[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 is new, is only recently possible, and is unlike anything that anyone else is doing to make synthetic fuels today. It is because of this new process that we are the only company making e-fuels that can compete with fossil fuels without new laws or subsidies — our fuels can compete simply by being better and costing less than the fossil fuels they will replace. This is a truly exciting breakthrough in our ability to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, like climate change, energy security, and the need for increased energy-driven prosperity. But as often happens with breakthroughs of this magnitude, our process has provoked some dramatic responses - It sounds too good to be true! — and raised a lot of questions: How is it possible that your e-fuels are so much cheaper than everyone else’s? And if you can make these fuels, then where are they? Why aren’t they for sale yet? I’m here to answer these questions.
What’s everybody else doing?
If we ignore biofuels and waste-to-fuels and just focus on fuels made partially or fully from electricity from renewable sources, then everyone else who’s making e-fuels is using high temperature, high pressure synthesis. It’s been possible for almost a hundred years to make synthetic fuels from H2 and CO2 by using the Fischer Tropsch process, (invented in 1925), or similar processes that use high temperature and pressure with a catalyst to combine carbon and hydrogen into fuels. Currently, there are many companies using Fischer Tropsch or related processes that call their products e-fuels, which technically can be true if they only use electricity for CO2 capture and desorption, hydrogen generation, CO2 to CO conversion, synthesis reactions, and downstream cracking and distillation. In practice, it’s common to use fossil methane for the heat needed in these processes and to try to justify the additional CO2 this emits by promising to capture it also. Regardless of how closely they keep to the electricity-only ideal, however, none of these approaches can compete with fossil fuels on price.
What’s new about our process and why do our e-fuels cost so much less that they can compete with fossil fuels?
- Electricity is really cheap now
The first reason our fuels have such a low cost is not specific to us — it’s the recent abundance of really cheap renewable power. E-fuels are stored renewable energy. The day has long been anticipated when the cost of renewable electricity would become low enough to enable e-fuels, and that day has come. Specifically, it arrived in 2018, when the cost of utility scale solar power dropped to $0.02/kWh for the first time in a purchase by the city of Los Angeles. This marks a drop of over 90% in just ten years. The most recent record for the lowest utility scale solar bid was achieved last year at $0.01/kWh. The dramatic drop in costs is due to massive investment in solar panel manufacturing and in learning-by-doing cost reductions from making lots of solar panels. Low cost electrons mean low cost e-fuels.
The second reason our fuels are low cost, and one that is specific to us, is that we don’t need pure CO2. In order to make hydrocarbon e-fuels at scale one needs to capture CO2 from the air by direct air capture (DAC). For everyone else making e-fuels, this is a large cost. This is because their processes all require pure, pressurized CO2 gas. One obtains CO2 from the air by adsorbing the CO2 into or onto something, typically an amine liquid or amine functionalized bead, or in a hydroxide solution in water, or something more exotic, like an ionic liquid. This part isn’t so hard, and doesn’t require much energy, just a fan to blow air. In some cases, passive wind is used, but in either case, it’s not the main energy consumer.
The main energy cost is in getting the CO2 to release from the absorbent — to desorb. And that’s when things get really expensive, because this requires a lot of energy, almost always in the form of heat from burning fossil methane or a portion of the fuel produced. This is why most DAC CO2 processes cost $500-$600/ton of CO2 with a far distant and hopeful target of $100/ton at scale. But even at $100/ton CO2, any fuel one goes on to make is already too expensive to compete with fossil fuel.
At Prometheus, we don’t make or need pure CO2 gas, so we don’t need to desorb it. Therefore, we avoid the vast majority of this cost. Instead, we capture CO2 in water and then use it in water to make fuel. ARPA-E refers to this as “reactive CO2 capture” and identifies it as a significantly lower-cost DAC approach. Because our DAC tech is fundamentally different, our cost to capture CO2 is only $36/ton, the lowest in the world, and the only one low enough to enable fuel that competes on price with fossil. (More on this below.)
- We use electrocatalysts, not catalysts that need high pressure and temperature
The third reason our fuels are low cost, and another reason that is specific to us, is that we use electrocatalysts to do what only pressure and temperature could do before. The first widely read paper on this showed that CO2 in water could be turned into ethanol at a faradic efficiency of 63%. This means that 63% of the electrons that went into products in the process went into ethanol. We licensed a second-generation of this catalyst that has even better performance, making much larger and more complex carbon-based fuels with electricity alone.
Using electrocatalysts instead of the high pressure and temperature catalysts everyone else uses gives us a big reduction in cost because we can do the same job at room temperature and pressure while using much less expensive materials. It’s also great for our system performance because we can turn our process on and off quickly, matching intermittent solar and wind power. High pressure and temperature systems can’t operate like that.
- We’re the only ones who don’t need distillation
The fourth reason our fuels are low cost is that we’re the only company in the world that can replace distillation with nanotechnology to separate fuels from the water in which they’re made. In my previous startup, Mattershift, I commercialized a carbon nanotube (CNT) membrane, and published on it in 2018. Numerous academic publications have shown that membranes like this could separate alcohols from water, but until Mattershift produced them, no commercial CNT membranes were available. Previously, the only way to separate alcohols from water was to use distillation, another highly inefficient and expensive heat-based separation process. The CNT membranes solve this problem, using over 90% less energy than distillation and dramatically lowering the cost of extracting our fuel. This is a big deal because it reduces what is a major cost for other e-fuel makers to a minor cost for us.
Ok, that sounds good, but how does all this compete with fossil oil and gas?
The math on the cost of our e-fuel is pretty simple. The only inputs are air (CO2 and water) and electricity, and the only outputs are oxygen and fuel. The cost of the inputs plus the cost of the equipment and its maintenance make up nearly all of the cost. There are some other operating costs, like the vacuum pump and coolers on the CNT membranes or the power for pumps and controls, but these are less than 1% of total operating costs. I won’t include taxes or delivery fees since these vary a lot from place to place.
The main cost is electricity. The energy density of liquid e-fuels is very high, the main reason that they have long been desired as a solution for decarbonizing long-haul shipping and aviation. For gasoline, the energy density is approx. 33 kWh/gallon. In a TEA study we did last year with a third-party engineering firm, the estimate for the overall efficiency of our process (chemical energy in the fuel / electrical energy used to make it) is approx. 43%. This is a really great efficiency, because it includes everything involved from start to finish, including DAC of CO2, synthesis of the fuel, and separating the fuel so it’s ready to use. At this efficiency, our gasoline will need approx. 77 kWh of electricity per gallon. If the cost of power is $0.02/kWh, then the electricity cost of our e-gasoline is $1.54/gallon.
The next cost is CO2. The third-party TEA put our DAC cost at $36/ton of CO2 at $0.02/kWh, making it the lowest cost DAC in the world, and this cost drops further with lower costs of electricity. A gallon of gasoline contains approx. 8.9 kg of CO2 per gallon, so at a cost of $36/ton, this results in a CO2 cost for us of $0.32/gallon.
The most important cost after electricity is equipment cost, typically called capital cost. Adding up the electricity and CO2 costs, we get $1.86/gallon. If we want to stay below $3.00/gallon (for example), then we need to keep the capital and maintenance costs less than $1.14/gallon. Our cost models tell us that we can have capital and maintenance costs that are significantly lower than that, due to the advantages listed above, including not needing CO2 desorption or fuel distillation equipment, using low cost materials due to low temperatures and pressures, and deploying mass manufacturing methods like those used to make cars.
