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Prometheus: Fuel from the Air
- swamp40 4y agoBetter explanation of the process: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/dude-wheres-my-fuel https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/dude-wheres-my-fuel
- singron 4y agoIt's not entirely dishonest, but it's a huge caveat that their process has 2 parts with an intermediate, so comparing just one part to other processes doesn't make sense. E.g. in one section, they mention that DAC to CO2 is targeted at $100/ton, but their process is only $36/ton. However, that's only the first half of the process. If you calculate for the whole process and assume they can produce a standard gallon of gas for $3 and 8.9 Kg CO2/gallon: ($3/gallon) / (8.9 Kg/gallon) * (907 Kg/ton) = $306/ton I.e. their goal is 3x more expensive at capturing CO2 than DAC. If you want to sequester carbon (e.g. by filling a cavern with this fuel), this is not the technique to use. The only reason to pursue this is to use zero carbon electricity to produce nearly net-zero carbon fuel.
- u320 4y ago> The only reason to pursue this is to use zero carbon electricity to produce nearly net-zero carbon fuel. That's the only thing they market it as
- GauntletWizard 4y agoAnd it's pretty much good enough; 90% of carbon emissions are from fossil fuels, 90% of that is petroleum products. If we could get half of our gasoline to come from Prometheus in the next ten years, that would be the EU emissions goal. Done. That's it.
- gizajob 4y agoFuel from the air, website from the era of Flash.
- sudobash1 4y agoI am not a fan of the site either, but apparently some people are: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/prometheus-site-of-the-year https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/prometheus-site-of-the-...
- gizajob 4y agoI'd have to go through the whole rigmarole again to read that.
- andwaal 4y agoLove it! Reminds me of a time where every movie, game, band etc. had amazing creative websites like this, often filled with custom games, wallpapers and other cool stuff for a ten year old discovering the World Wide Web for the first time. One example of this that gets mentioned every time are https://www.spacejam.com/1996/ https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
- kmeisthax 4y agoThe website is unusable from an iPad with a Magic Keyboard. It straight up ignores platform scroll and demands that you use the touchscreen because they didn't expect touch devices to have a scroll wheel.
- margalabargala 4y ago
- lallysingh 4y agoFTA: 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 The fonts are gigantic on my desktop monitor.
- ajsharp 4y agoThe visualization of the co2 extraction process is incredible. Kudos to whoever built this. Incredible.
- more_corn 4y agoOne of the best websites I’ve seen in years. Hopefully the tech measures up.
- avmich 4y agoNearly unreadable on my third browser (first two couldn't show), font sizes aren't adjustable, navigation is pretty hard, color palette is awful. Really, an ASCII text would be better IMO - sans images.
- cercatrova 4y ago> Really, an ASCII text would be better IMO - sans images. This is a classic HN response, talking about how an artistic website should ideally be reduced to some characters on a screen. But I am curious, what browsers did you use?
- imron 4y agoIt didn't even work on my browser. Hopefully the tech is not like the website.
- freetime2 4y agoYup I have no idea if the technology works, but that website is pretty slick! Edit: I see other people complaining that it doesn't load for them. So maybe not so slick after all!
- doitLP 4y agoAren’t all of these net zero or worse when accounting for construction and lifespan? Or is the fact of using renewables to power going to hopefully net positive over a long enough time scale?
- lallysingh 4y agoIt's a lot less net than regular gasoline.
- kmeisthax 4y agoThere are a lot of situations where direct electrical storage is unfeasible and chemical fuels will still be necessary. From a carbon perspective this switches us from unearthing old carbon out of the ground towards recycling it. Governments could also pay to have carbon pumped out of the air and buried back into the ground as reconstituted liquid fuel.
- warmwaffles 4y agoMy father pointed out to me that it's a form of battery. In the end we are still consuming energy to make the battery and will burn that fuel at a later time. You could take excess power created by solar or wind and create fuel and store it to burn later when demand goes beyond what the panels can produce during the night.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 4y agoIn theory you could take some percentage of hydrocarbon production and store it to reach zero.
- 4y ago
- jensenbox 4y agoI would love for someone to provide me additional details on exactly what a "Faraday Reactor" is.
- KSteffensen 4y agoHard to tell from the marketing, but I'm 90% sure it's some type of fuel cell run in reverse and with a fancy name. Unless they have some new catalyst there is no new tech here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
- jensenbox 4y agoWhy does their logo remind me of Peloton?
- mikkergp 4y agoP's man, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
- phtrivier 4y agoI'm tented to trademark "Breevr : Air out of thin Air". Anyone with a couple billion dollars laying around ?
