I didn't get past the loading screen. I'm not going to wait five seconds for the website to load.
I waited 20 seconds for the loading icon to disappear just to be greeted with an empty page
Dude, where's my fuel?
131–140 of 191 posts
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#132[Since a lot of people can't read the article and the format is annoying enough that even archive services haven't captured it, here's the text.] As you know, Prometheus converts renewable electricity from solar and wind power into zero net carbon gasoline, diesel, and jet e-fuels (short for “electro-fuels”) that compete with fossil fuels on price. What some readers may not know is that the process we use to do this…
I don't think I've ever seen a web site where the content was so interesting, but the presentation was so piss poor that the bulk of visitors likely leave without having even read any of this cool stuff. For the love of god, throw your web site away and start again with some simple, static HTML pages.
Yet it won some "best site of the year" award, twice.
https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/prometheus-site-of-the-...
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#133[Since a lot of people can't read the article and the format is annoying enough that even archive services haven't captured it, here's the text.] As you know, Prometheus converts renewable electricity from solar and wind power into zero net carbon gasoline, diesel, and jet e-fuels (short for “electro-fuels”) that compete with fossil fuels on price. What some readers may not know is that the process we use to do this…
Thanks, a lot of readers might not be able to load this, especially over a cellular connection. The site itself weighs 375MB, ~150MB after compression, and pins my CPU for about 3 seconds on load, using 1.70GB of real memory.
Oh dear. I had to visit it just to see my self and it looks like it preloads the whole site? Alot of pictures even though the article shows none. 356MB in total for just some text.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for copy and pasting this. They need to fire their designer right away. There is absolutely no reason for me to wait 10+ seconds for their website to load text data. WTAF are they thinking? It may seem like a small thing, but it is an important detail, and it makes me question if the company is snake oil or not. It doesn't appear very professional to take this approach. Maybe it was ok in 1998, but not toda…
Yeah I gave up and came here to read the complaints against the site and I'm glad I did as I found the article interesting. Even more "interesting" is that in their news section was this article: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/prometheus-site-of-the-... - so I don't think they're going to be listening to HN about their design anytime soon, which is a shame as that site is awful.
FWIW, they won the awards for their homepage animation experience, not for their news/blog static text experience.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#135If carbon capture usually is a big cost, why not pair it up with industrial processes that produce lots of CO2 in a more concentrated form?
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#136How does this compare (in terms of efficiency and energy loss) to just using the electricity directly in a battery electric vehicle?
They say they need 77kWh to produce one gallon of fuel. Which has 33.7kWh of energy stored. Assuming 20% average efficiency of an ICE engine (from Wikipedia), so 6.74 kWh per gallon end up as actual "work" done by the engine.
A quick DDG search suggests BEV has an efficiency of 80%, so the same 77kWh would end up doing 61.6 kWh of actual work when charged directly.
IMHO long-term this is no solution for general transportation, but ICE cars are still sold and as such will stay around for a few decades. Plus applications which require a higher energy density (mainly aviation & space; probably trucking & shipping; maybe long-range personal transportation) could make good use of these.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#137This is likely the most bloated and worst designed website I've ever seen.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#138This is neat and all (sincerely!), but what we really need much more of than this, and fast, is bulk anhydrous ammonia synthesis. It takes a lot less energy to produce ammonia, ammonia burns where natural gas is used today, and many places burning oil (such as ships and trains) can switch to ammonia with only tankage and plumbing retrofit. Burning electrically-synthesized ammonia displaces entirely as much fossil CO2…
How do you burn it without releasing a lot of nitrogen oxides? I realize the main reaction id 4 NH3 + 3 O2 -> 2 N2 + 6 H2O but there must be a lot of trace sideproducts, no? edit: By using excess ammonia, you reduce nitrogen oxides with a mechanism similar to AdBlue in diesel engines.
Using excess ammonia might have the risk of releasing unburnt ammonia in the atmosphere.
Fuel cells using ammonia seem much safer, but they are farther from being a commercially available solution.
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very large portion of what Europeans pay for gas is tax.
Presumably this stuff won't be taxed the same way. Taxes will need to be restructured so roads are paid for, maybe by vehicle licensing.
I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but in the UK neither vehicle duty nor fuel duty are used specifically for anything road related so theoretically they shouldn't need to tax it at all (beyond the standard VAT).
Re: Dude, where's my fuel?
#140This seems like a plan that's contingent on the moonshot of extremely cheap and scalable carbon capture. So far, effective carbon capture has remained elusive. "Carbon offsets" really means signing papers where a country says "we would have cut down this forest, but we won't now that you paid us." Actually taking carbon out of the atmosphere and burying it is the stuff of prototypes.
As described in the parent article, by far the most important advantage of their technology is that they do not need a traditional expensive process for capturing CO2 from the air, and then releasing it into a concentrated form (which requires much energy), to be used in fuel synthesis.
They just pass the air through water. A part of the CO2 from air will dissolve in water, up to its solubility limit.
The water with dissolved CO2 is then used in their electrolytic cells, which produce ethanol (dissolved in water). Presumably the water depleted in CO2 is reused to dissolve again CO2 from the air. (Some of the initial water is also converted into ethanol, so some fresh water must be added to the recirculated water.)
So they claim that they achieve in a sufficiently cheap way both the capture of CO2 from air and its conversion to fuel.