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Prometheus Fuels (YC W19) Closes Series B with $1.5B Valuation
- outside1234 5y agoWhat's the catch? Does the fuel cost $10 a gallon?
- jack_riminton 5y agoI can't point you to where because the scrolling but mid-page it said it costs the same as regular fuel
- rasz 5y agoThe catch is there is no fuel.
- rmcginnis 5y agoOne cent per gallon less than the fossil jet fuel spot price - in California (we will use LCFS credits to start)
- jonny_eh 5y agoThis site is so hard to navigate/scroll, it's a shame because this seems like interesting tech.
- setgree 5y agoTrying to click this on my phone in a low-service area (I waited 10 seconds and got nowhere besides a loading screen) is a great reminder of why companies should strive to have at least some of their materials — anything related to fundraising is a good candidate — in plaintext.
- caymanjim 5y agoI'm on high speed Internet and the loading animation was slowly spinning long enough for me to close the tab without seeing anything else.
- dr_orpheus 5y agoSame for me.
- whirlwin 5y agoJudging by the name, I thought it was something else. They can still make a fuel_exporter though!
- adamdusty 5y agoThe website really glosses over the part where they turn alcohols into gasoline. Is this an existing technology that is already available? I dont know as I'm not really plugged into energy generation technology. Also, it says that Titan turns 9 millions kilotons of CO2 into 1 million gallons of gasoline. Does it actually do this or is that what they expect it to do?
- pfdietz 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#Methanol_to_hydrocarbons,_olefins,_gasoline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol#Methanol_to_hydrocarb...
- donsupreme 5y ago1.5B valuation and yet their UX is total shit and basically unusable.
- bpodgursky 5y agoSounds like they have their priorities right, focusing on a hard-tech product and not a consumer web portal.
- norcux 5y agoI would argue they focused too much on the website to the point where they over-engineered it.
- kolbe 5y agoThis is not a cheap/neglected form of "total shit." They put a lot of man hours into this cartoon.
- kwonkicker 5y agoWhat product?
- notyourday 5y agoTheir product is selling shares. If you are looking at the UX or the tech, you aren't their target market.
- danpalmer 5y agoI haven't had a loading screen for that long on a website, or a framerate that low, since I last used Flash in 2007. This is a shame because I think the company does something interesting? I'm not sure, because the website is getting in the way of understanding what it is, but reading the Wikipedia entry it sounds fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels
- kaycebasques 5y agoThere was a lot of excitement around this business in their Launch HN post [1]. I recall the reception being positive and the technology sounding legit, not snake oil. Pretty cool to see that they've been plugging away and must have got the interest of some big players. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
- endisneigh 5y agoI admire the attempt to make your site really cool, but jeez it's so unusable. Perhaps the most "form over function" site I've used in years. Please use a million or so and just make the website a static site.
- jacquesm 5y agoBut if they had had a static website they wouldn't have had funding.
- lancesells 5y agoI think you could have both. Static home page with a link to "Experience Prometheus".
- destitude 5y agoDoesn't work properly for me in Safari version I am using (13.1.3).. I see no text or images.. just some logo.
- ttobbaybbob 5y agoThey 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-reactor https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/meet-our-v3-faraday-... https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/worlds-1st-machine-that-sorts-alcohols-from-h2o-without-distillation https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/worlds-1st-machine-t... Hopefully someone can chime in with an explanation of why the technology is viable now (and not in the past) or why Prometheus is equipped to execute on this vision.
- mbesto 5y agoAnd how a physical good/energy company that is worth $1.5B only has 20 employees...
- kolbe 5y agoWelcome to 2021. In a few years, Chase Coleman will pick up large stake in this company, take it public and financially engineer it enough to stuff it into the S&P at a $500bn valuation.
- femiagbabiaka 5y agoOh yeah. Added to $ARKK and the whole nine yards.
- sayonaraman 5y agomost of that funding must have paid for the animations
- splistud 5y agoDefinitely better valuations on Canadian companies in the carbon-neutral 'area', and better ideas in my opinion
- 5y ago
- Invictus0 5y agoNot surprised to see all the criticism of the website, as of course this is HN. But for me it loaded instantly and I absolutely loved the experience. That said, the technology seems suspect. Carbon nanotubes are just as hard to use today as they were twenty years ago.