- immmmmm 4y agoI wish that the 3 law of thermodynamics laws were more commonly taught... because here you are battling the 2nd and the 1st. A calculation by Jean Marc Jancovici showed that for a small airport (GVA in this case) you'd need half a dozen nuclear reactors just to produce the fuel for departing flights. That's obviously assuming this kind of technology is functioning and has 100% yield. I'm not saying that these technologies are not to be pursued, but thinking that we (the rich) can keep flying as much as now due to a miracle technology is unsupported by Science, to say the least. ps: i did 2 postdocs in material science trying to improve various industrial/energy technologies. there's no miracle.
- steve76 4y ago
- kaibee 4y agoSolar is cheaper than nuclear and still getting cheaper, so looking at what you'd need in terms of nuclear reactors is likely to be misleading.
- defterGoose 4y agoI don't even want to think about how much surface area you'd need for solar panels intended to replace 6 megawatt-scale nuclear reactors, but I'm guessing football fields is the wrong unit to use... Last time I checked, land wasn't cheap and they weren't making any more of it.
- immmmmm 4y agoyeah and there's crop failure coming decades in advance compared to IPCC's predictions, so better not using crop space.
- pwinnski 4y agoSome of that crop failure is due to heat, which could be mitigated by using solar panels to provide shade. That doesn't work for all crops, some of which require direct sun, but it works for more than I expected.
- Sevii 4y agoWould be amazing if we could cover baseload power with nuclear/hydro and then use zero marginal grid cost solar for fuel synthesis.
- schainks 4y agoI do like where this is going! Grid demand fluctuates during the day by quite a bit. You have to have "peaker" generation above base load to efficiently utilize your grid and respond to dynamic conditions (especially things like equipment failures). Heavy investment in nuclear could create a grid with such cheap energy we can use all the excess capacity for fuel synthesis along with renewables.
- ncmncm 4y agoEach dollar diverted from building renewables + storage into building nukes brings climate catastrophe nearer. Hydro generation sites are used up. We are demolishing dams, nowadays, because the fisheries they displace are way more valuable. (This does not make pumped hydro a bad idea: pumped hydro does not destroy fisheries.)
- schainks 4y agoI think this is a good argument, actually. It has been so surprising to see how quickly renewables have scaled up and built out. In the time you need to build, let's say, 3GW of nuclear, could you realistically build equal or more renewables with the same economics, reliability, and lifespan? I don't think that question has a clear-cut answer, but I think we are edging closer to "yes" by the numbers.
- mszmszmsz 4y agothe website crashes on safari on 2020 iphone se - many times throughout.
- bit_logic 4y agoThey're focusing on transportation fuel (cars and airplanes), but another area of great potential is power generation. The current trend is to build solar/wind and replace coal with natural gas plants as a stop-gap until some grid-scale energy storage is ready. Everyone assumes that energy storage will be batteries. But what if the natural gas plants don't have to be a stop gap? Just keep building more and more solar/wind, as much as the land can handle (imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar). Who cares if generation greatly exceeds daily demand. Use all the excess solar/wind to create fuel for the natural gas plants. There's already a vast infrastructure and experienced workforce to do this. Use the fuel during the evening and put any excess fuel into storage, there's so much existing ways to store fuel. Then use that during winter when solar generation decreases. We need to stop thinking carbon fuel = fossil fuel and so carbon fuel = bad. Carbon fuel is simply a form of energy storage, a kind of "battery".
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoCarbon fuels are bad, fossil or not. Same as Green Hydrogen, you'd only burn these if you couldn't directly electrify or battery power it. Otherwise you're using electricity you could have used directly, to make the fuel at a big loss of efficiency.
- s_tec 4y agoThe main reason to keep hydrocarbon fuels in a green-energy future is for their energy density. Rockets and airplanes will always want the best density and weight available, and that’s hydrocarbon fuel for now, barring some order-of-magnitude battery improvements. Hydrogen rockets are a thing, but their tanks are huge compared to methane or kerosene rockets.
- ReadTheLicense 4y agoYes! The same way, using CNG or bio-diesel (for example wood or algae-derived) in plug-in hybrid vehicles with smaller batteries (50 km) would be much more ecological than large battery vehicles.
- beautifulfreak 4y agoThe founder announced the launch of Prometheus (May 2019) on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
- schainks 4y agoIf you're literally blowing CO2 into water to get the process started, where's the threshold between doing this with air and just extracting acidic seawater or wastewater from somewhere?
- crazypython 4y agoDefinitely worth getting excited about, though it seems the current cost of fuel production as of Aug 8 including crude oil cost is $3.40/gal minus taxes and distribution.[0] Prometheus will likely cost less to distribute, since it doesn't need to be shipped across seas, funneled through pipelines, and between refineries, it can be produced next to solar or wind generation. For reference, Prometheus costs $1.86/gal to operate and they are aiming to reduce the cost of the machine so it can be produced including capex at $3.00/gal. [0]: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/transportation-energy/estimated-gasoline-price-breakdown-and-margins https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/transp...
