How does your expected 50-60% energy efficiency compare to the current energy efficiency of oil extraction? Extraction and especially refinement must be pretty inefficient. How do the end to end costs compare, and why do they fall the way they do?
Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
91–100 of 589 posts
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no waste. The only inputs are water, CO2, and electricity. The only outputs are fuel and oxygen.
With respect, that answer skirts the question of what happens to the water. You said you're using the nanotube membrane to separate petro products from the water. What do you do with the water left over? What state is the water in when the process is complete? Potable? In need of treatment by traditional water treatment facilities?
If water is an input and not an output, that implies it's consumed, not left over.
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#93> please excuse if I’m not able to go too far into details like our piping and instrumentation design, or other really specific things we wouldn’t want to help competitors with.
"I'll save the planet and my children only if we get super rich"
Is this peak capitalism ?
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#94Are you having to choose specific production areas to get effective economics for electricity? E.g., are you expecting to have to scale up a plant near cheap electricity like hydro?
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no waste. The only inputs are water, CO2, and electricity. The only outputs are fuel and oxygen.
With respect, that answer skirts the question of what happens to the water. You said you're using the nanotube membrane to separate petro products from the water. What do you do with the water left over? What state is the water in when the process is complete? Potable? In need of treatment by traditional water treatment facilities?
The water becomes the fuel. The hydrogen combines with the carbon in CO2 to form hydrocarbons, while the oxygen combines with itself to form molecular oxygen.
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no waste. The only inputs are water, CO2, and electricity. The only outputs are fuel and oxygen.
With respect, that answer skirts the question of what happens to the water. You said you're using the nanotube membrane to separate petro products from the water. What do you do with the water left over? What state is the water in when the process is complete? Potable? In need of treatment by traditional water treatment facilities?
If the inputs are truly CO2 and electricity, and 100% gets converted to usable hydrocarbons, then there's no waste water; the catalyst and water remain behind.
Assuming some water is lost due to electrolysis, you can top it off over time.
If the catalyst breaks down, or some undesired reaction limits efficiency (i.e. generation of perioxide or other undesired chemicals that degrade or react with the membrane, electrodes, catalyst, etc) then I think there might be some treatment or maintenance necessary.
However, none of this sounds remotely as bad as the treatment needed in the production of petrochemicals or lithium batteries or recycling.
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
California electricity is only 1% coal. 52% is natural gas and 40% is carbon-free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California . Most growth is in renewables.
The world is bigger than just California, and I thought that SV startups target "world dominance" by default :)
Most advanced economies are phasing out coal. Worldwide it's less than 30% of power generation.
Also, fuel is fairly transportable. You can produce the fuel wherever renewable electricity is most available, and sell it worldwide. The economics are comparable to aluminum, where a large fraction of the world's supply is produced adjacent to geothermal power stations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland#Aluminium
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
>What would be the point of converting the carbon dioxide to alcohol to gasoline and spending electricity to do it? At a minimum you could just pump at the alcohol stage. Sounds like a great idea! My general point is that zero carbon energy sources like wind and solar are at least mildly zero sum, and creating brand new load on them would likely just result in capacity moving over to other producers like natural gas…
We'll need a lot more wind and solar, so Prometheus will drive the expansion of these. We'll start out taking intermittent power that's low cost (wind at midnight, for example), but will soon have resources built for us to expand. This will be good for displacing other fossil fuel use (other than transportation), as we will be increasing the availability of renewable power, and also solving the problem of being able…
Wouldn't you have to really be paying above market rates to "drive" the expansion of renewables? Any thoughts about essentially building/running your own renewable power facilities?
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#99Is this something that could be turned into a consumer-scale machine? I understand a lot of the high fuel cost on islands is simply from shipping the fuel there - producing it on site with this tech would be a huge benefit.
Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plastics! Zero-carbon plastics would be great. Pull CO2 from the air, mix with water and wind/solar elec and product bags, phones etc!
The thought is kind of horrifying, but you could even make it a closed process - send your old phone to the factory, where it's burned to produce the plastics for your new phone.
That would open up a pretty good avenue for "recycling" then, and could possibly reduce waste plastic in the environment