The days of loud, obnoxious motorsport may well be coming to an end, with Honda announcing that they will be debuting their 100% ethanol powered V8 engines at the Gold Coast Indy race in October.

The ethanol engines use a plant-based fuel which burns cleanly with less air pollution, as opposed to the traditional methanol engines used by Indy cars. Yet they still manage to squeeze out the performance, with cars capable of hitting 160kph in less than three seconds.

Generally ethanol isn't considered to be a suitable replacement for fossil fuels as it requires vast amounts of plant life to convert into fuel, and that can eat into the plants being used to feed us. However, last year Honda uncovered a tech that can just convert the inedible bits of food into fuel, kind of like Mr Fusion in the Back To The Future II DeLorean (or not).

Hopefully we'll see this tech develop into the consumer (and time travel) space.

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Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies have launched the the Bio Energy Discovery Kit, a product that they are calling "the fuel cell industry's first direct ethanol product." The kit directly converts alcohol into electricity and can run non-stop for days on end. The purpose of the kit is to introduce fuel cell technology to students, scientists, teachers and engineers using a simple gadget that is easy to understand.

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E-Fuel's MicroFueler, the home-based ethanol production system that makes gas from sugar or stale beer, was unveiled for the first time today in New York. E-Fuel says it will now take preorders for the US$10,000 system, and will ship it by the end of the year. As you can see, it's not the smallest thing—no wonder the original image of it only showed a corner. Given its bulk and its price, what makes investing in this particular ethanol machine really worth it?

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The dream of a home ethanol pump has been realised, says the New York Times, thanks to inventor named Floyd S. Butterfield. One of the world's only celebrated non-hillbilly still-makers, Butterfield has invented the $10,000 E-Fuel 100 MicroFueler, a gadget that combines heaps of sugar and a sprinkling of yeast to ferment an alcoholic brew which it then distills into ethanol. The notion is that, as long as the price of sugar stays relatively low, it could cost about $1 per gallon to make the fuel. It's even cheaper when you put un-drunk stale beer in the system: Since the fermentation is done, all it takes is the electricity to distill the beer into scotch whiskey fuel for your car.

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Karl Jacob, an ex-Microsoft employee, has the world's fastest ethanol-based car. He took his run-of-the-mill Dodge Viper and had it converted from a regular gas guzzling monster to an ethanol chugger. While Jacob didn't drive the car himself, a driver from Super Viper hit 218 mph in July, a top speed record for an ethanol-based car during a standing mile. How much did this conversion end up costing Jacob? A paltry $200,000. [CNet]