Ok, that’s cheap fuel, I’m into it. But where are the demos? If you can do this, why can’t I buy the fuel yet? . . . Dude, where’s my fuel?
In short, the fuel is coming. We’re about to do more and bigger demos. And we can replace fossil fuels a lot faster than most people think. Here’s where we’re at now.
First, we make fuel from the air all the time at Prometheus. We’ve been doing it since we started with the Fuel Forge Demo 1 system I built in the Y-Combinator batch in 2019. We just don’t make that much at any given time, and there’s a really good reason for this. We’re optimizing the most expensive part of the system, the electrochemical stack (which we call the Faraday Reactor), and the fastest and best way to do that is one commercial-scale cell (a cathode, anode, and separator) at a time. 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.
It’s worth pointing out that companies that do demos to show they can make e-fuel aren’t showing that much. After all, it’s been possible to make fuel that way for over 100 years. What matters is showing that you can make it at low cost, and that is something you do with chemical analysis, bills of materials, and cost models. Kind of boring as demos go, but it’s what matters most. We’ve been killing these demos, which is why we are the first unicorn in the e-fuels space.
So let’s talk about capital cost, the one we need to keep below $1.14/gallon to stay below $3.00/gallon fuel.
For this it helps to compare our Titan Fuel Forges to a more familiar system, a hydrogen electrolyzer. Our Fuel Forges are similar in many ways to hydrogen electrolyzers, in that they consist of many layers of cells, each consisting of a cathode, an anode, and a separator. In an H2 Electrolyzer, the anode is where electrons are stripped from water, producing oxygen, and the cathode is where electrons are added to protons, producing hydrogen gas. In our system, the anode works the same way, but our cathode, in addition to making H2, also makes liquid fuels. Both systems have capital costs dominated by the costs of the electrochemical stacks.
This brings us to the issue of economies of scale. For high temperature / high pressure systems like Fischer Tropsch or e-methanol to gasoline (MTG), economies of scale mean large refinery installations that cost billions of dollars and years to build (and still don’t get to cost-competitive fuels). For modular, mobile systems like our Titan Fuel Forges, however, economies of scale mean mass manufacturing. Building a Fuel Forge isn’t like building a refinery, it’s like building a car. When you mass manufacture a product, the cost of the product asymptotically approaches the cost of the materials. Since our process uses only inexpensive metals like copper and steel, inexpensive gasket materials and other low pressure, low temperature components, our cost of materials is low. This is a very powerful approach for low fuel cost.
One thing that’s especially advantageous about the stack dominating the cost of the system is that bringing economies of scale to stack manufacturing by making many cells is very nearly as powerful as making many Fuel Forges overall. For manufacturing methods like injection molding, for example, one can get to very low costs very quickly, delivering impressive economies of scale. A Faraday Reactor, like an H2 electrolyzer stack, is made of many layers, so making even a few Fuel Forges can quickly lead to low stack costs.
For this reason, driving down the cost of the Faraday Reactor is the single most effective way to drive down the cost of a Titan Fuel Forge, and therefore the capital cost component of the fuel.
In the stage we’re at now, we’re close to locking down the design of our commercial-scale cell and stack design and are about to start automating their assembly into many-cell stacks. Even with the slow global supply chain we’ve all been dealing with lately, this can happen pretty quickly, because it’s a fairly simple assembly process — just slow when it’s being done by hand. This means we’ll be making larger quantities of fuel and we’ll get to do the demos with motorcycles, race cars and classic cars, and jetpacks and planes that we know you want to see. Up to this point, I haven’t been willing to do these larger-scale demos because of the significant slow-down they would involve, delaying our progress towards launching commercial fuel - the thing we care about most. But the right time to do them is coming soon. Personally, I’m really looking forward to doing those demos, because I like putting on a good show.
Our not-so-secret plan is to get the Faraday Reactors into automated assembly and take all the data we’ve gathered to design and build the first Titan Fuel Forge 1.0 commercial system. I think we can start the build this year, but I’ve learned that schedules are hard to predict right now. If everything goes our way, we’ll be shipping fuel very soon.
After that, we’ll be making more Forges with automated Faraday Reactor assembly and most of the rest by hand as fast as we can, but to really scale quickly, we’ll need to build a factory to make many fuel forges. We call this factory the MetaForge.
The rate at which we can build Fuel Forges in the first MetaForge will be set by the rate at which new solar and wind power can be built. If we assume for the moment that each Titan Fuel Forge will have a rating of 1 MW each, then 1,000 Fuel Forges will require 1 GW of new renewable power to operate. If 250 GW of new renewable power for “power to X” projects are built each year, then the MetaForge could make 250,000 fuel forges per year. (Compare this rate of production to that of car factories that can make more than 500,000 cars per year). At this rate, these forges could decarbonize approx. 30 million cars per year. This is a very rapid decarbonization rate compared to any other options currently under consideration. Alongside the growth of battery electric vehicles, it’s feasible using this approach to decarbonize the global vehicle fleet entirely by 2040. Using e-fuels to replace all energy products made from oil and gas across sectors could eliminate over 20 GT of CO2 emissions per year.
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.
I'd second this, just tried loading it on a tablet and gave up on the load screen. It was 50/50 I'd read the comments but I'm glad I did now.
Please please, for goodness sake, put a quick loading static page front and center quick! This stuff is too important and too cool to be lost to same hokey web design.
The page we are reading can quite easily be remade into a normal web page as it involves few of the exotic/mind blowing animations seen elsewhere on the website.
The first page view shouldn't be loading all that crap that isn't being used.
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 today.
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.
The irony that you made me sit through the loading animation to see that.
I've never heard of the FWA, but I'm going to make my own award site and give myself awards every year, maybe biannually.
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.
When you move around the site it has a lot of very nice, stylized 3d and cool transition effects. It's weird that it preloads nearly everything on first visit.
I wonder the extent to which Trevor Milton’s shenanigans at Nikola Motors have made life more difficult for other entrepreneurs in this space.
“Our tech works in the lab. Simple math shows it can be competitive in the market. Now, we’re focusing on scaling the tech.” Those words make sense when coming from a genuine effort that could succeed. Those words are therefore copied by charlatans as well.
I have no reason to think Prometheus is in the latter camp, but the presence of that camp makes life harder for them I think.
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 the perfect factory, with the manufacturing methods, to produce the perfect machine that will immediately go into large scale production, and operate on an automated basis. I expect the company aiming at 10-7-5-3 will reach 3 there faster than the company aiming at 3 to start out with.
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.
Tractor fuel produced at the foot of a wind turbine in the middle of a farmer's field, that doesn't need to be transported from a refinery, would have immediate value.
Fences made of double-sided solar panels mounted a bit more than tractor-width apart, running N-S, coexist nicely with row crops, and cut water loss, improve conversion efficiency (via evaporative cooling), and often increase yield besides (via reduced heat stress). Producing fuel locally is better than selling the power and buying fuel.
