35 ms·

Dude, where's my fuel?

• PaulHoule 4y ago
  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.
• johngalt 4y ago
  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.
  • nyokodo 4y ago
    > 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?
    • DennisP 4y ago
      And if Peter Zeihan is right, the loss of Russian exports is just the beginning of oil supply disruption over the next decade.
      • Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
        India and China are not losing any Russian imports
        • nyokodo 4y ago
          > 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.
          • Iwan-Zotow 4y ago
            You know that e.g. BP production had fallen for last few years, right?
      • leobg 4y ago
        If I read just one book of this author, which should I read? Or if not a book, which podcast/video? Thank you.
        • kreeben 4y ago
          This one hour podcast really got me interested in Peter Zeihan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdP01go8wdQ&t=258s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdP01go8wdQ&t=258s His latest book is "The end of the world is only the beginning". I follow him through the YT channnel "GEOPOP".
          • leobg 4y ago
            Thank you!
        • 4y ago
  • _hypx 4y ago
    The idea of synfuels, which is what this is, is not new. Many companies are pursuing this idea. Including Porsche: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/porsche-taking-stake-in-e-fuels-maker-highly-innovative-fuels-global.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/06/porsche-taking-stake-in-e-fu... There are two challenges to tackle here: First is to make it work at all, and second is to do it cheaper than what the competition can muster.
    • nyokodo 4y ago
      > There are two challenges to tackle Both of which are covered in the article.
  • db65edfc7996 4y ago
    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)?
    • rmcginnis 4y ago
      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.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      The chemical reagents are not consumed in operation, but they could be subject to contamination over time, and need to be replaced periodically.
  • rmcginnis 4y ago
    $3.00 / gallon is our v 1.0 (before taxes)
    • sien 4y ago
      Wow. If you hit that you're sorted in Europe. https://www.tolls.eu/fuel-prices https://www.tolls.eu/fuel-prices European prices seem to average about ~ EU 1.8 / litre or ~7.2 EU / Gallon or $US 7.6 / gallon. For C02 neutral fuel it would just work at that price.
      • Auracle 4y ago
        A very large portion of what Europeans pay for gas is tax.
        • PeterisP 4y ago
          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.
        • sien 4y ago
          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.
        • ncmncm 4y ago
          Presumably this stuff won't be taxed the same way. Taxes will need to be restructured so roads are paid for, maybe by vehicle licensing.
          • HyprMusic 4y ago
  • toast0 4y ago
    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.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      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
      • alex_young 4y ago
        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?
        • coderintherye 4y ago
          Solectrac is making electric tractors in production. They are available today (though waiting period between deposit and delivery).
          • ncmncm 4y ago
  • moistly 4y ago
    Prometheus addresses this: > The thing is one cell doesn’t make that much fuel. What it does do is make enough to tell us what to do to iterate to the next cell design, which is exactly what we need to be doing to improve our performance and costs as quickly and inexpensively as possible. If we stopped this process to replicate one of the iterations of the cell to many cells, we could make more fuel, but we wouldn’t learn any more, we’d use up a lot of time and materials, and it wouldn’t prove that we can compete with fossil fuels on cost - the thing that matters.
  • mmazing 4y ago
    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.
• adultSwim 4y ago
  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?
  • chrisbigelow 4y ago
    They acquire the carbon using direct air capture[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels#:~:text=The%20process%20uses%20a%20solution,through%20while%20blocking%20water%20molecules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels#:~:text=The%2....
  • gnulinux 4y ago
    They catch CO2 from air. They make fuel only from this and electricity. Then once someone burns the fuel, it produces the same or less CO2.
    • adultSwim 4y ago
      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.
  • jker 4y ago
    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.
• sdkgjajggaf 4y ago
  This page is completely unreadable due to the lagging custom scrolling they added. Just make a regular web page please.
  • onesafari 4y ago
    What is the point of messing with scrolling behavior? Do people find this to be an improvement over the default?
    • Rodeoclash 4y ago
      It's become an instant close of the website for me now. I can't stand it.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
      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.
  • beachy 4y ago
    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?
• Manuel_D 4y ago
  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.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Maybe, just maybe, they understand the actual business they are actually in better than you do?
    • Manuel_D 4y ago
      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.
      • tuatoru 4y ago
        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".
      • thereisnospork 4y ago
        >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).
• tedmcory77 4y ago
  I'm really rooting for your company Rob. Your lean approach to execution and keeping focused on what matters really give me hope you'll be successful.
  • rmcginnis 4y ago
    Thanks!
• usrn 4y ago
  All I get is a loading animation.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    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.
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      Anyway now I get text on-screen, so they fixed something. Messing with scrolling semantics just makes people hate you.
• neonate 4y ago
  [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. [chart: https://storage.googleapis.com/prometheus-fuels.appspot.com/uploads/1651637249475_ztl.jpg 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/uploads/1651638366192_wlb.jpg https://storage.googleapis.com/prometheus-fuels.appspot.com/...] https://inspirationfeed.com/how-to-correctly-calculate-the-cost-of-injection-molding/ 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.
