Some gullible people gave these guys a whole lot of money:
E-Fuel, a privately held, Los Gatos-based developer of technology for producing ethanol at home, has raised $2.6 million in venture debt, the company disclosed in a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
To catch you up, E-Fuel is a company that has developed an all-in-one, personal use, miniature ethanol plant. They’ve been peddling this thing for years, and my head hit the desk this morning when I found out they’re still taking money from people. Here’s the latest claim:
The MicroFusion Reactor operates as a continuous process, in which every 2 minutes the cellulosic material in the reactor’s chamber is completely processed and ready for fuelprocessing. Its method of wood hydrolysis dissolves any wood or other cellulosic agricultural material in a manner that is residue free, according to E-Fuel.
The machine’s output is comprised of sugar water and lignin powder. The sugar water is fermented by the MicroFueler into ethanol, while lignin is a substance used in the pharmaceutical industry as an ingredient in various cancer-fighting drugs, among other things.
According to the company, with its reactor, ethanol production costs can be as low as $0.56 per gallon, when combined with the energy saving effects of the MicroFueler and“GridBuster,” a wet ethanol-powered generator with a heat recovery feature developed by E-Fuel.
Complete conversion of wood to fermentable sugars. In 2 minutes! Look, a lot of people have been working on figuring that out for a good 20 years. If these guys could actually do that, they would be building out hundreds of millions of gallons of wood to ethanol plant capacity as we speak, and they would be the biggest names in renewable energy. But they aren’t, because you can’t convert wood to sugars in 2 minutes in a reactor designed to go in consumers’ garages. Or in any reactor at all, for that matter, as far as I’m aware. At least not in any technically or economically feasible way.
And to ice the cake, it’s output is sugar water (that gets fermented to ethanol, that part is reasonable if they could actually get that far) and lignin powder. Lignin is kind of like the glue that holds wood together, and will be the main by-product from this system. I haven’t bothered to check if it is actually a pharmaceutical ingredient, because I can tell you right now that no one will be able to successfully sell their lignin residue to Merck.
And the final claim, a production cost of $0.56 per gallon!! That is just absurd absurd absurd. You can’t make corn ethanol for that price, and it is much, much easier to do.
I really just wanted to write this to vent, because these guys piss me off. They certainly aren’t the only people in the biofuels industry that make outlandish claims about their magic new technologies, but they are the most egregious I have ever encountered.
But I guess they’re doing something right. So ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to let you all in on a new investment opportunity! I am in possession of a bag of magical beans that, when planted in the proper location, will grow into a golden unicorn that shits rainbows. All this can be yours, for only $2.6 million!
520 Chestnut 
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