HH XX HH
HH=XX=HH <--tractor
HH XX HH
crop XX
| XX | <-panel/fence
v HH |
x|x x x x|x x x x|x x x x|x
x|x x x x|x x x x|x x x x|x
x|x x x x|x x x x|x x x x|x
x|x x x x|x x x x|x x x x|x
x|x x x x|x x x x|x x x x|x
x|x x x x|x x x x|x x x x|x
Why not just make electric tractors? The energy efficiency of converting wind -> electricity -> fuel -> mechanical power has to be less efficient than wind -> electricity -> mechanical power right?
Tractors are very expensive. Farmers will not replace them just for this. And, they need to operate all day long, which would take a hell of a lot of battery.
Retrofitting with ammonia tankage and plumbing (making them cheaper to run) is an expense they might prefer to avoid until they have a reliable secondary supply of ammonia.
They need to run all day and all night for ~2 weeks straight twice a year and then they can sit idle most of the rest of the time. But during those 4 weeks charging for one out of every three hours (I’m assuming that a big tractor pulling a big implement is going to deplete even a really big battery fast and charging a battery that large is probably going to take a long time) isn’t going to be tolerable.
It is easier and cheaper to store liquid fuel. Making liquid fuel would allow fuel to be made and stored in the off season in a greater quantity than could be reasonable be stored in batteries.
> The energy efficiency of converting wind -> electricity -> fuel -> mechanical power has to be less efficient than wind -> electricity -> mechanical power
It depends on how efficient it is to use existing ICE tractors vs creating new electric tractors. If tractors are like other ICE vehicles then something like half the energy they take over their lifetime is used in their production so if you want to get to Net-0 sooner generating carbon neutral fuel might be the way to go.
Efficiency is secondary. Cost is primary. As the cost of generator capacity continues on down, people worry less about efficiency. The top-line input, sunshine, is free. So it is a question of capital cost amortized over energy produced.
While the question I was responding to was explicitly about efficiency, you might be right about cost. However, ICE tractors that are already owned along with the capital required for their use and maintenance are potentially a lot more attractive to keep vs new electric tractors. Sunshine might be free but it’s not available in sufficient quantities everywhere with current technology, and all technologies will require ongoing maintenance. With China becoming an untrustworthy trade partner the cost of solar panels will likely rise. If they do I hope they can make affordable efuel so that we make progress either way.
Solar panels are produced in many more places, now. (Former-Soviet) Georgia produces a very great number of them, for example, at exemplary prices.
There is plenty of sunshine most places if you can bank fuel during off-season. Finns will probably still need to import from the south or via transmission line if the wind is off -- as they have done for many decades on a more regular schedule.
You seem to be saying you think keeping liquid fuel in tanks does not qualify as storage. If that is what you mean, you will need to explain why you think that, because it makes no sense.
If you mean we have not yet built out as much storage as we will ultimately need, because we anyway haven't enough renewable generating capacity built out yet to charge it from, then yes we know. The solution to that is obviously to continue building out renewable generating capacity, and then storage for the excess.
> You seem to be saying you think keeping liquid fuel in tanks does not qualify as storage.
I just misread what you wrote. I didn't see "fuel" and thought you were referring to other means of renewable storage. Fuel as an efficient and much less geographically limited means of storage makes a lot of sense.
Chart omits liquified anhydrous ammonia. Its volumetric energy density is about half of diesel's, with a somewhat better mass energy density. You need bigger tanks that can hold back a bit of pressure, and new plumbing disinclined to corrosion.
It also omits liquified hydrogen, which is inconvenient to handle, but not much moreso than liquified methane.
With the amounts of extra weight farmers often add to their tractors, and their general hatred of DEF and regen cycles, electric tractors seem like a billion dollar idea just waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it.
I doubt batteries are up to the task. Tractors and implements are big, so the battery is going to have to be huge, which is going to further increase the weight of the tractor and so on. Plus if you’re in the middle of harvest season (you have a narrow window to get crops out of the ground and you work around the clock for a week or so), you can’t afford to wait an hour to charge your tractor after driving it for an hour or two. Anyway, you would have to have electricity in ample supply on site or else you’re taking your tractor offline for even longer while you drive it to and from your field for a charge.
Boutique item, maybe unless the batteries can be replaced while it operates. They would need a hell of a lot of spare batteries, and somebody running around replacing them. Presumably today people are driving out to fill up fuel in existing tractors after some number of rows.
Yes and no. It's not targeted at massive monoculture farms such as corn farms in the Midwest. Rather it is targeted at operations where a smaller tractor with a few hours runtime is useful. That includes not only hobby farmers but also vineyards, etc.
Given how much cutting edge process chemistry is involved in this fuel manufacture, it will be a long time before it's available in small units, which will of course be more capital-intensive and less efficient than large units because that's how scaling works.
It's far more likely this fuel will end up simply co-mingled with the global market and shipped all over the world from a few sites which are good for generation but not for direct consumption.
According to their "need for speed" page, their plan is to build factories producing units the size of shipping containers. They think they can have three of them by 2030, each churning out a quarter million units annually.
Indeed it would. It certainly wouldn't be possible if they needed heat and pressure. See this part of the article:
> Our Fuel Forges are similar in many ways to hydrogen electrolyzers, in that they consist of many layers of cells, each consisting of a cathode, an anode, and a separator. In an H2 Electrolyzer, the anode is where electrons are stripped from water, producing oxygen, and the cathode is where electrons are added to protons, producing hydrogen gas. In our system, the anode works the same way, but our cathode, in addition to making H2, also makes liquid fuels. Both systems have capital costs dominated by the costs of the electrochemical stacks.
> This brings us to the issue of economies of scale. For high temperature / high pressure systems like Fischer Tropsch or e-methanol to gasoline (MTG), economies of scale mean large refinery installations that cost billions of dollars and years to build (and still don’t get to cost-competitive fuels). For modular, mobile systems like our Titan Fuel Forges, however, economies of scale mean mass manufacturing.
Heat and pressure are readily available in small-format equipment.
What would make a difference are whether it is expected to start and stop operation, how much supervision it needs, and how much customization is desirable. The quoted text above cites ability to manufacture mass numbers of units, and by implication to distribute, install, and operate them with minimal attention to details.
While a nice theory, this is not competitive in practice... The capital costs and loss in productivity result in about a 2 to 3 times lower profit per unit of land compared to full solar. Just put solar on the non-ideal fields (iirc about 4% of German AG area would be needed to cover electricity demand with solar)
You miss the point that identically the same land is now producing two revenue streams, one year-round. And, that ag yield is increased. Fortunately, they don't need your approval. It is being done now. Japanese are leading.
It might not need to be 100% of fuel used, subsidizing the fuel supply would be enough I think. It would also allow those farms to claim some of that as carbon credits and other green certificates.
> 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...
Due to Russian oil drying up volatile high prices globally will be the norm until technology like this comes into play and at least puts a ceiling on the price. So, the real question is how quickly and how cheaply can they reach 4 million barrels per day of production?
> 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.
Geopop videos on youtube were my introduction, and are definitely the quickest way to get the gist. Then I started reading his books.
Accidental Superpower is his first, from 2014, and is the best overall introduction. It doesn't just look at current events; he applies his approach to pretty much all the great civilizations of world history, starting with ancient Egypt. Well worth reading for that alone, it's amazing. Also covers modern day, and while it's a bit out of date now, the broad strokes haven't changed. This book includes a prediction that Russia would invade the rest of Ukraine right about now. If you read just one, make it this one.