• dredmorbius 4y ago
  Dude, where's my web content? (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.)
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    At least they finally got it so text shows up, for me, eventually.
• elil17 4y ago
  Can anyone explain to me why their DAC is so cheap?
  • DennisP 4y ago
    From the article: > 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.
    • simulate-me 4y ago
      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?
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        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.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  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. EDIT-2: $12/gal if 93-octane equivalent 0: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GBBG5LZ/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GBBG5LZ/
  • maxerickson 4y ago
    That would probably be a cheap price for delivering gasoline that cost ~$0 to put into those containers.
    • renewiltord 4y ago
      I see. Thank you for acquainting me with the economics at play. I guess it isn’t feasible to go DTC.
• no_wizard 4y ago
  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.
  • fswd 4y ago
    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.
    • elil17 4y ago
      The U.S. "Sunshot" program sets USD$0.03/kWh as the target levelized cost for 2030 utility solar. At the moment that number is USD$0.06/kWh. If they used power only at production peaks and colocated with generation (saving ~10% line losses), $0.02/kWh seems in the realm of the possible. As to lack of resources to build enough solar capacity, concentrator plants make that a non-issue.
• foobarian 4y ago
  Oh I see, their lander is mining Bitcoins with my browser to subsidize the product. /s Seriously, that page took 10s to load, pegged my laptop CPU and got the fans spinning. WTF?
  • leodriesch 4y ago
    The blog seems to be poorly optimized, but if you go to their home page you will see where all that power is going. Really amazing TBH.
• Layke1123 4y ago
  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.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Depends whether he actually delivered the thing in 2018.
    • Layke1123 4y ago
      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?
      • ncmncm 4y ago
        It really only matters if you are thinking of investing in his company. There are dozens of others working toward the same or similar goals. If his company does not succeed, another will.
  • scotty79 4y ago
    It's not a key element of their process. You could just distill it and humanity had millenia of expeirience in scaling and optimising that process.
    • Layke1123 4y ago
      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.
• omreaderhn 4y ago
  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.
• jkqwzsoo 4y ago
  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.
• ncmncm 4y ago
  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/ https://terraformindustries.com/ If they could sequester, say, half their captured carbon, that would be a good look.
  • photochemsyn 4y ago
    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?
    • ncmncm 4y ago
      Already being done. We just need a great deal more of it. Natural gas burners inject ammonia to cut their NOx output. Maybe they know something.
  • hoseja 4y ago
    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.
    • adrian_b 4y ago
      Using excess ammonia might have the risk of releasing unburnt ammonia in the atmosphere. Fuel cells using ammonia seem much safer, but they are farther from being a commercially available solution.
• m348e912 4y ago
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• perardi 4y ago
  Hopefully they can provide the cheap, clean fuel we need to power CPUs and GPUs powerful enough to enable smooth scrolling on this website. Because that scrolling is so bad I’m almost impressed.
• chrischen 4y ago
  How does this compare (in terms of efficiency and energy loss) to just using the electricity directly in a battery electric vehicle?
  • archi42 4y ago
    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.
    • scotty79 4y ago
      This has the benefit of creating incentive for capturing CO2 which is something we should be willing to pay for in coming decades.
      • archi42 4y ago
        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?
        • scotty79 4y ago
          I think the only way to make capturing CO2 valuable is to tax the economy and pay for actually captured CO2 directly. Fuel manufactured out of CO2 might be easily verifiable proof of capturing CO2.
• coderenegade 4y ago
  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.
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    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.
    • coderenegade 4y ago
• ur-whale 4y ago
  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?
  • ncmncm 4y ago
    Catalysts? Made of valuable, thus recyclable materials.
• veltas 4y ago
  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.
  • deadbunny 4y ago
    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. 1. https://i.imgur.com/lmq8iTC.jpg https://i.imgur.com/lmq8iTC.jpg
• dncornholio 4y ago
  This seems like a piece for something hypeware, vaporware. Nothing concrete, we just have to believe it. See it, then believe it.
• Gordonjcp 4y ago
  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.
• t0suj4 4y ago
  I didn't get past the loading screen. I'm not going to wait five seconds for the website to load.
  • vultour 4y ago
    I waited 20 seconds for the loading icon to disappear just to be greeted with an empty page
• perlgeek 4y ago
  If carbon capture usually is a big cost, why not pair it up with industrial processes that produce lots of CO2 in a more concentrated form?
• miked85 4y ago
  This is likely the most bloated and worst designed website I've ever seen.
• pabs3 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/20220504230211/https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/dude-wheres-my-fuel https://archive.ph/20220504230211/https://www.prometheusfuel...
• stevespang 4y ago
• scotty79 4y ago
  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.
• thinkcontext 4y ago
  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. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/prometheus-fuels-startup-carbon-neutral/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...