As if US ethanol producers didn't have enough to worry about, the man behind the design of Nintendo's popular wii game controller, Thomas Quinn, says his E-Fuel Corp has invented a device that will make ethanol for consumers right in their own homes.
The first shipments of the so-called MicroFueler are expected this month. After "the world's first home ethanol system" arrives, the customer's "sole task" is "to simply fill their vehicles with E-Fuel100 ethanol," according to an E-Fuel press release. The machine makes up to 35 gallons of ethanol per week and can double that using alcohol as feedstock.
The MicroFueler can even power a home or business by fueling E-Fuel's optional GridBuster electric generator.
That all sounds great for consumers and while the almost $10,000 MicroFueler price tag is nothing to sneeze at, it is nowhere near the millions of dollars needed to build an ethanol plant.
The machine also eliminates the need for pricey infrastructure improvements like the $3.5 billion pipeline being studied to bring ethanol from the Midwest to East Coast. And forget about constructing new terminals for blending and refiner-marketer squabbles over blendstock availability -- the MicroFueler splash blends ethanol with gasoline right in a car's gas tank.
Quinn, a California-based entrepreneur, has said the MicroFueler will be the personal computer of its day. The PC marked a paradigm shift that allowed consumers to break the chains of mainframes and use a computer when and how they liked. Now the MicroFueler will allow consumers to break the chains of the oil industry, and at the same time the ethanol industry, by making their own fuel.
Quinn says big ethanol is based on an unsustainable business model. Unlike US commercial ethanol production, "E-Fuel's business model doesn't require government subsidies to survive," said Quinn in an e-mail.
Commercial ethanol cannot tap all the local organic waste that is available, he said. "In the US alone, E-Fuel estimates there are over 55 billion gallons of organic waste each year that can be used for efuel100 production," he said. Commercial ethanol production "must be sold and distributed by the oil industry infrastructure, which has no incentive to have them succeed. Every year Americans pay billions of dollars to keep this flawed energy distribution system alive."
Quinn expects more than 10,000 MicroFuelers to be sold over the next 12 months. Distributors are lined up in the US, Europe and Japan.
Is big ethanol worried about this small start-up with such big plans? Not yet.
"As is the case with energy technologies, we will need them all and the market will decide which ones succeed and which ones fail," said Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuel Association, which lobbies on behalf of corn-based ethanol producers. "If there is a market for home fueling, than the MicroFueler will be successful."
If the popularity of Nintendo's wii is any indication, the MicroFueler will be very successful.
Can a game of Ethanol Hero be far behind?
The PC revolution is not the correct analogy. The telephone revolution is more apt. First these will be rolled out to the service industry (i.e. gas stations), but it is now feasible to make unattended gas microstations, like neighborhood payphones were before it was less common for a household to have a telephone. Next, the price will come down so radically that everybody will have one in their garage, where they can dump their compost and yard waste to make fuel, just as ultimately telephones became ubiquitous.