The next two books are entirely focused on present day.
Absent Superpower from 2016 has two parts. The first is probably more information than you want about the shale revolution in the US, but he keeps it interesting. Then he writes about individual countries, with more of an energy focus. This one's obviously most relevant to the tech we're discussing here, which could change everything if it scales up soon enough.
Now I'm partway through Disunited Nations, from 2020. This also goes country by country, and of course is the most up-to-date so far. He starts out with several chapters on China, and goes into more detail than the previous book on their situation, which is incredibly grim. Now I'm starting the next chapter, on Japan.
His next book comes out in June. I think he mentioned in a video that he focuses more on the outlook for various industries.
Yes. Definitely. In most (all?) developed countries except the US fuel tax easily covers the costs of roads and subsidizes everything else.
The EU is determined to reduce C02 emissions rapidly. If they want to do that they could cut their fuel taxes and use C02 neutral fuel and meet their targets much more easily. Not to mention cutting dependence on authoritarian states.
Looking at local (EU) gas price structure, ~50% is the actual cost of fuel and the rest is excise tax, VAT, and expenses/profit. So $3/gal bulk cost would fit a $6/gal = 1.6 eur/litre retail price including all taxes, which would be competitive even without any subsidies that a CO2-neutral fuel might justify.
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).
It is mentioned in the blog post that the basic reaction is for producing ethanol. Are you then upgrading this ethanol to other fuels like gasoline, kerosene, diesel with traditional processes (e.g. something MTG, MTO-like), and how much cost does that add?
A lot of EU countries also mandate E10 gasoline in a misguided effort to reduce GHG emissions. I'm not sure where they get all that ethanol from, but I'm sure it's a similar agribusiness scam as US corn ethanol.
> 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.
They should release it under some sort of fair use model where they receive 10% of the profits of anyone using their technology.
Then, there doesn't need to be any marketing and limiting of availability by only having one source of product.
Product manufacturers would probably be ecstatic to generate products that have great use and public appeal, where all you need to do is be the first to be able to manufacture it.
One thing that is unclear to me - are there items that need to be replaced/regenerated? The article says the costs are mostly capital. If true, on a long enough timeline, are you not just looking at entirely operational costs (sourcing water + electricity)?
Yes, only inputs are air and electricity. If you have an equipment payback of only a few years, then after that all fuel is close to opex only. Similar to solar itself.
All the best to them, but I'll believe it when I see it.
I'm also skeptical that petrol / diesel / long chain hydrocarbons are even the right fuel to make. If the average length of the carbon chain for something like diesel is around eight, you can make roughly eight times the number of methanol molecules for the same carbon input. Hydrogen requirements are also lower, so the cost limitation there is reduced as well. It just seems like an inherently cheaper $/kWh pathway for storing energy, especially when you consider that there are already amateurs doing methanol conversions for cars for a few thousand dollars.
Obviously this doesn't work for aviation, but the calculus there is a bit different. LH2 has a number of advantages for aircraft, and depending on how much cheaper it is than synthetic kerosene, it may prove to be the better option.
On the subject of direct air capture -- have any studies been done on its efficacy relative to fast growing plants? Some seaweeds can grow at a rate of a meter a day, which obviously requires pulling carbon from the water (i.e. indirectly from the atmosphere). Similarly, it seems like there are pre-existing (and potentially cost effective) pathways for shorting the carbon cycle by, for example, using sewerage as a source, since all of that carbon was at one time pulled from the atmosphere by a vegetable.
The sweet spot for synthetic fuel, in most cases, is anhydrous ammonia. It stores in liquid form at room temperature under mild compression. Ammonia can be burned in place of natural gas in generators, and in place of bunker oil in ships given retrofitted tankage and plumbing. It is probably practical for retrofitted freight trucks, rail locomotives, and farm machinery. Its volumetric energy density is lower than kerosene's, but usually tolerably so. It is unlikely to find use in cars.
Anyplace where LH2 aircraft operate, kerosene-powered airframes will be simply unable to compete. It is not clear that existing airframes can be retrofitted, and build-out of LH2 craft may take a long time. By 2040, if civilization has not collapsed yet, probably the majority will be LH2, and old kerosene airframes will be on marginal routes.
Synthetic hydrocarbon fuel will have strong demand for at least a decade or two, maybe longer depending on many factors including various costs, taxes, and regulations.
Maybe. Ammonia is certainly the best carbon-free fuel, the only real issue with it is its toxicity. Methanol is a lot easier to handle since it's a liquid at SSL conditions, and generally less dangerous, but it has it's own downsides (it's hygroscopic, for example). But I agree with you in the sense that, to me at least, the two most sane options for an e-fuel are methanol and ammonia. I think the path of trying to make synthetic petrol and diesel is probably the wrong choice.
We do, in fact, care about toxicity, so do not e.g. expect to see ammonia powering cars.
NASA and ESA are phasing out use of hydrazine because of its unfortunate handling characteristics. But solid hydrazone might still find uses.
Among the chief attractions of ammonia is that it is very simply synthesized with free feedstock. You bond hydrogen stripped from water to nitrogen from air. Although toxic, it is a lot lighter than air, so if it leaks it goes up, and does not hang about poisoning people in a broadening area.
The main problem with hydrocarbons as synthetic fuel is that you need the carbon, which in air is at below 0.05% concentration. It is certainly possible, but seems unlikely to approach ammonia in cost.
> NASA and ESA are phasing out use of hydrazine because of its unfortunate handling characteristics.
I read about various 'green propellant' efforts over the years, but it seems in practice hydrazine is still used for orbital manouvering systems. Of course for those the volumes are small compared to the launch rockets themselves. For launch vehicles it seems only old Russian and Chinese designs still use hydrazine.
> Although toxic, it is a lot lighter than air, so if it leaks it goes up, and does not hang about poisoning people in a broadening area.
Eventually yes it will dissipate upwards, but typically ammonia accidents result in a vapour cloud traveling close to the ground. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIi4_Poo2HY
> The main problem with hydrocarbons as synthetic fuel is that you need the carbon, which in air is at below 0.05% concentration. It is certainly possible, but seems unlikely to approach ammonia in cost.
There's certainly a largish cost to concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere. Carbon Engineering, one of the companies in the DAC space, claims 8.8 GJ/ton. Just some back of the napkin comparison to the enthalpy of formation for CO2 and H2O (+ adding an assumed 70% efficiency for CO2 dissociation and water electrolysis), and assuming we're building hydrocarbons with a 2:1 H:C ratio, that would mean a roughly 40% energy penalty compared to starting with a concentrated CO2 feedstock.
One the plus side you get a fuel with cheaper and safer handling, better energy density, and compatibility with existing equipment. Hard to say which approach will win. Might well be as you said, that for large industrial users that can take appropriate precautions like maritime shipping or peaker power plants ammonia will be a better solution, but for other smaller scale usage synthetic hydrocarbons will win.
They still loft hydrazine on birds already designed, but plan to use a non-toxic, and otherwise actually better alternative in new designs.
Hydrazine is troublesome because it is readily absorbed through the skin, in liquid form, or the lungs, in vapor form, whence it destroys the liver and other internal organs. As vapor it is slightly heavier than air, so its vapor spreads out from point of release.
