Running on Empty?
Tom Quinn’s unconventional idea of a microfuel station in every garage sounds dandy indeed—the devil, however, is in the details
Dan
Neil
Shout
Tom Quinn worries me. I’m interviewing the affable 55-year-old founder and chief executive of E-Fuel, and he’s smiling, and I’m smiling, and all the while I’m thinking, This guy is nuts. Innovation, like evolution, is a process whereby occasional and incremental success emerges out of a grinding narrative of failure. Quinn—a serial innovator, with the bank account to prove it—seems determined to skip the messy part.
His company represents a “disruptive technology” in the field of transportation energy. But from everything I know about the problem of energy and personal mobility, all the easy answers have been taken. I see some major holes in his plotline, and I wonder if it’s me or him who’s not getting it. And where,exactly, does the work of innovator end and salesman begin?
After making his bones in high-tech entrepreneurship—including the invention of the motion-sensing controller in the Wii handset—Quinn was seeking his next venture when, in 2006, he was seduced by the promise of ethanol, that most problematic of biofuels, the elixir vitae of Midwest corn interests and energy charlatans.
“I saw a speech Henry Ford gave in 1916, warning America not to go on fossil fuel,” Quinn says, pointing out that Ford’s Model T was designed to run on ethanol (and I note in my head, Not exactly). “In order to make a difference in the energy system, you can’t just do the components. You have to change the paradigm.”
Quinn’s big idea is the MicroFueler, a portable, home-size ethanol microrefinery consisting of a 250-gallon tank and a high-tech still and fuel pump that together are about the size of a conventional gas-station pump. The plan calls for E-Fuel distributors to collect organic waste from local sources and process it into a liquid feedstock, which would then be delivered to customers’ MicroFuelers. Ethanol produced with organic waste would seem more energy efficient than that made from corn, which requires huge inputs of fossil fuel (in the form of petroleum-based fertilizer), as well as unseemly amounts of water and arable land—see the whole food-versus-fuel debate. “Corn ethanol is stupid,” says Quinn. On that we’re agreed.
What kind of organic waste? This is where I see the invisible crazy imps dancing around Quinn’s head. “All kinds,” he says, “everything from out-of-date soda and wine to beer yeast to leaves and grass clippings.”
If only. To extract ethanol from leaves, grasses, agricultural waste and other dry biomass, you must break down the cellulose into sugar—typically with specially trained enzymes—in very large and complex refineries that economize scale. E-Fuel doesn’t have such a facility and so is missing a rather large piece of the cellulosic ethanol puzzle. If you put leaves into the MicroFueler tank, you’d get only wet leaves.
Quinn knows this, and he knows I know it, so why are we having this twigs-and-leaves talk? I grow worried.
He tells me his first love book-wise was a biography on Thomas Edison—fitting for a man disposed to far-fetched, big-return inventioneering. “I loved the movie where he was played by Mickey Rooney [Young Tom Edison]. I loved that he would create something that would add to life.” And yet Quinn takes a different approach than Edison, who laid siege to a problem with untold iterations and an army of exploitable young minds. In football terms, Edison played a grinding ground game, while Quinn is more likely to throw the Hail Mary rainbow spiral to the end zone on every down.
For now, Quinn and his Southern California distributor, Chris Ursitti, are collecting liquid waste from breweries, winemakers and the Sunny Delight company and processing it at a facility in Paso Robles. In the future, sources of liquid organic waste could include chemical plants, hospitals and bars. Quinn says one of his company’s breakthroughs was to create a national database of entities that would otherwise pay waste handlers to haul off this stuff.
Realistically, how many consumers want to stick it to the man badly enough to plop down $10,000 on a portable ethanol station?
The resulting feedstock for customers would be inherently rich in alcohol and high in sugar. This part of Quinn’s chemistry seems reasonable. High-sugar liquids require little care and feeding to ferment ethanol, and alcoholic-beverage waste would already have a high percentage of alcohol. The MicroFueler would probably make short work of such organic fuel. The only byproduct would be an unspecified amount of “stillage.”
Then there is the matter of scale. How much of this stuff is out there? Quinn says the U.S. disposes of 50 billion gallons of organic waste per year. Fifty billion gallons of bad fruit juice and old beer? Our annual beer production is only 6 billion gallons. Where are these rivers of easily fermented liquid biofuels? If this material is so gravid with potential energy, why aren’t companies exploiting it themselves? I grow more worried.
In on the ground floor of the Silicon Valley boom, Quinn became rich when he cashed out of Novell in the early ’80s. Success, he says, “is like a drug.”
His riches make it hard to dismiss him as an energy-snake-oil salesman. Quinn simply doesn’t need the money. He seems sincere in his environmentalism. “I’m worried about my kids,” he says. He also likes to invoke ethanol as a way to strike back at Big Oil.
Realistically, though, how many consumers want to stick it to the man badly enough to plop down $10,000 on a portable ethanol station? (A 50 percent federal tax credit is supposed to be available, but consult your accountant before you buy.) Meanwhile, the MicroFueler’s return on investment seems shaky. I won’t drag you through the arithmetic, but a driver using 750 gallons of MicroFueler-supplied E100 annually would not break even for about 20 years (assuming $3-per-gallon gas, which I grant is not a good longitudinal assumption). Quinn also has some truly wrongheaded ideas about ethanol in internal-combustion engines. Most troublesome is his blithe assertion that “all cars can run on ethanol.”
