391–400 of 589 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What? They compete today with significantly lower fuel cost. You see 100+ mpge on every electric car I know of today, you're looking at half-1/3 the per mile cost in an electric car. That more than makes up for the higher upfront cost over the lifetime of the vehicle, with cars you can go buy right now, today.
And that doesn't even take into account the superior UX.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bizarre comment. Being able to quickly refuel is one of the key advantages internal combustion engines have over electrics.
Depending on your assumptions. For day to day use EV doesn't need trips for gas station to refuel - so you actually save time. For long trips - yes.
So, the goal is carbon-neutral gasoline. Short term, I suppose your target is feel-good gas burning vehicles. Longer term, do you envision this technology being used for clean(er) + carbon neutral municipal power generation, or is the fuel type just wrong for that? I ask because a stop-gap can easily become permanent, and it'd be unfortunate to continue dumping particulates (pm2.5/10), smog, etc into the air in major…
The perfect is the enemy of the good. We have a carbon problem now , that is causing real damage now . We shouldn't be turning our noses up at "stopgap" just because it doesn't do everything we can dream of doing.
I do not question the sanity of carbon neutral gasoline. Esp aviation fuel and rockets.
I was suggesting carbon neutral gas plants which can power electric fleets, as a way to also reduce pollution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
* producing solar panels and such also requires energy input, and these do have limited lifetime. What is the real full-cycle energy conversion ratio is? I wonder what this is, too, but a typical 300W panel with 20 year lifespan will generate something like 20MWh over its lifetime. You can't possibly use anywhere near that much energy to manufacture it.
My personal pet theory is that the energy consumption is more or less equivalent to the price. So as long as the solar panel is not economically viable, it does not provide an energy surplus. 20MWh is not much, it's $500-$3000 worth of energy, depending on taxes and stuff. Can you buy, install, connect, maintain, clean a 300W solar panel for 20 years for this price? Edit: Also, 20MWh is quite high. That's 9h of perfe…
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!
> cars will switch to electric Even once cars are all electric, I can’t see gas turbine engines in planes, trains and ships being replaced in a hurry. And rockets are never going to be electric. I assume you can make RP-1 with this process. I can imagine hydrocarbons being produced where electricity is cheap and practical, and being shipped to where it is expensive and impractical. In theory if it was efficient enoug…
Of course most (non-electric) train engines use Diesel-electric propulsion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel%E2%80%93electric_transm...). That's mostly because of the flat torque curve of the electric motor. Some ships do too.
I'm not sure why you think that battery-electric train engines or ships aren't going to happen. There is a lot of room for batteries on vehicles like that!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
* producing solar panels and such also requires energy input, and these do have limited lifetime. What is the real full-cycle energy conversion ratio is? I wonder what this is, too, but a typical 300W panel with 20 year lifespan will generate something like 20MWh over its lifetime. You can't possibly use anywhere near that much energy to manufacture it.
My personal pet theory is that the energy consumption is more or less equivalent to the price. So as long as the solar panel is not economically viable, it does not provide an energy surplus. 20MWh is not much, it's $500-$3000 worth of energy, depending on taxes and stuff. Can you buy, install, connect, maintain, clean a 300W solar panel for 20 years for this price? Edit: Also, 20MWh is quite high. That's 9h of perfe…
So a 3kW system @ about $8k purchase price should return about $50 - 80k gross.
You can lower your efficiency substantially and still offset a substantial expense.
I know that you focus is on scale, so you're not likely to pursue this, but the prospect of a fridge sized fuel generator seems like a wonderful stop-gap for the existing ICE cars.
Having one in your garage that produces fuel from rooftop solar panels when there is excess generated, and then not having to worry about transporting the fuel or going to a petrol station sounds like a wonderful future while we transition to EV.
Really looking forward to hearing how this plays out, good luck.
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…
So the plan is to only use excess renewable energy that otherwise wouldn't get produced and consumed? If not wouldn't you be a net carbon generator, as you would be burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon in order to capture a lesser amount of carbon in your process? What steps are in place to prevent the process from displacing other renewable use? Take the fact that it is less than 100% efficient to store renewab…
A couple of scenarios where this is ideal:
1. Located close to intermittent renewable generation that is already hooked up to the grid, especially in places like California where intermittent renewables can already push generation beyond load at peak times and result in near zero or negative prices, this can soak up electricity usefully in a way that displaces other carbon emitting fuel.
2. Deployed along with intermittent renewables in the most optimal places for generation, where connection to the grid is impossible, inefficient, or will simply take time. This can soak up the most efficient possible generation of deployable renewables which would make otherwise uneconomical utility scale deployment viable.
Both of these are scenarios that our capitalist market system should work well to optimize for assuming the electricity->fuel technology reaches suitable efficiency (and not before then).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a completely accurate comment. Why is it downvoted? I assume the company is operating in the US. In the US only 27% of electricity is from coal and falling. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph... And in California (where nearly half of the US's electric vehicles reside--with EVs achieving a nearly 8% market share last year among light vehicles), it's MUCH less than that. There's only…
If this process were to only make transoceanic shipping carbon neutral it would be well worth it.