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A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

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271–280 of 291 posts

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#271

This will be nice for legacy cars, but I would prefer my Tesla to pretty much any ICE car. Even if it was running on solar powered gasoline. The quiet, the torque, the instantaneous acceleration.

Bragging about your luxury car that costs more than my home wins you no friends, and is not even on topic.

Teslas start at $35k now. Wish I could buy a home for that price.

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#272
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some buses need long range, such as that from Munich to Baku. That's not the common case: the common case is more like line 59 in Munich, whose route is about 14km long. A lot more people take the 59 to work than take the bus towards Baku. Trucks: There are different kinds, but you can separate them into "ones that could be replaced by trains" and "ones that don't really need long range" and not be very wrong. There…

Presumably the bus running on line 59 doesn't run once a day; it makes lots of loops back and forth on line 59. Electric charging is not so fast that you can do it in the short amount of time that buses are required to turn around, which is usually measured in minutes. A rail network rarely has capacity for both decent freight (America) and decent passenger service (Europe). There are some exceptions to this rule, li…

Are you saying that the 59 can't be electric because then it would have to wait empty at its two destinations for twenty minutes instead of ten before starting its next route, and that's impossible?

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#273
post #257
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have reviewed the original paper which from which the "$94-$232" estimate is obtained. You can find it here: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3 My comments are as follows: 1. Obviously, this is not the current cost, but an estimate for a hypothetical future plant. 2. You can get wildly differing estimates through a series of small discrepancies in the assumptions. Comparing the provided estim…

Don't forget that there are also low temperature DAC routes that can use waste heat (climeworks, global thermostat, antecy, skytree). If you get the heat for free you only need energy for your fans. This drastically reduces the price. There are some good papers that do proper cost analysis on DAC. 100$ or lower is within range in a decade. I'm not in front of my computer now but if your interested I'll send the paper…

That would be great, my "anon" email is in my profile.

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#274
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Easier initially... Then start with point sources initially. Considering a good portion of transportation and basically all of the heating can be replaced by electricity directly, you will not need to go beyond point sources anyway.

There is a much more efficient way to deal with point sources, if you have a clean energy source in their neighborhood: just shut them down and replace the energy they provide with the clean energy you would use to scrub the CO2 from the air.

Yes, sometimes this is practicable. But many locations do not have sufficient renewable energy available, and nuclear has become unpalatable for a variety of reasons.

Scrubbing CO2 from boiler or turbine exhaust takes a small fraction (5%-ish) of the energy needed to convert it into fuel. If the source is a power plant, the CO2 can be captured at a cost of efficiency penalty of around 10%.

Once it is captured, storing and transporting CO2 to a location with abundant clean energy is also relatively simple.

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#275
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point of that is not to capture the carbon but to utilize it as fuel. >If you are capturing carbon, you might as well do it in a form where you can actually utilize it for fuel. Do you understand that the Prometheus proposes to first capture the carbon and then convert it to fuel? I have no objection to the "convert it to fuel" part. Just to the capture from atmosphere, which is the most inefficient way.

I understand you perfectly. I just don't agree with a single sentence of it. The semantics of carbon capture for you seem to mean to capture some (tiny) percentage of the absolutely epic levels of fossil carbon we put into it today. The point of Prometeus is to take no fossil carbon whatsoever (0%) and create the fuel directly from the CO2 already in the air and indeed put it back there when it is burned. It's not ca…

>I understand you perfectly.

I don't think so.

>I just don't agree with a single sentence of it.... The more costly fossil fuel gets, the more attractive Prometheus gets. As it is, they seem to be claiming to be cost effective as is.

Okay. Invest in Prometheus. I think the net result will be an increase in CO2 emissions, because all the activity will fail to deliver any viable atmospheric CO2 capture plants, ever. Let's check on this say 20 years from now. If I'm right, buy me a beer.

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#276
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article has nothing to do with carbon recapture. The gasoline produced from carbon is then intended for burn... This is simply an alternative electricity/power storage mechanism. But great to reduce emissions but is not intended for negative emissions (for which there is other tech)

> The gasoline produced from carbon is then intended for burn... If it's captured from the atmosphere and then burnt then surely it's zero-sum (apart from the energy cost of capture). Is this not better than releasing historically captured fossil fuels with a larger net increase in atmospheric levels? If the capturing process is net-negative in terms of CO2 emmissions then perhaps we could invest in capturing more th…

Plenty of projects for harvesting CO2 getting prototyped -- and my point is the OP is not one of them. If the purpose is just storage and not making fuel, there are other ways (like liquid CO2).

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot see how you could take CO2 and make gasoline out of it using less energy than what the gasoline contains. At best, you will need to supply that energy via something like solar panels. Then it becomes a question of efficiency: how many Watts of gasoline can you produce per Watt of electricity you have? My guess is, not many.

It can still be competitive with things like tar-sand extraction, which takes more energy than you get out of the oil. It's only economically viable because energy in gasoline/oil form is more valuable than the energy content itself, due to it's ease of transfer. Air sequestration might be a viable fuel source in regions where import costs of fuel are high, but energy is cheap.

This is false, the net energy is positive for tar sands it is just less than for conventional oil extraction.

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#278
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the recharge time for that motorcycle?

They're a little cagey about that ( https://www.zeromotorcycles.com/charging/ ) but it looks like it can fast charge in ~1hr and charge off a standard wall outlet "overnight".

Right. I'd think a bike would charge quickly.

Tesla S require 4h45m at 240V/90a, and 52 hours on 110v (prusumably 20a).

https://www.cars.com/articles/2013/11/how-quickly-does-the-t...

Both range and recover matter.

Re: A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)

#279
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the bus running on line 59 doesn't run once a day; it makes lots of loops back and forth on line 59. Electric charging is not so fast that you can do it in the short amount of time that buses are required to turn around, which is usually measured in minutes. A rail network rarely has capacity for both decent freight (America) and decent passenger service (Europe). There are some exceptions to this rule, li…

Are you saying that the 59 can't be electric because then it would have to wait empty at its two destinations for twenty minutes instead of ten before starting its next route, and that's impossible?

Nothing is impossible, but it's certainly more difficult.

If charging time is twenty minutes and the bus needs to be out in ten, you need two additional buses on standby to maintain the current schedule (one for each direction.) Except you need more than two, because transit agencies keep a "spare factor" of buses in case a bus breaks down or is otherwise unexpectedly available, and so you probably need ~2.2 buses for this single route.

Scale this up across an entire bus network and that could easily be a hundred or two additional buses. And when you're talking about increasing the fleet by that much, you need to consider storage space for said buses. It's incredibly hard to site bus depots, because you want to minimize the distance from the depot to the start of the line, but you also have to consider the price of land and whether or not a land parcel's best use is a parking lot for buses. And this is before you consider that very few people want a parking lot they can't use as a neighbor.

And so what seems to be a small problem can very quickly snowball into a large one. Public transit agencies aren't exactly flush with cash to buy a larger fleet than otherwise necessary, or land to store said larger fleet. And even if they had this money, is it best spent going electric? Money that is spent going electric is money not being used to keep the fare down or boost services.

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