When you see dramatic videos of spilled ammonia, that is generally liquid, either boiling anhydrous or dissolved in water and spreading out on the ground. Purely gaseous leaks go up. But liquid spills can be pretty bad.
All that said, synthetic hydrocarbon fuels will clearly be better for small and consumer-grade use in places where batteries do not suffice.
"I'm pretty sure we can go through that iceberg."
--Captain of the Titanic, probably.
"Might as well go with hydrazine."
--Unknown, heard before explosion.
I missed the bit on ethanol when I skimmed through the first time, but you're right. That's actually fairly exciting if it's something that can be scaled.
The part that baffles me is that if you have a workable fuel like ethanol, from an efficient process that doesn't compete with arable land, why try to make petrol from it? Ethanol is perfectly fine, and inherently cheaper than any hydrocarbon you would make from it.
> The part that baffles me is that if you have a workable fuel like ethanol, from an efficient process that doesn't compete with arable land, why try to make petrol from it? Ethanol is perfectly fine, and inherently cheaper than any hydrocarbon you would make from it.
Indeed. Even replacing the current usage of ethanol in the gasoline pool would be a huge market, and AFAIU most Otto engines can be relatively cheaply modified to work on up to E85 fuel.
Perhaps they're trying to fly under the radar of the corn ethanol lobby?
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 plausible however. I'm just a natural skeptic.
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.
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.
I just don’t understand the answer. Seems to be conflating “energy cost” and “financial cost” under the same umbrella. I don’t think Prometheus is disputing the energy costs of “the physics required to assemble a molecule”.
Current processes use heat+pressure, which are pretty wasteful, and often rely on burning fossil fuels in the 1st place, which will mechanically increase the financial cost”
What I understand from Prometheus is that they have a different way to “assemble molecules”, which relies on “electrocatalysts” instead of “catalysts requiring high temperature and pressure”. On the face of it, I can totally see how such a catalyst would decrease the “financial cost” without necessarily impacting the “energy cost”. It’s simply using a cheaper energy than the current processes.
The twitter answer rings similar to someone who would say “There is no shortcuts around the physics of producing light” to justify why LED lightbulbs would never make it. Most of the energy of incandescent bulbs is just heat, and there are physical process that produce light without all that heat. I don’t see any reasons why the extra heat would be needed to produce fuels
You aren't the only one. This recent article captured a lot of skepticism from people in the field. And then there's history of optomistic predictions, in 2018 McGinnis predicted they'd be undercutting gasoline in 2019.
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 live in Arizona you will have very low utilization.
BUT... when I lived on the grid I paid $.13/kwh. At 77kwh per gallon that puts us at $10.01/gallon. It is unknown if this is just syn gas or ethanol, or what the BTU of that gallon is. And this definitely isn't diesel, which would have the biggest impact. I know when my friend did bitcoin mining he was able to get $.03kwh so... let's use that 77 * .03 = $2.31. So between $10 and $3 a gallon is actually possible.
With gas over $5 or $6 (the company is in Santa Cruz? Their gas is probably $7 or $8 at this moment, I bet) ... this will work
The other issues are... United States uses 30TW of oil a day (convert barrels of oil to BTU and convert BTU to watt hours... to convert oil used per day in watts to speak of)... and 10TW of electricity a day.
To replace 'fossil' fuels we'd need ...70TW of electricity after inefficiency conversion.
There isn't enough copper, nickle, and silver to make all those solar panels.
There isn't enough public support or political capital to build nuclear reactors either. This is another flaw.
Another commentor suggested, just replacing Russian's oil at 4 million barrels a day. That's possible. And it makes it exciting.
There is, in fact, plenty of copper. You don't need nickel or silver to make or place solar panels. Prices are still falling fast. Nowadays they don't even bother to tilt them to match latitude, so mounting has got very, very cheap.
The price of electricity is variable, sometimes negative. You would not need to produce at levelized cost, but only when the sun is shining.
I think the other tradeoff over the long run is long-run lifetime costs of replacing "solar panels, and the wiring, fuses, breaker box, charge controller" under the assumption that these aspects do have lifetime costs and are at best rebuildable and at worst produce waste (e.g. think about how Vaclav Smil calls wind turbines 'the perfect embodiment of fossil fuels' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&feature=youtu.be... ).
It's important to ask these questions of what the tradeoffs really are when thinking about Energy Returned on Energy Invested, whether e-fuels would actually decrease new car production (i.e. older cars get used longer if e-fuels really make sense), the political economy ramifications if these things really worked, etc.
Finally, it's really worth pointing out the concern of any of these things falling under solutionism when also thinking about the state of our planet from a more integrated framework such as the planetary boundaries: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
I wouldn't call Fischer-Tropsch a "high temperature" process at least compared to other processes that run at an oil refinery. A big problem with it (unless you're making methane) is that high temperatures break hydrocarbons down.
Low temperature processes run at a low rate so you have a huge machine and large quantities of catalysts tied up to make just a trickle of fuel.
Nice to see the F-T process bypassed because the high capital cost makes it the last refuge of the desperate.
This 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 as does burning captured carbon. I would rather see captured carbon sequestered instead.
A GW-scale ammonia plant is under construction in Norway. We will need thousands of them in short order. They need to be made cheaper.
Another concern competing with this is called Terrapower Industries. They are maybe less far along, but their web site is actually readable: https://terraformindustries.com/
If they could sequester, say, half their captured carbon, that would be a good look.
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.
Note that hydrogen is itself a greenhouse gas, so you would want to tune the mixture carefully to leave minimal unburnt hydrogen. Hydrogen acts to promote a greenhouse effect by several mechanisms: 6x directly, but also by prolonging methane lifetime, and by promoting lower-atmosphere ozone, making its greenhouse impact up to 200x CO2.
Water vapor is itself another greenhouse gas, so it could be important for big users of hydrogen and ammonia fuels to make an effort to condense out exhaust vapor, e.g. by using it to warm incoming fuel, or air after the initial compression stage. Probably natural-gas burners should be doing it already, as burning methane produces copious water vapor.
Condensing exhaust water vapor from these systems could increase efficiency by creating a vacuum at the exhaust.
Just making ammonia without natural gas to meet the needs of the global fertilizer market would be difficult enough I imagine. Also, the notion that you'd easily burn NH3 + O2 -> H2O + N2 seems questionable, isn't a lot of NOx (a nasty air pollutant leading to PAN and really bad air pollution) also going to be generated?
Their website is so obnoxious (why the hell do people think that scrolling text needs "inertia", so it keeps going after you stop twiddling the scroll wheel?) than I would never use their product.
To be honest, it doesn’t matter how much it costs if you can get to a point where you can deliver the American contract without going bankrupt. At that point, airlines should offer carbon neutral first class by default and optional carbon neutral economy, regardless of cost. Unlike BEV/carbon neutral ICE cars, the longer it takes to go to market, the more of a moral imperative it becomes for airlines to offer a carbon-neutral product.
Can someone explain how this is carbon neutral? It sounds like it produces regular gas, but using electricity instead of extracting petroleum. Wouldn't burning the gas produced still be a problem?
Thanks. I understood the pieces of getting CO2 from air, getting electricity from solar/wind, using those plus water to somehow make fuel (magic?); but didn't connect the dots on it all being the same carbon throughout the process.
