Interview with Tom Quinn

CEO and President of E-Fuel Corporation

Tom Quinn is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He grew up in California and lived in the same Neighborhood as Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs of Apple. A prolific Inventor he is the former president of Novell Corporation and is the inventor of the Inertia graphic control system – motion controller technology that formed the basis of the successful Nintendo Wii toys and is and is now found in every phone. After selling his company in 2008 he decided that the energy field was the one he was most interested in because it is at the center of climate change. Quinn, who is an advisor on climate change to President Joe Biden - has invented an entirely new system of power generation that he says uses agriculturally grown products to produce energy from the distillation of sugar in naturally grown plants. He calls this E-Fuel.

Quinn’s system is called “the Rejected Energy Reactor” which makes use of “rejected energy” otherwise known as waste heat. These are special cogeneration units which he believes will reduce 77% of the world’s Carbon Dioxide emissions. The by-products of his specially designed co-generation system – which will run 24/7 and be base power - are not carbon soot but pure distilled water and electricity. He believes that this will change the world within five years. People who doubt him should remember that he was the principal inventor of the data storage system we now call “the cloud”.

Quinn is working with Keoni Ford, Scotty Wong, Scotty Reis-Moniz, and Alika Watts in Waianae on what he describes as “a new and revolutionary System”. Although he gets inquiries about his system from all over the world, he believes that Hawaii, with its high electricity costs, is the ideal place to demonstrate on a local level that the world can free itself from dependence on fossil fuel.

He came to speak at the 8th Annual Bio-Economy Forum which was held August 17th and August 18th, 2022 at the Hawaii State Capitol.

Interview August 19, 2022

Q: Tom thank you for taking the time to speak with us. What brought you to Hawaii

Tom: I came to Hawaii at the invitation of Keoni Ford and Scotty Wong. I met the Native Hawaiian people and they are very interested in my E-Fuel technology. I am appreciative of the people in the Hawaii State Legislature and State government who are supporting the use of E-Fuel technology in a meaningful way.

Q: What year were you born and how did you get into the computer business?

Tom: I was born in San Jose California in 1954. My father and mother were from New York. My Dad was in the Navy and decided to get out of the service and start a small television repair shop. I was working with my Dad from the age of 10 fixing TVs and with my Dad’s brothers fixing cars. This was the way I was introduced to electronics and mechanical systems.

Q: You went to public school or private school?

Tom: I went to public school in Sunnyvale through high school.

Q: Then you went to college

Tom: I went to De-Anza College (in Cupertino) for two years and majored in political science but I didn’t like it. I was working for Al Schugart at Seagate Systems. Schugart helped develop Memorex and the disc storage system. His company Seagate Technology was the world’s largest developer of disk drives in the world. The company was later bought by Xerox. I was making too much money to want to go to college.  I come from a family of people who make things and create things and we have a strong ethic.

When I was young, my father was recruited by Lockheed. But he still kept his television repair business. He would leave home early in the morning, go to work at the Lockheed plant, and then come home and go back to work on the TVs in the shop. He worked every day repairing TVs. I grew up in Silicon Valley with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. We all had parents that worked in start-ups and we were bred for technology and changing things. We weren’t so much into going to college. We wanted to create something new.

When Steve Jobs was alive he said that he would never require people who applied for work at Apple to have college degrees. He said that it was important for people to have ideas and be able to do things. He said, “Think Different”. When I had my own companies I would also look for people not with PhDs but who were capable of doing things. Even today at Apple the CEO Tim Cook has said people do not have to have college degrees to work there.

When I developed the inertia traffic control that was later used in Nintendo Wii games and is now in every phone the first prototypes were the size of a coffee can. Because at that time gyroscopes were that way. We had guys from Teledyne who were the biggest gyroscope makers look at what we were doing and they said ‘You will never make it!’ When I heard that I thought that’s it we are going to make this happen. It’s going to succeed and it did.

