221–230 of 589 posts
Could you provide some more detail on how these inputs are obtained? How much CO2 are you able to extract over a day? Do the input rates suffer from depleting the accessible CO2 from the local airspace in the same way that plants do?
How could the math possibly work out on this? If a gallon of gas holds 33.70 kWh of energy, and you can get cheap electricity for $0.1/kWh, you're looking at $3.37/gallon if you have a magical process that converts with 100% efficiency. Even if you hit your efficiency goal, which would be impressive, who is paying $7/gallon for gas? Just buy an electric car. This can only possibly be useful when all of the oil is gon…
In the UK, people pay approx $6 per gallon for gasoline.
Of course any replacement of fossil fuels is a great goal, but just curious where you see this going at scale, if it were wildly successful? It seems like if you or others were able to scale this up massively, you'd run into unit economics issues as demand for the required renewable electricity outpaced supply, raising the price.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10 [2] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going to be. Electric cars can't compete against gasoline cars until the price hits about $6/gallon. And considering that crude prices are relatively low, but gas in CA is almost $4/gallon in the Bay Area, it doesn't take much time for normal rates to hit $6/gallon in the next 10 years or so. At that price, it becomes more economic and that's the time frame…
> gas in CA is almost $4/gallon in the Bay Area And the national average (today) is $2.95, you might as well compare Hawaii and Alaska which are also economic islands. >it doesn't take much time for normal rates to hit $6/gallon in the next 10 years or so. The national average 10 years ago was $2.45, which is $2.90 accounting for inflation. The only way gas hits $6 is if we have a second Great Inflation or massive po…
By that measure, Florida or Oregon would be economic islands due to their anomalous taxes.
You've elsewhere quoted 60 kWh per gallon of renewable gasoline. The US consumed 391.40 million gallons per day on average in 2018 [1], and concurrently had generation capacity for 1.153 billion kWh per day from non-hydroelectric renewable sources [2]. That suggests that full replacement of current gasoline usage would require ~23.48 billion kWh per day, which far outpaces what is currently available. Of course any r…
Every new technology goes through a refinement cycle where costs & resources are reduced, and I would assume the same is possible here.
I read in the Bloomberg article that the machine itself hasn't yet created "enough gasoline to power his Golf even a single mile". I assume you've already made enough to power an engine in the separate steps? How long before you think you'd be able to make a video taking gas from the machine and pouring it into a tank?
We are doing the system shakedown now, and have started making fuel. We'd like to do a demo in the next few months, as long as it doesn't divert us from our timeline. Everything we're doing has been demonstrated separately, including the CNT membrane alcohol extraction, so there isn't really a technical risk here. Everything we need to do now is focused on proving the economics.
To make combustible fuel from solar energy is crazy. The cost of such fuel is almost zero from the large oil reserves: the price you see is carefully calculated to maximize profits and to politically permit less efficient suppliers to survive and profit acceptably: but any synfuel business can be wiped out any time. At a point where we are trying for a renewable electric ecosystem, to take its product, and turn it in…
...if you ignore the costs that exist in the form of environmental externalities, a behavior which is increasingly being recognized as an existential threat to human civilization.
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.
If this process produces a specific hydrocarbon or class of hydrocarbon, it is feasible that common byproducts of combustion will not appear with their fuels.