April 14, 2010
Grilling With Ethanol (DomesticFuel.com)
Grilling enthusiasts will find a new product that uses ethanol as an alternative to charcoal or propane on the shelves of many grocery and hardware stores this summer.
The FlameDisk® actually utilizes proprietary solidified ethanol and is the first ethanol product to be used exclusively for outdoor grilling, according to manufacturer Sologear, the Wisconsin-based company that invented the product. They are marketing FlameDisk as “more eco-friendly than charcoal and lighter fluid because it features renewable ethanol. Ethanol is extremely clean burning and generates 90% fewer pollutants than charcoal. The FlameDisk®’s aluminum casing is also recyclable.”
“We buy our ethanol from an ethanol manufacturer in 200 proof,” said Sologear president Chad Sorenson. “Then we convert it from a liquid into a solid with a special chemical process that we’ve developed. Nothing like this has ever been done to my knowledge.”
Each FlameDisk utilizes one pint of domestically produced ethanol, which makes it a new market for the fuel, albeit a small one. “Obviously, the largest volume consumer of ethanol is the transportation industry and we’d have to go a long way to cut into those volumes,” Sorenson said. “But it has a lot of significant potential with about 3.8 billion grilling occasions in the U.S. every year and we are already selling product overseas so we think over time this could be a significant new use of ethanol that may have not been considered prior to this.”