When I went to school in the 80s everybody had punch cards that they used to enter data into big centralized computers and when the computers went down. People didn’t have access to information. I thought we should mirror the information people get on small computers so that multiple computers could process the same information but in different locations. That was Novell and that idea became what we call now the cloud. Then I sold that company and I developed the motion sensor. The inertia graphic control system takes linear movement onto graphic movement on a screen and rotation. First, it was used in toys like Wiii. Nowadays it’s on every phone and when you drive a car it records your linear movement.

I think it used to be that everybody felt that you had to go to college to succeed but now 40% of people go out and learn on their own.

Q: How did you start the e-fuel business

Tom: I thought energy was not going in the right direction.

Q: What Is Rejected Energy?

Tom: Rejected energy is basically heat. They used to call this waste heat that can’t be used as energy. Coal for example is 2/3 wasted. But the idea that it is waste heat is incorrect. The law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be destroyed or created. Rejected energy is simply energy that is not being used.

This means that for every 3 barrels of oil used to produce mechanical energy two barrels are rejected energy. Mechanical energy is everything that is being manufactured and the biggest sources of this rejected energy are fuel and power generation.

So I said why power the world with something so grossly inefficient? In contrast to petroleum which is 1/3 efficient why not go instead to the distillation of sugar which is 100% heat?

This became my micro-fueler a waste-to-energy converter.  

Q: How does it work?

Tom: When we use rejected energy we can use the old saying “One man’s waste is another man’s treasure.” We can take any kind of agricultural waste and turn it into ethanol fuel that can be run in any vehicle. It can also power our generator which we call our grid buster.me. It creates enough electricity to power your home, creates heat for the distillation process, and creates fuel for your car.

We start with agricultural products like hemp, we use a machine that cuts it into small pieces turns it into a powder puts it in four tanks, and then uses the heat of the sun and allows it to ferment.

Over the last 12 years, the amount of rejected energy has increased .3% so things are getting less efficient, not more efficient. We can’t just stop using carbon-based fuels because almost everything depends on it. E-fuel has found a way to consume existing carbon and consume it so it will be able to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere.

What we plan to do is take feedstock and deliver the biomass to reactor converters all over the world and create ethanol with it 24/7.

But while we cannot simply stop using carbon-based fuels (because almost every commercial and industrial product depends on it), E-Fuel has found an aggressive innovative way to consume it that will begin cooling the planet quickly. In Hawaii, we are going to use the power we generate to create dry ice – which is otherwise too expensive to make.

With ethanol, if you make use of 3 barrels you consume 3 barrels. When you use rejected energy it becomes carbon negative and you are producing distilled water and mechanical energy.

Q: How will it plug into the grid?

Tom: First of all the grid is the most dangerous thing. Geo Magnetic bursts from the sun can cause it to explode. We have to have distributed energy. Our RER reactors can be connected one to another and power individual homes. One has to think of old-fashioned mainframe computers where programmers had to keypunch data. When the mainframe went down everything went down. When we were at Novell we said let’s mirror individual computers so that everything has a backup. That became the cloud. We need to do something similar with power. Everybody at home should have their own power system. Microfuellers are going to replace the grid and oil refineries in the way that microcomputers replaced mainframe computers

Q: How will it cool the planet?

Tom: If we can replace the refineries and chemical industry processors with this technology we will cool down the planet very fast because there will be significantly less heat released into the atmosphere.

Q: And what happens to the water by-product?

Tom: The water by-product contains carbon and is sold to growers as a replacement for the chemical Nitrogen which is an oil-based product brought in to be used as fertilizer.

Q: How much does the system cost?

Tom: Customers will be charged for the initial installation and then a competitive monthly energy rate price.

Q: How do you deal with criticism that this cannot be successful?

Tom: When you do something different and it starts impacting the market. That’s when the knives come out. It’s to be expected.

Thank you