- dukecitypal 5y agoWhy convert methanol to gasoline when you can directly convert it into electricity using a reformer and HT-PEM fuelcell? https://www.advent.energy/advent-power-stacks/ https://www.advent.energy/advent-power-stacks/
- splistud 5y agoBecause gasoline is also an extremely useful product
- brutusborn 5y agoThe main benefit would be in applications like jet fuel where the smaller alcohols and hydrocarbons won't cut it.
- lambdatronics 5y agoSeems to me that directly selling methanol might be the way to go at first. It's an important industrial chemical in its own right.
- sethbannon 5y agoI'm confused about how this is on the front page. The title says they've raised a Series B at a big valuation but the link is just their marketing page, with no mention whatsoever of a raise.
- alexose 5y agoSorry, I'm not sure what happened there. The actual release is tucked away on their blog: https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/prometheus-is-first-electrofuels-unicorn-closes-series-b https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/prometheus-is-first-...
- contravariant 5y agoDear god, it's just text but somehow they've managed to make it equally unusable as their overdesigned homepage.
- jpm_sd 5y agoDidn't Google X try out something similar, and then decided it was uneconomical? https://x.company/projects/foghorn/ https://x.company/projects/foghorn/
- nradov 5y agoThe US Navy continues to research similar technology for manufacturing synthetic kerosene out of sea water onboard aircraft carriers. They aren't too concerned about economics. Their goal is to reduce the amount of jet fuel they have to haul around.
- mbesto 5y ago> Their goal is to reduce the amount of jet fuel they have to haul around. Which has economic consequences :)
- nradov 5y agoNo it's more about survivability. Tankers are a vulnerable part of the logistic train. And storing large amounts of fuel is a fire risk.
- mbesto 5y agoOk let's get pedantic. Not having to store fuel means: - I have to spend less money on logistics because I don't have to put out fires, I don't have to train people to put out fires, I don't have to hire people, etc. etc. - Less fuel needed to be held means more working capital needed for energy consumption, less time to fuel up. - Less fire risk means I have to allocate less money for risk based allocations (insurance, hospitalization for people getting burnt, emergency planning and services required to deal with fires, etc.) - Less fuel means the cost to create an aircraft carrier is much less - A smaller fuel tank required means a smaller overall aircraft carrier, which means I spend less - etc etc. This is by all means an economic decision.
- 5y ago
- aww_dang 5y agoFeasibility aside, this is exactly what people want to hear today. Eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere and sell gasoline. You have to give them credit for the pitch, regardless of what is or isn't delivered.
- jacquesm 5y agoI have this great idea about doing blood assays for all of the common tests out there out of a little pinprick worth of blood from your fingertip. It's exactly what people want to hear today. How about some funding?
- aww_dang 5y agoYes, Theranos raised money. If Prometheus goes that way the failure mode may be different. "Our process works, but it isn't profitable." "It isn't profitable, but we deserve subsidies..." "It isn't profitable now, but with carbon trading right around the corner we will be wildly profitable in the near future"
- alexose 5y agoIt definitely passes the Mr. Burns test: https://twitter.com/sethbannon/status/1214215295969030148 https://twitter.com/sethbannon/status/1214215295969030148
- moneywoes 5y agoThis seems to good to be true. What’s the catch?
- truthwhisperer 5y agohope your technology works better than your website
- BLanen 5y agoUsing organic fuels as a battery(which this essentially proposes) with internal combustion engines is extremely inefficient. This seems more like a device to capture subsidies.
- pkrein 5y agoIf 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?
- caust1c 5y agoSubsidies, closed grid electric sources, could be anything! (Not claiming it's feasible, but playing devils advocate because of course I'm hopeful)
- sacred_numbers 5y agoTheir system is designed to easily start and stop to take advantage of wholesale wind and solar electricity rates, which are more like $0.02/kWh during certain parts of the day and times of the year. They sacrifice uptime for even cheaper electricity. If their capital costs and fixed opex are low enough this is a good strategy. Here's an article about this strategy form the CEO: https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(20)30002-7.pdf https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(20)30002-7.pdf
- skeeter2020 5y agomake it up on volume?