They're going to really need to knock people over the head with the part that what goes out is only what goes in, and also why that's better than extracting oil from the ground.
It only emits the CO2 that it captures in the first place to make the fuel. As long as the electricity used to make the fuel is itself carbon neutral, than the entire process is. It would be seriously exciting if and when this works.
This 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.
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.
It makes the burning of fossil fuels more efficient, e.g. you can X tons of coal to produce Y MW of power and get Z additional gallons of gas. But it's really a stretch to call this carbon neutral.
Yes, because Prometheus fuels is trying to extract from atmosphere. Scavenging industrial CO2 byproduct is something you can only do opportunistically.
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.
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 has consistently eluded companies seeking to produce captured carbon fuels. If they manage to solve it, great that's an awesome invention. But until that actually gets solved, they're one of many synthetic fuel companies that are blocked on the problem of carbon capture.
>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).
They still need to capture the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere. They claim that because it doesn't need to be pure carbon dioxide it'll be a lot cheaper. But that's based on an engineering assessment not an actual bill of materials from a working prototype. Just like how the hyperloop is amazing technology on paper.
Yes, I'm more than comfortable letting BMW put $12.5 million into Prometheus. If they shared even half of your confidence in this tech, they'd invest a lot more than that. My take, and likely the investors' takes too, is this is yet another carbon capture company, and it's success hinges on whether or not they can actually hit the performance their promising.
BMW are certain to understand investment strategy better than you.
Probably they are putting seed funding into a bunch of different start-ups, and will invest more as they see further evidence of viability. That is a much more productive activity than carping ignorantly from the sidelines.
Most startups flop for reasons unrelated to their technology underpinnings. E.g., incompetent website implementation.
> Probably they are putting seed funding into a bunch of different start-ups, and will invest more as they see further evidence of viability. That is a much more productive activity than carping ignorantly from the sidelines
This is exactly what I'm saying: they're testing to see if this technology is viable, because we don't know if it's viable.
"Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip", "Count your chickens", and "Grass is greener" shed as much light.
If not this one, one or six among the other dozens. It's trivial electrochemistry, so the problems to be overcome are of manufacturing, which just needs money. And, we know hydrogen and ammonia synthesis work at scale; this is extra.
Got to say I agree with this. Having read the text (thanks, neonate!), I see a lot of buzz-wordy obscurantism and complexification, and no mention of this, the core problem, except "we capture carbon dioxide in water".
This posting seems to be a response to a bunch of skepticism about them that has surfaced recently. MIT Technology Review published an article about them that contained several critical perspectives, including:
> “It’s laughable,” says Eric McFarland, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s the tech bubble again,” he added later. “People are putting money into lots of things that ultimately won’t ever work, and this is one of them.”
And it points out that the CEO (and submitter here) has a history of making predictions that have not come true, such as saying in 2018 that they would be able to undercut gasoline on price in 2019.
I really hope they are able to do what they say they can do but I won't be at all surprised if they fail.
Website text size seems to be based on window width, doesn't resize when I zoom out, I'm zooming out because I don't want to read your website as if I'm trying to read a war memorial from 1ft. I shouldn't have to resize my window to read comfortably.
It's obscene, I have a 1440p ultrawide monitor and it renders like this[1]. One paragraph on the screen, and utterly garbage scrolling which actively makes things harder to read. I know bitching about stuff like this is against site rules but what a shit show.
This is honestly one of the most impressive things I've seen. This is sci-fi levels of technology. It's very cool, inspiring, and refreshing to see such ambitious projects.
No need to make cheap. Deliver 4 of these[0] a month to me in SF (can be all at once) and I'll pay you $200/mo committed to one year ($10/gal equivalent). You can require that the old cans be returned.
EDIT: I will pay one-time fee of 4*30 = $120 to get those first 4 cans.
I'm super curious how fast could such technology develop if it was opensourced.
Since it supposedly doesn't require large capital cost, can be done in small scale and doesn't require exotic materials (except for cheaper separation of fuel from water) it would be perfect technology for small time experimenters and small entrepreneurs in all corners of the world.
Unless I missed it, there is no mention of the environmental cost of the process itself.
What I mean by that is all the chemistry / electrolysis / carbon nanotube stuff, they do mention that this is where the main cost is, but what happens when that equipment needs to be replaced?
What is the environmental impact of the equipment itself?
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.
That's a distraction: The extraction is only temporarily. The value of an amount of efuel is not in that it's made from captured CO2, it's in burning that efuel to drive some machine. So yeah, there will be some CO2 captured in storage and transit, but that's will be less than what we release every year.
If you want to capture CO2 for good: Capture it, dump it somewhere and don't touch it ever again. The trick is to derive (monetary) value from the permanent storage. Just digging a hole and dumping it there doesn't make anyone richer (only healthier, but who's paying for that on the necessary scale?). Thinking about it, maybe we can use it in construction?
Maybe we have a little misunderstanding here? If you produce fuel from CO2, that CO2 will be released again once that fuel is burned. It's CO2 neutral, not negative.
So assume today we have 100t CO2 in the air. You capture 20t of that and make efuel from it. Now we have 80t of CO2 in the air. Which is great. However you went through all the effort so you could actually sell that efuel instead of sitting on it. So lets say I buy it from you. And then I'll burn some in my car and use some to heat my house. As a result, we now have 100t of CO2 in the air, again.
Would I use fossil fuel and heating oil, then we would have 120t of CO2 in the air. So non-ironic hooray, we prevented that. We're neutral. But once we're upgrading me to an electric heat pump and an electric car that energetic detour won't be necessary anymore, since I can use the electricity directly. That's also much more efficient: The heat pump by a factor of 4 to 9 (77kWh produces 1 gal efuel, which burns for 33.7kWh of heat; 77kWh used in a heat pump produces 154 to 308kWh of heat), and the car by a factor of 10 (math given previously).
If the goal was to have 80t in the air on the other hand, then at least it didn't make it worse; but until we dump CO2 somewhere it isn't released into the air again, we will never get to that goal.
It's not like I'm anti-efuel; for a long time to come and for some specialty use cases it will be a good solution to not make things worse (e.g. space rockets), but in the general case: It's a stop-gap, not a solution.
//edit: What we could do is tax people who release CO2 for the subsequent, necessary capture. That can then be scrubbed from the air again using the 36$ process the people on the linked page claim to use/have invented. Use that CO2 in an efuel and release it again, you pay to have it scrubbed again. To reduce the total amount of CO2 in the air, require that you not only pay to scrub the emissions, but some additional % (until the problem is solved, then just pay to scrub what was actually emitted).
That's essentially a simplified & more strict CO2 certificate trade.
> The main energy cost is in getting the CO2 to release from the absorbent — to desorb. And that’s when things get really expensive, because this requires a lot of energy...we don’t make or need pure CO2 gas, so we don’t need to desorb it. Therefore, we avoid the vast majority of this cost. Instead, we capture CO2 in water and then use it in water to make fuel. ARPA-E refers to this as “reactive CO2 capture” and identifies it as a significantly lower-cost DAC approach.
How good is water at capturing CO2 compared to the other absorbents? My guess, not as good. So is more CO2 released because they're capturing with water?
