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Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#81

Post by calvinmorrison »

llukas wrote: post #68
docker_up wrote: post #29

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…

ICE cars cant compete with convenience of: * not needing to refuel * less maintenance needed * not spewing particulates in air etc (if you care about what you breathe)

* not needing to refuel

no, we're taking Soothing30MinuteRelaxingBreaksAt200MileIntervalsAwesomeHappy™ brought to you by Tesla™ instead

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#82

Post by qmanjamz »

mrguyorama wrote: post #28

Would you be willing to share vague details of your roadmap? Specifically; How many barrels of ready to burn gasoline are you outputting per day in 6 months? 1 year? 3 years? The fact that the general fuel is going to be sold and re-burned means this is at best carbon neutral, so from a cynical environmentalist point of view, what's the point? This can't help anyone unless you pump the synth-gas into the ground and s…

> what's the point?

This is an utterly asinine question. The point is that most current fuel is not carbon neutral so this is an improvement over the status quo.

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#83

Post by mamon »

tlb wrote: post #79
tofof wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the general fuel is going to be sold and re-burned means this is at best carbon neutral, so from a cynical environmentalist point of view, what's the point? This can't help anyone unless you pump the synth-gas into the ground and sequester it... The status quo today is that we are removing carbon from the ground and putting it into the air. This replaces those fuels that currently come out of the ground. It's stil…

California electricity is only 1% coal. 52% is natural gas and 40% is carbon-free. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_California . Most growth is in renewables.

The world is bigger than just California, and I thought that SV startups target "world dominance" by default :)

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#84

Post by rmcginnis »

mrguyorama wrote: post #74
tofof wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...the general fuel is going to be sold and re-burned means this is at best carbon neutral, so from a cynical environmentalist point of view, what's the point? This can't help anyone unless you pump the synth-gas into the ground and sequester it... The status quo today is that we are removing carbon from the ground and putting it into the air. This replaces those fuels that currently come out of the ground. It's stil…

>What would be the point of converting the carbon dioxide to alcohol to gasoline and spending electricity to do it? At a minimum you could just pump at the alcohol stage. Sounds like a great idea! My general point is that zero carbon energy sources like wind and solar are at least mildly zero sum, and creating brand new load on them would likely just result in capacity moving over to other producers like natural gas…

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 to use the excess (we can be seen as a kind of grid storage).

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#85

Post by tathougies »

34k5jo3i4toig wrote: post #18

IMHO this is a waste of time. You are wasting clean energy sources to make dirty ones -- at best a 50-60% loss of energy. And you end up with dirty fuel, that further produces CO2, in which the cycle repeats, with a net loss. In the near future, cars and trucks will be electric. This is shuffling deckchairs on the titanic. Why not put 100% of your efforts into electric vehicles powered by 100% renewable sources?

Can you elaborate how gasoline is 'dirty' if the outputs were converted back into the fuel via carbon neutral means?

Such technology would make gasoline have no output, since the ouptuts would be reabsorbed. If anything, electric cars, due to the massive environmental damage due to rare earth mineral mining, would be more of an environmental disaster.

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#86

Post by MuffinFlavored »

rmcginnis wrote: post #65
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of what you are doing is "behind closed doors / patented / patent pending"? If there was a list of materials needed to do this on a consumer level, I could see a lot of people wanting to play around with this as a hobby.

Patented, yes. You could do the fuel synthesis in water on a hobby level, and use a thermal still to get something flammable, but you wouldn't be able to use it in an engine. It's pretty fascinating to work on though.

Do you guys not have a landing page / website yet?

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#87

Post by maliker »

Damorian wrote: post #19

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…

There have been 15 year solar power purchase agreements signed already for $0.025/kWh [1].

Assuming they get to 50% efficiency, that's $1.69/gallon.

Sounds crazy low, but I hope it's true.

[1] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/texas-muni-signs-cheap-sola...

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#88

Post by icebraining »

berbec wrote: post #76
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thing that's turned me positive on "e-fuels" is that there's such a huge amount of petroleum that's used today in applications where we basically have no other options . Think stuff like big jets, or container ships. If you sit down and crunch the numbers for any non-carbon energy carrier, you either end up sinking the ship or with a fuel tank twice the size of the cargo.

Plastics! Zero-carbon plastics would be great. Pull CO2 from the air, mix with water and wind/solar elec and product bags, phones etc!

The thought is kind of horrifying, but you could even make it a closed process - send your old phone to the factory, where it's burned to produce the plastics for your new phone.

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#89

Post by mrguyorama »

rmcginnis wrote: post #60
mrguyorama wrote: post #28

Would you be willing to share vague details of your roadmap? Specifically; How many barrels of ready to burn gasoline are you outputting per day in 6 months? 1 year? 3 years? The fact that the general fuel is going to be sold and re-burned means this is at best carbon neutral, so from a cynical environmentalist point of view, what's the point? This can't help anyone unless you pump the synth-gas into the ground and s…

If we replace fossil gasoline with renewable gasoline, that reduces CO2 emissions. Our gasoline will be zero carbon, and may actually be certified as slightly negative, as we will not be emitting CO2 from drilling and refining as fossil fuels do. If we replace all liquid fuels now made from oil with fuels made from air mining of CO2, it could reduce emissions by approx. 10 gigatons per year. That is huge. The membran…

>If we replace fossil gasoline with renewable gasoline, that reduces CO2 emissions

Nitpick: It will leave carbon emissions unchanged, but may reduce the amount added to the carbon cycle.

What kind of production quantity are you looking at? Small batch aviation fuel for a niche "green" airline? Every semi truck on the road in America? The neighbor kid's go-kart?

You give an "efficiency" of 60ish %, but I don't know how to interpret that. How many megajoules (or kilowatts) are required to produce a gallon of 86 rated gasoline?

Re: Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline

#90

Post by e3b0c »

mrguyorama wrote: post #28

Would you be willing to share vague details of your roadmap? Specifically; How many barrels of ready to burn gasoline are you outputting per day in 6 months? 1 year? 3 years? The fact that the general fuel is going to be sold and re-burned means this is at best carbon neutral, so from a cynical environmentalist point of view, what's the point? This can't help anyone unless you pump the synth-gas into the ground and s…

It can be seen as an energy storage technology for renewables.
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