261–270 of 589 posts
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.
It's never said explicitly and I couldn't find a question about it, but everyone talks as if we'll need solar input to power this. I assume this means the machine doesn't produce enough fuel to power itself? At any rate, amazing product. Can I (eventually) buy one of those machines or donate somewhere to make my area CO2 free?
It's never said explicitly and I couldn't find a question about it, but everyone talks as if we'll need solar input to power this. I assume this means the machine doesn't produce enough fuel to power itself? At any rate, amazing product. Can I (eventually) buy one of those machines or donate somewhere to make my area CO2 free?
Edit: Or close enough to perpetual motion that it only requires the occasional replacement of nanotubes and other materials
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cost of the agricultural feedstocks to biofuels are not easy to reduce further, whereas renewable electricity is getting less expensive and likely has much further to go. I think CO2 to fuel will have a decisive cost advantage over biofuels. The reason to use direct air capture rather that going for higher concentration point sources is one of scale. We want to produce fuel at scales much larger than can be accom…
Why not go for the higher concentrations now? Why not target agricultural ethanol plants now? I grant that long term they are limited, but why not use them now? Higher CO2 concentration seems like it ought to make your initial testing easier. Likewise, if you are really more cost effective than distillation all the existing ethanol plants would love to replace their boilers with your system. It seems like a simple wa…
It's never said explicitly and I couldn't find a question about it, but everyone talks as if we'll need solar input to power this. I assume this means the machine doesn't produce enough fuel to power itself? At any rate, amazing product. Can I (eventually) buy one of those machines or donate somewhere to make my area CO2 free?
In a sense, Prometheus is a competitor to Tesla.
It's never said explicitly and I couldn't find a question about it, but everyone talks as if we'll need solar input to power this. I assume this means the machine doesn't produce enough fuel to power itself? At any rate, amazing product. Can I (eventually) buy one of those machines or donate somewhere to make my area CO2 free?
Well of course not. It does not defy the laws of thermodynamics.
An oil pump can pump enough oil to fuel itself (we don't need solar to power our gasoline industry). And we can eat a plant and have enough energy to cultivate more plants to eat. I would not be surprised if it works the same here.
Edit: I guess the flaw in the logic is that, where there is a lot of energy stored in oil and plants (and plants get it from soil and the sun or so, again something external), this process is the reverse of burning. So if reverse burning costs less fuel than burning, we'd have a perpetuum mobile. Is that it? I'm sorry that this wasn't immediately obvious to me (if that is even the answer), since there are so many other fuel creating and self supporting processes...
This is really cool!
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…
It would not make sense today, but in 10 to 15 years, with climate regulations, having a carbon neutral jet fuel might start making a lot of sense.
My most immediate question (after others you already answered in this thread) is about getting enough CO2. When you start absorbing CO2 from the air, won't the CO2 in the neighborhood be depleted very quickly? And I'm assuming you can't pump enormous amounts of air either for various reasons (noise, energy usage, other environmental issues). Of course there's wind to bring more CO2, but I'm curious about your computa…