They are capturing with hydroxide salt dissolved in water. At issue in all such scenarios is how you get the CO2 back out. They claim to have something uniquely clever for that. It will soon be evident how well it works.
(I'm ... if not a huge fan, desperately interested in seeing whether or not Fischer-Tropsch fuel synthesis is viable. Stumbling straight out of the gate with an impossible-to-read website is ... a very disappointing self-pwon.)
These comments are irritating but so true. WTF! I waited for many seconds for the page to load, and now I have to wait 3 or 4 seconds every time I try and scroll.
Maybe this doesn't reflect on the company, but I feel if you can't even create a simple web page, then what the hell else are you going to struggle with along the journey?
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.
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.
Distilling doesn't make it more economical than traditional refining though, according to their whole position. Boiling involves ALOT of energy compared to passive membrane separation.
They still have a zero carbon liquid fuel so you can't compare it directly to refined fuel.
Fossil fuels should be eventually taxed into oblivion. Even at current taxation level their distilled fuel would be competitive if tax exempt for example in Europe.
I didn't. The comparison is that this is claimed to be cheaper than normal fuel extraction from the ground. But that relies on tech such as the permiable membrane developed from CNT, which AFAIK, no major breakthroughs have been made.
It's a bit like investment madness, in which investors are being swindled because no one is doing their due diligence to vet the tech and instead throwing money in a blind panic in FOMO.
Exactly? Did he? Looking at the site that is linked or quoted to doesn't exactly instill confidence. Is no one else drilling down and looking into all these details like me, or do they simply research it and then move on rather than comment leaving all the arm chair scientists to pontificate based on a flashy website?
Me too. If I turn on some Javascript, I get just a logo and a hamburger symbol on a black screen. If I click on the hamburger symbol, it turns into a big "X" still on a black screen.
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 is new, is only recently possible, and is unlike anything that anyone else is doing to make synthetic fuels today. It is because of this new process that we are the only company making e-fuels that can compete with fossil fuels without new laws or subsidies — our fuels can compete simply by being better and costing less than the fossil fuels they will replace. This is a truly exciting breakthrough in our ability to solve some of the world’s most intractable problems, like climate change, energy security, and the need for increased energy-driven prosperity. But as often happens with breakthroughs of this magnitude, our process has provoked some dramatic responses - It sounds too good to be true! — and raised a lot of questions: How is it possible that your e-fuels are so much cheaper than everyone else’s? And if you can make these fuels, then where are they? Why aren’t they for sale yet? I’m here to answer these questions.
What’s everybody else doing?
If we ignore biofuels and waste-to-fuels and just focus on fuels made partially or fully from electricity from renewable sources, then everyone else who’s making e-fuels is using high temperature, high pressure synthesis. It’s been possible for almost a hundred years to make synthetic fuels from H2 and CO2 by using the Fischer Tropsch process, (invented in 1925), or similar processes that use high temperature and pressure with a catalyst to combine carbon and hydrogen into fuels. Currently, there are many companies using Fischer Tropsch or related processes that call their products e-fuels, which technically can be true if they only use electricity for CO2 capture and desorption, hydrogen generation, CO2 to CO conversion, synthesis reactions, and downstream cracking and distillation. In practice, it’s common to use fossil methane for the heat needed in these processes and to try to justify the additional CO2 this emits by promising to capture it also. Regardless of how closely they keep to the electricity-only ideal, however, none of these approaches can compete with fossil fuels on price.
What’s new about our process and why do our e-fuels cost so much less that they can compete with fossil fuels?
- Electricity is really cheap now
The first reason our fuels have such a low cost is not specific to us — it’s the recent abundance of really cheap renewable power. E-fuels are stored renewable energy. The day has long been anticipated when the cost of renewable electricity would become low enough to enable e-fuels, and that day has come. Specifically, it arrived in 2018, when the cost of utility scale solar power dropped to $0.02/kWh for the first time in a purchase by the city of Los Angeles. This marks a drop of over 90% in just ten years. The most recent record for the lowest utility scale solar bid was achieved last year at $0.01/kWh. The dramatic drop in costs is due to massive investment in solar panel manufacturing and in learning-by-doing cost reductions from making lots of solar panels. Low cost electrons mean low cost e-fuels.
[chart: https://storage.googleapis.com/prometheus-fuels.appspot.com/...]
- We don’t need pure CO2
The second reason our fuels are low cost, and one that is specific to us, is that we don’t need pure CO2. In order to make hydrocarbon e-fuels at scale one needs to capture CO2 from the air by direct air capture (DAC). For everyone else making e-fuels, this is a large cost. This is because their processes all require pure, pressurized CO2 gas. One obtains CO2 from the air by adsorbing the CO2 into or onto something, typically an amine liquid or amine functionalized bead, or in a hydroxide solution in water, or something more exotic, like an ionic liquid. This part isn’t so hard, and doesn’t require much energy, just a fan to blow air. In some cases, passive wind is used, but in either case, it’s not the main energy consumer.
The main energy cost is in getting the CO2 to release from the absorbent — to desorb. And that’s when things get really expensive, because this requires a lot of energy, almost always in the form of heat from burning fossil methane or a portion of the fuel produced. This is why most DAC CO2 processes cost $500-$600/ton of CO2 with a far distant and hopeful target of $100/ton at scale. But even at $100/ton CO2, any fuel one goes on to make is already too expensive to compete with fossil fuel.
At Prometheus, we don’t make or need pure CO2 gas, so we don’t need to desorb it. Therefore, we avoid the vast majority of this cost. Instead, we capture CO2 in water and then use it in water to make fuel. ARPA-E refers to this as “reactive CO2 capture” and identifies it as a significantly lower-cost DAC approach. Because our DAC tech is fundamentally different, our cost to capture CO2 is only $36/ton, the lowest in the world, and the only one low enough to enable fuel that competes on price with fossil. (More on this below.)
- We use electrocatalysts, not catalysts that need high pressure and temperature
The third reason our fuels are low cost, and another reason that is specific to us, is that we use electrocatalysts to do what only pressure and temperature could do before. The first widely read paper on this showed that CO2 in water could be turned into ethanol at a faradic efficiency of 63%. This means that 63% of the electrons that went into products in the process went into ethanol. We licensed a second-generation of this catalyst that has even better performance, making much larger and more complex carbon-based fuels with electricity alone.
Using electrocatalysts instead of the high pressure and temperature catalysts everyone else uses gives us a big reduction in cost because we can do the same job at room temperature and pressure while using much less expensive materials. It’s also great for our system performance because we can turn our process on and off quickly, matching intermittent solar and wind power. High pressure and temperature systems can’t operate like that.
- We’re the only ones who don’t need distillation
The fourth reason our fuels are low cost is that we’re the only company in the world that can replace distillation with nanotechnology to separate fuels from the water in which they’re made. In my previous startup, Mattershift, I commercialized a carbon nanotube (CNT) membrane, and published on it in 2018. Numerous academic publications have shown that membranes like this could separate alcohols from water, but until Mattershift produced them, no commercial CNT membranes were available. Previously, the only way to separate alcohols from water was to use distillation, another highly inefficient and expensive heat-based separation process. The CNT membranes solve this problem, using over 90% less energy than distillation and dramatically lowering the cost of extracting our fuel. This is a big deal because it reduces what is a major cost for other e-fuel makers to a minor cost for us.