- yumraj 5y ago> How can that work? Theranos 2.0 ?
- qqqwerty 5y agoThere is probably a fair bit of wishful thinking going on, but that is essentially a perquisite for starting a company like this. The pessimists don't get very far. 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.
- hannob 5y agoJust 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 discussion (while snarky, both people know this space well): https://twitter.com/gnievchenko/status/1385357863191814149# https://twitter.com/gnievchenko/status/1385357863191814149# https://mobile.twitter.com/rutherdan/status/1385459168107057156 https://mobile.twitter.com/rutherdan/status/1385459168107057...
- Voloskaya 5y ago> can capture CO2 from the air with 36$, which is like 20-30 times lower than what current best tech can offer 36$ is their cost after reselling the fuel. The 20-30x is the cost to capture and then sequester a ton, with no revenue for this.
- rmcginnis 5y ago$36/ton is our cost to capture CO2 from the air. For us it is an input to making things, not a product, so we don't need to purify it to 100% pure CO2, just need to capture it into water (approx. 2% concentration). This requires way less energy and equipment, so much much cheaper.
- YossarianFrPrez 5y agoPrometheus's vision is very hard not to like. And, at the same time, there are likely good reasons to be skeptical. (I have very little expertise in this area myself.) 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.
- YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
- tbojanin 5y agoThis website gave safari a heart attack
- betaby 5y agoLooks like Theranos to me.
- neonate 5y agoHere's the relevant text, since the website makes it hard to get to. We’re excited to announce the close of our Series B funding round, with investment by Maersk, Metaplanet, and BMW. As a result of the round, we’ve achieved a $1.5 Billion valuation, making us the world’s first electrofuels unicorn. This month, we received strong support from the White House, as well as some of world’s largest, most iconic brands that have been nothing short of bold in backing innovative tech to decarbonize their industries — American Airlines, Maersk, and BMW. Their support marks a rising recognition of the incredible promise that our zero net carbon electrofuels hold in getting the planet to Net Zero by 2050. On September 9, the Biden administration included Prometheus and our zero net carbon electro-Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or electro-SAF, in its plan to phase out fossil jet fuel and make aviation carbon neutral by 2050. American Airlines, responding to the White House’s goal, cited our zero net carbon electro-SAF as key to decarbonizing its fleet, which, at over 880 aircraft, is the world’s largest. The airline’s support came on the heels of its recent agreement to buy 10 million gallons of our fuel. Said Doug Parker, American Airlines Chairman and CEO: “We’re excited to partner with Prometheus to scale up the production of zero net carbon electrofuels. Their ability to produce 100% carbon neutral SAF at a price lower than fossil jet fuel and to not be limited in the scale of future production is the strongest indicator we’ve seen that a 100% carbon neutral aviation future can be achieved in time.” Maersk Growth, the venture arm of A.P. Moller - Maersk, led our Series B round. Maersk, the world’s largest container logistics company, responsible for moving nearly 17% of the world’s container capacity, has been a take-no-prisoners, accept-no-half-measures trailblazer in decarbonizing its operations and the maritime shipping industry at large. So we were honored when Maersk’s Head of Decarbonization, Morten Bo Christiansen, had this to say: “Prometheus Fuels is developing a very exciting and innovative technology to produce carbon based electrofuels from direct air capture of CO2. Electrofuels are expected to play a key role for the decarbonisation of shipping and, if scaled successfully, Prometheus Fuels’ technology will address a key constraint for carbon based electrofuels — namely the cost competitiveness of direct air capture.” BMW i Ventures, who led our Series A round last year, doubled-down to join our Series B as well.
- quadrature 5y agoThanks!, their website is completely unusable so this helps a ton.
- earksiinni 5y agoSerious question for all atmospheric carbon capture companies: What happens once you're super successful and atmospheric carbon densities are dramatically lower? Is there a point at which the density is too low for the economics to work? Would be an awesome problem to have.
