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Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

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Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#201

Post by whatshisface »

lutorm wrote: post #188
whatshisface wrote: post #163

By law, gasoline gets cut with ethanol, degrading engine performance. If I buy gas from you guys will it be legal to put 100% gasoline into my engine? If so that's a "killer app," (so to speak) for people who care about their engines, even if it is more expensive in early development stages.

Why do you say ethanol degrades performance? Ethanol is an anti-knocking agent when added to gasoline, so it actually enables higher performance.

Your engine has to be designed for it. It's a niche market I know, but some engines aren't. (Not every gasoline engine is in a car after all.)

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#202

Post by bluGill »

mrguyorama wrote: post #98
rmcginnis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Renewable power plants are not reliable producers of power. When they produce power they are the cheapest, so utilities would love to have more - but they need a backup plan for when renewable power isn't running which they have complex management schemes to deal with. Expansion of renewable energy it limited more by the power companies willingness to buy it than by ability to install more (though that is of course an issue as well).

If they can scale their process quickly (not just on-off, but to levels in between) the power company will be happy to give them a substantial discount. They can probably get power for $.03/kwh - windmills are about $.02 for profit so that is plenty of profit to pay for transmission infrastructure. Of course they have to agree to how quickly they can change their production.

This assumes they can turn off completely at 5pm when everyone gets home and jumps in the shower needing hot water. Then go to full production as they go to bed while the wind blows the best. Then drop down overnight. Then scaling up again as the sun comes up. In the late afternoon as the sun is hot they scale down to account for air conditioning. Of course they may as well shut down for maintenance in December (Christmas lights). If they can pull this off renewable energy can scale grow to be much better while taking more power plants offline. That is a big if though.

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#204

Post by [deleted] »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #182
eDISCO wrote: post #111

Interesting proposition. 1. Why would your process be more cost effective and/or efficient than the commercially available processes for alcohol production? Surely if the magic sauce is the nanotube alcohol/water separation then conventional alcohol sources from fermentation will start using it at some point and will be able to produce same fuel but cheaper and/or more efficient. Maybe you can show that [photosynthes…

I'd imagine retrofitting power plants to process their exhaust is itself an extremely expensive process. Maybe they could setup their devices around plants anyways tho.

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#205

Post by rmcginnis »

xtorol wrote: post #194

Can you elaborate on "we use zero-carbon electricity"? How far abstracted from electrical generation are you? What guarantees do you have that your electricity is provided by low/zero-carbon sources?

We're going to take the power at the renewable power plant, so we will be certain that we are getting zero carbon electricity.

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#206

Post by [deleted] »

yeukhon wrote: post #151
jyriand wrote: post #148

My two cents — change your name. Prometheus us too pretentious in my opinion. Also, Prometheus can be pronounced in different ways. Is it pronounced PromEEteus or PrometHeus? And its also ProMeth. :)

Most importantly, Prometheus is a well-known software... https://prometheus.io/

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#207

Post by bluGill »

thereisnospork wrote: post #185

If you really think the underlying economic problem with electrochemical CO2 to alcohols as fuel is the separation at the end you are in for a world of (economic) hurt. Not that improving the aforementioned separation isn't useful or valuable, its just not the lynch pin. Take a really hard look at your economics, in particular throughput and capital amortization (which scales proportionally to uptime!). Good comparis…

I hope you are wrong, but realistically I fear you are correct. It is easy to show something works in the lab, hard to make it work in the real world.

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#208

Post by aeternus »

34k5jo3i4toig wrote: post #117
monk_e_boy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To buy an electric car i need £20,000 which I don’t have. Even if I had the money or access to credit, I don’t have a parking space near my house, so I can’t charge the car. All fixable things, but will take tens of years. Let me use carbon neutral petrol

You have 20.5 years until Petrol cars are outlawed in the UK. Best get saving. Also -- this is no such thing is carbon neutral petrol.

Nothing at all is truly carbon neutral, after all a human took a breath to contemplate it.

The idea and processes behind Prometheus are still very interesting and have implications beyond the short-term focus on carbon footprint. This type of process will likely be needed to manufacture fuel on other planets.

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#209

Post by rmcginnis »

refurb wrote: post #104

Interesting timing of Derek's Lowe's post on "In the pipeline".[1] There are government levers (subsidies, tax breaks, carbon use taxes and so on) that can change the economic landscape, but the paper estimates that you’d need electrochemical efficiencies of at least 60% and electricity available at 4 cents/kilowatt-hr or better to make these ideas profitable (with the usual 30-year-amortization assumption about the…

Yes, that data is from a recent Science review article: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6438/eaav3506

I think the timing on this effort is right, from a cost of renewable power perspective, as well from a growing consensus that it is very close to being achieved. Hope to prove that soon!

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#210

Post by bluGill »

amluto wrote: post #179
rmcginnis wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the near term, we will remove the damage caused by fossil fuel use. Our fuel will burn much cleaner, so that's also helpful. In the medium to long term, cars will switch to electric, but now we'll have enough time to do that. As that happens, Prometheus will roll out new products made from CO2, like carbon negative building materials, etc. It's important to look not only at the end goal, but also the path!

Why will your fuel burn cleaner? Soot and NOx are fundamental to the combustion process. I guess you have no sulfur, which is worth something.

Different molecules burn differently. They might not be able to stop NOx, but they can make a fuel burns cleaner in an engine. We already know how to make those molecules, but it isn't practical to make gasoline that way for normal use (read 3x the price of pump gas)
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