Ok, that sounds good, but how does all this compete with fossil oil and gas?
The math on the cost of our e-fuel is pretty simple. The only inputs are air (CO2 and water) and electricity, and the only outputs are oxygen and fuel. The cost of the inputs plus the cost of the equipment and its maintenance make up nearly all of the cost. There are some other operating costs, like the vacuum pump and coolers on the CNT membranes or the power for pumps and controls, but these are less than 1% of total operating costs. I won’t include taxes or delivery fees since these vary a lot from place to place.
The main cost is electricity. The energy density of liquid e-fuels is very high, the main reason that they have long been desired as a solution for decarbonizing long-haul shipping and aviation. For gasoline, the energy density is approx. 33 kWh/gallon. In a TEA study we did last year with a third-party engineering firm, the estimate for the overall efficiency of our process (chemical energy in the fuel / electrical energy used to make it) is approx. 43%. This is a really great efficiency, because it includes everything involved from start to finish, including DAC of CO2, synthesis of the fuel, and separating the fuel so it’s ready to use. At this efficiency, our gasoline will need approx. 77 kWh of electricity per gallon. If the cost of power is $0.02/kWh, then the electricity cost of our e-gasoline is $1.54/gallon.
The next cost is CO2. The third-party TEA put our DAC cost at $36/ton of CO2 at $0.02/kWh, making it the lowest cost DAC in the world, and this cost drops further with lower costs of electricity. A gallon of gasoline contains approx. 8.9 kg of CO2 per gallon, so at a cost of $36/ton, this results in a CO2 cost for us of $0.32/gallon.
The most important cost after electricity is equipment cost, typically called capital cost. Adding up the electricity and CO2 costs, we get $1.86/gallon. If we want to stay below $3.00/gallon (for example), then we need to keep the capital and maintenance costs less than $1.14/gallon. Our cost models tell us that we can have capital and maintenance costs that are significantly lower than that, due to the advantages listed above, including not needing CO2 desorption or fuel distillation equipment, using low cost materials due to low temperatures and pressures, and deploying mass manufacturing methods like those used to make cars.
Ok, that’s cheap fuel, I’m into it. But where are the demos? If you can do this, why can’t I buy the fuel yet? . . . Dude, where’s my fuel?
In short, the fuel is coming. We’re about to do more and bigger demos. And we can replace fossil fuels a lot faster than most people think. Here’s where we’re at now.
First, we make fuel from the air all the time at Prometheus. We’ve been doing it since we started with the Fuel Forge Demo 1 system I built in the Y-Combinator batch in 2019. We just don’t make that much at any given time, and there’s a really good reason for this. We’re optimizing the most expensive part of the system, the electrochemical stack (which we call the Faraday Reactor), and the fastest and best way to do that is one commercial-scale cell (a cathode, anode, and separator) at a time. 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.
It’s worth pointing out that companies that do demos to show they can make e-fuel aren’t showing that much. After all, it’s been possible to make fuel that way for over 100 years. What matters is showing that you can make it at low cost, and that is something you do with chemical analysis, bills of materials, and cost models. Kind of boring as demos go, but it’s what matters most. We’ve been killing these demos, which is why we are the first unicorn in the e-fuels space.
So let’s talk about capital cost, the one we need to keep below $1.14/gallon to stay below $3.00/gallon fuel.
For this it helps to compare our Titan Fuel Forges to a more familiar system, a hydrogen electrolyzer. Our Fuel Forges are similar in many ways to hydrogen electrolyzers, in that they consist of many layers of cells, each consisting of a cathode, an anode, and a separator. In an H2 Electrolyzer, the anode is where electrons are stripped from water, producing oxygen, and the cathode is where electrons are added to protons, producing hydrogen gas. In our system, the anode works the same way, but our cathode, in addition to making H2, also makes liquid fuels. Both systems have capital costs dominated by the costs of the electrochemical stacks.
This brings us to the issue of economies of scale. For high temperature / high pressure systems like Fischer Tropsch or e-methanol to gasoline (MTG), economies of scale mean large refinery installations that cost billions of dollars and years to build (and still don’t get to cost-competitive fuels). For modular, mobile systems like our Titan Fuel Forges, however, economies of scale mean mass manufacturing. Building a Fuel Forge isn’t like building a refinery, it’s like building a car. When you mass manufacture a product, the cost of the product asymptotically approaches the cost of the materials. Since our process uses only inexpensive metals like copper and steel, inexpensive gasket materials and other low pressure, low temperature components, our cost of materials is low. This is a very powerful approach for low fuel cost.
One thing that’s especially advantageous about the stack dominating the cost of the system is that bringing economies of scale to stack manufacturing by making many cells is very nearly as powerful as making many Fuel Forges overall. For manufacturing methods like injection molding, for example, one can get to very low costs very quickly, delivering impressive economies of scale. A Faraday Reactor, like an H2 electrolyzer stack, is made of many layers, so making even a few Fuel Forges can quickly lead to low stack costs.
[chart: https://storage.googleapis.com/prometheus-fuels.appspot.com/...]
https://inspirationfeed.com/how-to-correctly-calculate-the-c...
For this reason, driving down the cost of the Faraday Reactor is the single most effective way to drive down the cost of a Titan Fuel Forge, and therefore the capital cost component of the fuel.
In the stage we’re at now, we’re close to locking down the design of our commercial-scale cell and stack design and are about to start automating their assembly into many-cell stacks. Even with the slow global supply chain we’ve all been dealing with lately, this can happen pretty quickly, because it’s a fairly simple assembly process — just slow when it’s being done by hand. This means we’ll be making larger quantities of fuel and we’ll get to do the demos with motorcycles, race cars and classic cars, and jetpacks and planes that we know you want to see. Up to this point, I haven’t been willing to do these larger-scale demos because of the significant slow-down they would involve, delaying our progress towards launching commercial fuel - the thing we care about most. But the right time to do them is coming soon. Personally, I’m really looking forward to doing those demos, because I like putting on a good show.
Our not-so-secret plan is to get the Faraday Reactors into automated assembly and take all the data we’ve gathered to design and build the first Titan Fuel Forge 1.0 commercial system. I think we can start the build this year, but I’ve learned that schedules are hard to predict right now. If everything goes our way, we’ll be shipping fuel very soon.
After that, we’ll be making more Forges with automated Faraday Reactor assembly and most of the rest by hand as fast as we can, but to really scale quickly, we’ll need to build a factory to make many fuel forges. We call this factory the MetaForge.
The rate at which we can build Fuel Forges in the first MetaForge will be set by the rate at which new solar and wind power can be built. If we assume for the moment that each Titan Fuel Forge will have a rating of 1 MW each, then 1,000 Fuel Forges will require 1 GW of new renewable power to operate. If 250 GW of new renewable power for “power to X” projects are built each year, then the MetaForge could make 250,000 fuel forges per year. (Compare this rate of production to that of car factories that can make more than 500,000 cars per year). At this rate, these forges could decarbonize approx. 30 million cars per year. This is a very rapid decarbonization rate compared to any other options currently under consideration. Alongside the growth of battery electric vehicles, it’s feasible using this approach to decarbonize the global vehicle fleet entirely by 2040. Using e-fuels to replace all energy products made from oil and gas across sectors could eliminate over 20 GT of CO2 emissions per year.