a gallon. And also Coors was making their ethanol from waste beer, basically stuff they would have to trash otherwise, so this analogy doesn't completely apply.
But this is where economies of scale do come into play. Coors probably has a substantial amount of waste beer to the point where distilling it into ethanol becomes practical. Apparently there is a waste beer refinery plant located right next to the Coors plant in Colorado.
How much waste beer does a microbrewery produce though? What cost per gallon does ethanol need to sell at for there to be a decent ROI to add distillation to ethanol capabilities based on the amount of waste beer produced?
If a microbrewery produces 100 gallons of waste beer a month, that's 20 gallons of ethanol at $4/gallon. $80/month probably doesn't justify the additional cost of new equipment, as well as the cost of running that equipment. And prodcing only 20 gallons a month does not make for a refueling station unless we seriously increase our fuel efficiencies.
Now, some savvy entrepreneur could possibly set up a waste beer refinery operation that takes waste beer from a network of local microbreweries and create competative ethanol that way.
