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Dude, where's my fuel?

prometheusfuels.com

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Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#41

Post by sien »

rmcginnis wrote: post #38
johngalt wrote: post #3

Prometheus should be laser focused on being first to market in commercial quantities. There are people who want carbon neutral fuels today even if they are more expensive than fossil fuels. Capture that entire market with v1 of the process even if it's $10/gallon. Take everything learned to make v2 at $7/gallon and v3 at $5/gallon etc... The goal of $3/gallon is pushing Prometheus down the rabbit hole. Waiting for th…

$3.00 / gallon is our v 1.0 (before taxes)

Wow.

If you hit that you're sorted in Europe.

https://www.tolls.eu/fuel-prices

European prices seem to average about ~ EU 1.8 / litre or ~7.2 EU / Gallon or $US 7.6 / gallon.

For C02 neutral fuel it would just work at that price.

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#42

Post by 10u152 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #26
10u152 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Centre for climate and energy solutions say there are currently 26 commercial scale carbon capture facilities online and more in development. They're not talking about carbon offsets for the linked article, they're literally talking about using captured carbon to make fuel. Remember "Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good" https://www.c2es.org/content/carbon-capture/

Those examples aren't actually capturing carbon from the atmosphere. They're capturing carbon produced as a byproduct of industrial processes. There's a massive difference when you're already working with concentrated carbon dioxide and when you're trying to capture it from the atmosphere.

If it’s capturing co2 that would otherwise go into the atmosphere…does it matter ?

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#43

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

onesafari wrote: post #18
sdkgjajggaf wrote: post #11

This page is completely unreadable due to the lagging custom scrolling they added. Just make a regular web page please.

What is the point of messing with scrolling behavior? Do people find this to be an improvement over the default?

It demos well when an agency shows it to a decision maker. Back in the day I used to use fine dining websites as a way to get clients to understand this dynamic. Lots of places would have a flash animation intro with music and images/video, etc. The owner loves this because the whole time they're thinking "this makes my place look so upscale and cool and desirable." Meanwhile, actual customers cared about location, menu, and hours being upfront and center without any bullshit. Thomas Keller never sold a single plate because he had an interstitial ad as the landing page on his website.

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#44

Post by nyokodo »

Iwan-Zotow wrote: post #37
DennisP wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if Peter Zeihan is right, the loss of Russian exports is just the beginning of oil supply disruption over the next decade.

India and China are not losing any Russian imports

> India and China are not losing any Russian imports

Russia cannot keep up production without the involvement of the likes of BP etc, so while China and India haven't boycotted Russia it won't matter before very long.

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#45

Post by toast0 »

johngalt wrote: post #3

Prometheus should be laser focused on being first to market in commercial quantities. There are people who want carbon neutral fuels today even if they are more expensive than fossil fuels. Capture that entire market with v1 of the process even if it's $10/gallon. Take everything learned to make v2 at $7/gallon and v3 at $5/gallon etc... The goal of $3/gallon is pushing Prometheus down the rabbit hole. Waiting for th…

Burried in the long post (as copied in the thread), it sounds like they are starting to move something to production, which they say will enable enough fuel to do demos and what not. Depending on what exactly that means when it happens, maybe they can start selling $10/gallon gasoline somewhere.

If it's a turnkey fuel production device, I'm sure there's a market for hook up electricity in remote location and get a tank of fuel over time.

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#46

Post by Layke1123 »

I see carbon nanotube tech and become immensely skeptical. I am under the impression that anything carbon nanotube still cannot be done at scale, and the article is very light on that part of the process. Following the rabbit hole leads to http links (in 2022?) and various publications from science journals I am unfamiliar with.

Does anyone else get the smoke and mirrors vibe from this or am I just being overly skeptical and not reading thoroughly enough into the literature provided?

If this tech is true, I can see the HUGE potential it has.

