5 ms·

biofuels or synthetics. not sure if they plan to own the fuel supply chain, so "net zero" may come through offsets to cover the impact of producing the fuels

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
They appear to have signed a deal with YCombinator startup Prometheous Fuels to supply the SAF fuel, with carbon offsets to cover other carbon costs. https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ (very cool website, not sure if thats a good or a bad thing)
- solardev 4y ago
  > (very cool website, not sure if thats a good or a bad thing) Maybe I'm just old-school, but this was sooooo annoying. It'd be a cool intro to a Telltale game or something, but having it take over all the navigation (scrolling barely works, getting to the point takes forever) to tell its fancy 3d story was just a waste of my time, IMO. I want to know how their fuels work, not that they can hire someone to make a 3D game intro inside their browser. Just unnecessary shiny that gets in the way of usability :(
- replygirl 4y ago
  carbon capture to fuels is pretty cool! wonder how much of the capture will run off gas or battery :|
- KolmogorovComp 4y ago
  Cool site indeed. Unfortunately (but expectedly) experts are challenging the feasibility of it: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/prometheus-fuels-startup-carbon-neutral/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...
tgv 4y ago
Biofuels is ecological fraud. It is not sustainable. And is there a synthetic fuel plant with zero impact at any scale already? No, this is just wasting more fuel for the heck of it.
- phire 4y ago
  Are you saying that sustainable synthetic fuels can't exist? Or don't current exist? Because those are two very different statements.
  - tgv 4y ago
    Well, it requires a lot of power, so building a large plant will be difficult and expensive.
    - danans 4y ago
      > building a large plant will be difficult and expensive. Utility scale renewables are in pennies pwr kWh in Levelized Cost, and continually dropping. There are 10kWh/liter of jet fuel. Utility scale solar is 3c/kWh LCOE today. Assuming a pessimistic 10% efficiency in electricity to synthetic jet fuel conversion via H2 hydrolysis and the Fischer Tropsch process, that's a hypothetical $3/liter of synthetic jet fuel. Current petroleum based jet fuel is $1.50/liter. If you improve the conversion efficiency to 20% and lower the LCOE of utility scale solar to 1c/kWh (projected by 2050), and the hypothetical liter of synthetic jet fuel drops to 50c/liter, all while petroleum jet-fuel grows increasingly scarce and more expensive. The efficiency of synfuel production could rise significantly as the efficiency of feedstocks like H2 hydrolysis (already 50%+) increase, and if if CO for Fischer Tropsch can be sourced from biomass instead of sourcing it from atmospheric CO2. Finally, it's likely that in the future we'll switch to using hydrogen directly as an aviation fuel, bypassing hydrocarbons altogether, at which point the electricity to air conversion efficiency nears 80%. At those prices, you can begin to afford to overbuild renewable capacity to drive a synfuel pipeline to store that energy chemically, which we will arguably need to do for seasonal energy storage anyways.
    - phire 4y ago
      On top of what danans calculates, they are currently researching solar reactors that convert biomass directly into biofuel with sunlight, skipping the losses and costs of converting sunlight to electricity with regular PV solar.
  - 4y ago

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

They appear to have signed a deal with YCombinator startup Prometheous Fuels to supply the SAF fuel, with carbon offsets to cover other carbon costs. https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ https://www.prometheusfuels.com/ (very cool website, not sure if thats a good or a bad thing)

solardev 4y ago
> (very cool website, not sure if thats a good or a bad thing) Maybe I'm just old-school, but this was sooooo annoying. It'd be a cool intro to a Telltale game or something, but having it take over all the navigation (scrolling barely works, getting to the point takes forever) to tell its fancy 3d story was just a waste of my time, IMO. I want to know how their fuels work, not that they can hire someone to make a 3D game intro inside their browser. Just unnecessary shiny that gets in the way of usability :(
replygirl 4y ago
carbon capture to fuels is pretty cool! wonder how much of the capture will run off gas or battery :|
KolmogorovComp 4y ago
Cool site indeed. Unfortunately (but expectedly) experts are challenging the feasibility of it: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/prometheus-fuels-startup-carbon-neutral/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...

tgv 4y ago

Biofuels is ecological fraud. It is not sustainable. And is there a synthetic fuel plant with zero impact at any scale already? No, this is just wasting more fuel for the heck of it.

phire 4y ago
Are you saying that sustainable synthetic fuels can't exist? Or don't current exist? Because those are two very different statements.
- tgv 4y ago
  Well, it requires a lot of power, so building a large plant will be difficult and expensive.
  - danans 4y ago
    > building a large plant will be difficult and expensive. Utility scale renewables are in pennies pwr kWh in Levelized Cost, and continually dropping. There are 10kWh/liter of jet fuel. Utility scale solar is 3c/kWh LCOE today. Assuming a pessimistic 10% efficiency in electricity to synthetic jet fuel conversion via H2 hydrolysis and the Fischer Tropsch process, that's a hypothetical $3/liter of synthetic jet fuel. Current petroleum based jet fuel is $1.50/liter. If you improve the conversion efficiency to 20% and lower the LCOE of utility scale solar to 1c/kWh (projected by 2050), and the hypothetical liter of synthetic jet fuel drops to 50c/liter, all while petroleum jet-fuel grows increasingly scarce and more expensive. The efficiency of synfuel production could rise significantly as the efficiency of feedstocks like H2 hydrolysis (already 50%+) increase, and if if CO for Fischer Tropsch can be sourced from biomass instead of sourcing it from atmospheric CO2. Finally, it's likely that in the future we'll switch to using hydrogen directly as an aviation fuel, bypassing hydrocarbons altogether, at which point the electricity to air conversion efficiency nears 80%. At those prices, you can begin to afford to overbuild renewable capacity to drive a synfuel pipeline to store that energy chemically, which we will arguably need to do for seasonal energy storage anyways.
  - phire 4y ago
    On top of what danans calculates, they are currently researching solar reactors that convert biomass directly into biofuel with sunlight, skipping the losses and costs of converting sunlight to electricity with regular PV solar.
- 4y ago