81–90 of 124 posts
Heavy on animation, can't select text, uses the canvas element which isn't great for accessibility.
If this would be a 'normal' html website with those videos embedded - would this make a difference how you perceive the company and their tech?
Great tech though - hope they can scale it. Need to throw everything we got at this climate crisis.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I myself don't like much how my brain sees Musk everywhere, yet I think similar methanol production will first come from SpaceX for Mars. Also i wonder whether moonshine style distillation is worse than the carbon nanotubes membrane filtration, especially if you have a source of cheap waste heat.
Distillation is pretty expensive, energy-wise, and if you can't run continuously [e.g. if you're trying to use cheap intermittent renewables] you lose energy in the cooling-and-reheating cycles. I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power larg…
Moonshining is less than 400 KJ per kg of source, i.e. about 1.5 KWh per kg of ethanol produced from 15% ethanol/water source. Given that one can use waste heat from almost any other industrial process the real monetary cost is way less than the cost of electrical 1.5 KWh.
>I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power large-scale industrial processes.
Moonshining is 78 C degree - such cheap waste heat sources are plentiful exactly because it is hard to use for almost anything else.
>you lose energy in the cooling-and-reheating cycles.
not an issue for a 78 C process - basically like your water boiler, takes minimum of thermal isolation.
Why should anyone be excited about reusing captured C02 as fuel for gasoline? The climate crisis is incredibly dire, do not forget. We are rapidly sleepwaliking into a catastrophic 2 degrees C of warming.
Other carbon capture tech doesn't have a useful end product, so the only incentive for it to exist is to offset other carbon emissions in some sort of larger cap and trade or carbon tax scheme. So it would be great if this also drives down the price of carbon capture in general.
This seems more like a device to capture subsidies.
They seem to be heavy on vision, marketing and zero-net-carbon partnerships with huge brands, light on technical detail (i wouldn't hate some links to papers or a PoC of their reactor or something), all of which feels a little Nikola-y. Thin articles touching on the technology: https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/meet-our-v3-faraday-... https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/worlds-1st-machine-t... Hopefully som…
Some of the technical details: https://www.science.org/news/2019/07/former-playwright-aims-...
Just so people are aware, Prometheus comes up every now and then among people on twitter following the climate tech space, and most think that their claims are bogus and completely unbelievable. Like they recently claimed that they can capture CO2 from the air with 36$, which is like 20-30 times lower than what current best tech can offer, and also lower than what people believe is generally possible. See some discus…
FYI, I didn't find the tweets you've linked to to be convincing. One tweet criticizes prometheus because, at the time of the tweet, they had a P.O. box. The other suggests that 'the secret ingredient may be lies.' Now, maybe both tweet authors' criticisms are well-founded. But, rhetorically speaking, the tweets aren't appeals to logic.
If the founders are around... trying to understand their economics. They claim to sell Jet A at the market clearing price. Jet A goes for $0.45/L. The lowest industrial electricity rates in the US are $0.05/kWh (double that in California where they are selling today.) With 100% efficiency, no capital costs and no other opex, you get $0.05/kWh * 9.5 kWh/L = $0.47/L electrofuel Jet A. How can that work?
But something worth considering, in academic circles the "old" school of thought was that we could get a high penetration of renewable energy by building sufficient transmission capacity (i.e. send electricity from sunny/windy areas to places where it is not). The "new" school of thought is that instead of investing in transmission, invest in significantly overbuilding capacity. Think 3-4x the peak demand vs peak supply (i.e. in the summer months, if you have 100MW peak demand, build 300-400MW solar/wind). The rough idea is that renewables are so cheap and long term storage and transmission are so expensive, that it is better to just massively overbuild renewables and rely on shorter term storage to fill in the gaps.
And one major side affect of a strategy like this is that we will have a ton of extra electricity that we don't know what to do with during certain periods of time. This would be a great time to spin up carbon capture devices (among other industrial uses). There are still a lot of things that need to fall into place for a future like this to happen, but if you are trying to "skate to where the puck is going to be" it is not a bad target to aim for. There are plenty of well funded energy focused startups/companies that operating on worse future assumptions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I myself don't like much how my brain sees Musk everywhere, yet I think similar methanol production will first come from SpaceX for Mars. Also i wonder whether moonshine style distillation is worse than the carbon nanotubes membrane filtration, especially if you have a source of cheap waste heat.
Distillation is pretty expensive, energy-wise, and if you can't run continuously [e.g. if you're trying to use cheap intermittent renewables] you lose energy in the cooling-and-reheating cycles. I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power larg…
They seem to be heavy on vision, marketing and zero-net-carbon partnerships with huge brands, light on technical detail (i wouldn't hate some links to papers or a PoC of their reactor or something), all of which feels a little Nikola-y. Thin articles touching on the technology: https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/meet-our-v3-faraday-... https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/worlds-1st-machine-t... Hopefully som…
I hope they will do it. I see Rob McGinnis (their CEO) has a PhD. Did he publish some papers on this topic before?