Yes, cars can run on a light blend of ethanol—such as the government-mandated 10 percent, or E10—but they have to be modified to cope with ethanol-rich fuel mixtures (so-called flex-fuel vehicles). And engine and fuel-system damage is not uncommon. High-ethanol fuel blends perform badly in cool, not even cold, weather. Don’t look for a MicroFueler at your parents’ house in Vermont.
Quinn’s other notion is that ethanol offers fuel economy—it doesn’t. Ethanol has 34 percent lower energy content per unit of volume than gasoline; consequently, E85-fueled cars’ mileage drops by about a third. E100, such as from the MicroFueler, can only perform worse.
Quinn likes to cite ethanol’s higher octane rating—which is true but irrelevant, unless you radically raise your car’s engine-compression ratio from 10:1 to, let’s say, 17:1. Here’s your wrench—go for it.
To the extent Quinn knows the downside of ethanol and is not saying, he’s a salesman. To the extent he thinks he’s right and a century of chemical and automotive engineering wrong, he’s only a product of his Silicon Valley upbringing, where the glamour of intuition—the road-to-Damascus light of innovation—paid off better than long hours making incremental improvements to the status quo, per Ford and Edison.
“You have to have an ego,” he says. “Ego protects you. Ego helps you sleep at night.”
DAN NEIL won a Pulitzer as automobile critic for the L.A. Times. He is currently driving similar coverage at the Wall Street Journal.
See Tom Quinn's open letter to Dan Neil, rebutting some of the writer's contentionsCategories: Living Green / Risky Business / Technology
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It is interesting to note that Quinn's response to the article is full of emotional rhetoric and does not address two very concrete issues:
- ethanol does NOT provide increase in fuel economy (it simply cannot), and
- the benefits of high equivalent octane number of ethanol cannot be used without extensive engine modifications (I am not sure about 17:1 compression ratio, but it should definitely be increased to 12-15:1). Anyone familiar with building racing engines knows how easy and cheap that is.
Posted by: Peter M | 05/04/2010 at 10:05 AM
It always amazes me how much of the cost gets left on the floor when the salesman is telling me how much I will save by purchasing his products.
Is this a good idea? Sure. Is it a good idea economically?
I still have to find $12,999 cash to purchase the item.
Then I have to buy the "ingredients" for the item each month for the life of machine.
Next I have to pay to transport these secret sauce parts to my house and pay store them.
Then I am pretty sure this "factory in my garage" will consume electricity. (I could put up another $2,000 for solar panels to run it I guess.)
I am pretty sure my Home Insurance carrier, let alone the city zoning, does not allow me to store 250+ gallons of flammable liquids at my residence.
What happens when there is a spill? How much will the Hazmat team bill cost me?
Convert to E85? About $1,000 ( the kit is about $500, then labor for the rest.)
My 2004 F-150 gets 18.5 MPG on good Gasoline, 16.5 MPG on 10% Ethanal and it will get about, 11.5 MPG on Ethanol. That 65% more gallons of fuel I need to burn.
If half of my fuel purchases are done away from my house then that cuts the efficiency of a home station by half or increases the cost by two fold.
If i buy this many pump i have to assign any "CARBON REDUCTION CREDIT ASSIGNMENT" to his company. Yes, #4 in his license Agreement.
Oh, and there is the $10 a month subscription fee Pay to him to use the machine.
And was it only me who notice the $0.25 a gallon Fee for using my $12,999 station?
Yes, some of the costs are waived the first year of placement.
Then there are repairs and maintenance of all and sundry related equipment.
Let's see over 10 years I would guess that I could spend
$12,999 for the pump
$2,000 for a solar panel
$1,200 for 10 years of fees
$5,000 in pump per gallon charges
$2,000 to convert my 2 cars
Unknown tax savings
Unknown repair cost
$23,200 for my 2 cars for 10 years compared to $48,000 for gasoline at $3 per gallon
What's missing here? Oh, right the secret ingredients to run the fermentation pump. 12 pounds of Sugar per gallon of Ethanol. So I would need 24,000 pounds to make 2,000 gallons. I would buy in 25 pound bags to make it usable. (That is about the size of large Dump truck pile. about 8 Cubic Yards) Did anyone mention where i dispose of the waste by products?
At $1 a pound I would need to spend $24K a year on sugar.
Even if i got that down to 10 cents a pound, thats $24,000 over 10 years on "Sugars"
So, its a wash, $48,000 for the ethanol pump or $48,000 for the gasoline.
Someone remind me again, where am I saving money?
Posted by: Race Vanderdecken | 05/14/2010 at 10:44 AM
what about a CNG pump in every house. Propane is already available in every house, we use it every day, There's a gas line in every house and very seldom you hear of an explosion, the gas company has already the technology. and is cheaper than Gasoline,Gas is wasted and burned up on every oil refinery and oil field, like a waste, its cleaner then oil and has no CO2, just burns into h20, and other countries such as Italy and South America have been using it for the last 20 years massively!
Posted by: Gustennisplyr | 05/19/2010 at 10:55 AM
Burning fuel is caveman. I just bought an electric car and just plug it in. No fuel station or anything, just a standard plug in my garage. Cost me 12k, it'll last forever, batteries are already cheaper to replace in 10 years. The only bad part is that the company doesn't make very many of them so not everyone can go out and buy one.
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