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#47

Post by moistly »

johngalt wrote: post #3

Prometheus should be laser focused on being first to market in commercial quantities. There are people who want carbon neutral fuels today even if they are more expensive than fossil fuels. Capture that entire market with v1 of the process even if it's $10/gallon. Take everything learned to make v2 at $7/gallon and v3 at $5/gallon etc... The goal of $3/gallon is pushing Prometheus down the rabbit hole. Waiting for th…

Prometheus addresses this:

> The thing is one cell doesn’t make that much fuel. What it does do is make enough to tell us what to do to iterate to the next cell design, which is exactly what we need to be doing to improve our performance and costs as quickly and inexpensively as possible. If we stopped this process to replicate one of the iterations of the cell to many cells, we could make more fuel, but we wouldn’t learn any more, we’d use up a lot of time and materials, and it wouldn’t prove that we can compete with fossil fuels on cost - the thing that matters.

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#48

Post by thereisnospork »

Manuel_D wrote: post #17
ncmncm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, just maybe , they understand the actual business they are actually in better than you do?

I think they understand what they need to say to get investments. This could be a huge development in fuel technology. Or if could be to fuels what the Hyperloop is to transportation. The OP explains that the main reason why they aren't delivering fuel is because they can't perform the carbon-dioxide separation cheaply enough. So, they have a plan to deliver cheap captured-carbon fuels, once they solve the issue that…

>many synthetic fuel companies that are blocked on the problem of carbon capture

No one is 'blocked' by carbon capture. There is ample 'low hanging fruit' CO2 emissions from e.g. breweries that are clean and don't require significant separation or cleanup. Also most if not all commercially sold CO2[0] for sale is a byproduct of other industrial processes[1], so its utilization in a synfuel would be carbon-neutral.

Even at a realistic cost of $1000/tonne air captured CO2 that is "only" approx $10/gallon of gas surcharge (9kg CO2 per gallon gas). Call it a hunch but I would imagine that there are enough wealthy and climate conscious Californians that'd buy 20-25$/gal carbon-captured gasoline judging by the number of Toyota Mirai's I see around.

[0]nominally 50-100$/tonne

[1]Haber-Bosch, for instance, will continue to emit fairly clean CO2 as a byproduct fertilizer production for the foreseeable future (until green electricity becomes cheaper than natural gas by Btu).

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#49

Post by elil17 »

fswd wrote: post #36
no_wizard wrote: post #33

This all sounds amazing but it also gives me Theranos vibes. While I understand the general science around this has been around a long time (the aforementioned Fischer Tropsch process) I would love for this to get some independent scientific validation before I'm willing to buy in to their dream here. It just "feels" too good to be true. Even with the Faraday Reactor considerations Seems much more scientifically plau…

The theranos vibes you're feeling I believe is from a "flaw" they make an assumption solar is 1 or 2 cents a kilowatt-hour. This isn't true (maybe with subsidies IDK) but it costs more to ship solar panels, and the wiring, fuses, breaker box, charge controller, adds a huge significant cost. You can't just take a panel cost and divide it by the watts without this in consideration. And the land cost. And unless you liv…

The U.S. "Sunshot" program sets USD$0.03/kWh as the target levelized cost for 2030 utility solar. At the moment that number is USD$0.06/kWh.

If they used power only at production peaks and colocated with generation (saving ~10% line losses), $0.02/kWh seems in the realm of the possible.

As to lack of resources to build enough solar capacity, concentrator plants make that a non-issue.

Re: Dude, where's my fuel?

#50

Post by photochemsyn »

no_wizard wrote: post #33

This all sounds amazing but it also gives me Theranos vibes. While I understand the general science around this has been around a long time (the aforementioned Fischer Tropsch process) I would love for this to get some independent scientific validation before I'm willing to buy in to their dream here. It just "feels" too good to be true. Even with the Faraday Reactor considerations Seems much more scientifically plau…

Theranos never produced a working prototype of a microfluidic measurement device that could do what they were claiming, and their investors were foolish enough to pour their money in without doing that basic due diligence, for various reasons that have been well-dissected in the past.

I think here they would really have to get a working prototype / pilot plant up and running, with a transparent demonstration. That's how the Haber process got support from Bosch c. 1909.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process

Generally speaking however, industrial processes run with pure streams of ingredients are more efficient. The rate-limiting step in the process as they describe it looks like the first one, because they're just using 400 ppm CO2 air as the input, with no pre-concentration. You'd need some kind of energy return on energy investment, i.e. how much electricity input per liter of produced fuel, plus lifetime of the catalyst etc. to make sense of how plausible it is.

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