- achenatx 5y agowe burn the generated fuel and cycle the carbon again. The fuel essentially acts like a battery. You would have to use renewable energy to power the capture.
- earksiinni 5y agoDuh! Obviously (headdesk :-) I guess I was thinking more of CCS, but for fuel it makes total sense.
- alexose 5y agoI can't wait for that to be a problem :) Most carbon capture schemes like this tend to have some sort of concentration step, often using amine sorbents or other chemical equivalents. The atmospheric concentration doesn't tend to be the bottleneck here, from what I can tell. There is the question of "what happens when we're at pre-industrial carbon levels", which yeah, means that we'll have to stop getting our carbon straight from the atmosphere :)
- hsavit1 5y agoWhy 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.
- rhinoceraptor 5y agoEV passenger cars are feasible for the average person today. But without an order of magnitude leap in battery tech, it's never going to be feasible to electrify planes, cargo ships, farm equipment, etc. 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.
- avaldes 5y ago> EV passenger cars are feasible for the average person today. Where? California? The world's bigger than the US and Europe and massive EV adoption in the developing world isn't a thing. EV are still a expensive luxury in most countries.
- eaenki 5y agoThey must have spent a million on that landing page
- tedmcory77 5y agoI really enjoyed Prometheus's launch discussion here on HN. I've followed them on a regular basis because I believe in their vision and mission largely because of Rob's responses here on HN. I'm glad to see they've got funding for the next steps to start scaling.
- jmpman 5y agoIf Norway took their entire sovereign wealth fund from the extraction of oil, and spent it on carbon capture, what percentage of carbon they extracted through their oil industry, could they recover? 0.1% 1% 100% ?
- uxcolumbo 5y agoWhat does everyone think of the website? 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.
- rmcginnis 5y agoHi everybody, I'm the founder of Prometheus. Happy to answer any questions!
- alexose 5y agoI'm curious if Prometheus has considered any options for permanent sequestration. Perhaps buying an old oil rig and pumping electro fuel back into it. It's obviously hard to find an economic incentive to do this, but maybe carbon credits would make it possible.
- Voloskaya 5y agoHow would that be better for the environment though? Unless we have a way to electrify all planes (we don't currently), this is the next best thing. I think the key is to ensure biofuel never gets cheaper than regular fuel, to avoid incentivizing flying more. If you sequester what you pull out in some old oil well, while American Airlines is pumping out from the next oil well, it has to be less effective (and thus release more CO2 in the process), than just you sending your oil from captured carbon directly to them.
- alexose 5y agoIt would make sense in that we need a net reduction in atmospheric carbon, and not 100% of carbon emissions come from burning fuel. Though, I do see your point-- This only pencils out once you've captured 100% of the available fuels market, which is quite large.
- pedalpete 5y agoMore a bit of feedback then question. You are obviously aware of the issues with the site. I like the vision and how you've laid it out, but I felt you were missing a trick with design a bit. You lay out the "for centuries the way.." really well, and it's fun. I feel like I'm in Mad Max. But then, you introduce your technology, and everything is still desert. I don't feel like you've "changed the world" because your tech is so great. Also, for LOTS of people (as you can see in the comments) this sort of web experience doesn't work when they want to dig into real details, or want to feel like they aren't watching a movie. They want it to feel real, so I'd recommend a place they can go with a simple layout, almost whitepaper like description of what you're doing. Perhaps that exists, but I couldn't find it, and you even had a comment (more highly voted than yours) which has copied the text from your site, and pasted it here to be easy to read. Just a few suggestions.
- rmcginnis 5y agoSorry to all about the drop in website performance. Working on it!
- annoyingnoob 5y agoI feel like a high school kid just told me about a great idea. Pretty much ignores pollution beyond CO2. The 289 engine in the '67 Fastback in their cartoon is what I would call a 'gross polluter'. Burning gasoline also produces NOx, CO, SO2, particulates, and more. There is a reason that electric cars are a thing.
- bushwik 5y agoThis is an interesting one since it may be more about market timing than technology. Doing a bit more research but it is likely they are getting the valuation based on LCFS (CA) and 45Q (Federal/IRS) carbon capture credits in addition to the potential of displacing jet fuel.