- supernova87a 4y agoI am intrigued by the idea but find the details hidden in the Faraday reactor and separation nanotube membrane to be hard to sanity check / the most important factor that is not well understood. (or at least, I don't understand it / have not read enough) What's the magical material in the Faraday reactor that can somehow combine CO2 + water to form hexanol? I've never heard of such a process occurring (again, probably my ignorance). And then similar question for the separation filter? If I had to guess an analogy, it strikes me as similar to mining and then recovering + refining miniscule fractions of uranium isotopes at a similar energy cost. And when you require that much energy/cost to get some small amount of material, it had better be very valuable, and not something you just burn at $3/gallon. But I am glad to be educated on how this is breaking that analogy.
- stevespang 4y ago
- andrewmcwatters 4y agoNeat site! Reminds me of something showcased on Awwwards/CSSDA.
- 0x457 4y agoHopefully, they're better at making fuel than at websites because website doesn't work.
- seiferteric 4y agoWhy not just use bio waste and turn it into wood gas. From there your can get methanol. Let plants do the collecting of CO2 from the air for you using solar power. Plus you get charcoal out which can be buried for carbon sequestration.
- jiri 4y agoI believe that we do not produce enough of the bio waste, it has very low energy density.
- deepdriver 4y agoNot nearly enough wood can be grown to meet modern society’s energy needs. Europe experienced massive deforestation back when charcoal was a primary fuel for heating and smelting. South America and parts of Arica still struggle with this today.
- dang 4y agoRelated: Dude, where's my fuel? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31264388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31264388 - May 2022 (183 comments) Prometheus Fuels (YC W19) Closes Series B with $1.5B Valuation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28631067 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28631067 - Sept 2021 (121 comments) Launch HN: Prometheus (YC W19) – Remove CO2 from Air and Turn It into Gasoline - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240 - May 2019 (565 comments) A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19792412 - April 2019 (279 comments)
- rhacker 4y agoBoth firefox and chrome: TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'baseCamera')
- pfdietz 4y agoMaybe they should first consider solving the problem of having a web page that doesn't suck.
- camillomiller 4y agoGo through this comment section and find out that some people actually like it. The experience on mobile or tablet is simply abysmal. Apparently they even won accolades for that crock of s..t
- mosselman 4y agoWhat don't you like about it?
- pfdietz 4y agoWhen loaded on my desktop, it displayed a rotating icon and just stalled. How about just some static text explaining what they're doing? I don't need a web site with overcomplex crap that doesn't work.
- pfdietz 4y agoSo, which is cheaper: 1) Capturing CO2 from the air and making fuel from it, or 2) Capturing CO2 from the air, sequestering it, and using it to offset the CO2 produced by using fuels derived from petroleum. If 2 is cheaper than 1 then this process is useless anytime soon.
- pphysch 4y agoIf energy costs $0 due to temporary oversupply, then 1) wins.
- btilly 4y agoThe answer is 2). It is inherently cheaper to make a low energy, high carbon, biofuel than it is to make a high energy fuel that can actually be used. And it is cheaper exactly by the energy you don't have to leave in the fuel. Furthermore for many applications, electrical+batteries is more efficient than fossil fuels. So with projected near-term technologies, it makes no sense to make a round trip through fossil fuels.
- Schroedingersat 4y agoNice shell game there. Double counting costs and hiding the externalities of the fossil fuels. Take a state of the art green hydrogen system at about $4/kg (and falling rapidly with projections as low a $1 in a decade) Let's assume we have a machine that can sequester 80mJ worth of CO2 from fossil fuels or about 0.75kg of carbon or 200g of CO2 from the air for $1 If the cost of extracting, refining, storing, transporting and dispensing 80mJ of fossil fuels ever exceeds $3 (or the cost of the green hydrogen goes down equivalently) you've lost instantly. But it's much worse than that, because that 80mJ of fossil fuel required about 160mJ of fossil fuel to be burnt durng extracting, refining, storing, transporting and dispensing, so now you have to get it for $1 (less than the current market price of methane). You could argue that you can use green energy for all of the steps to get the fossil fuel, but that's just an incredibly stupid, expensive, polluting and roundabout way of makng a water electrolyzer. Locally made Hydrogen becoming a more economical fuel than fossil fuels by 2035 is an inevitability. The only relevant question is whether we can find a cheap and efficient way of storing it or turning it into something at least as heavy as methane or ammonia. Batteries will always be better per joule dispensed and thus for daily or even weekly fluctuations, but a year of capacity is unsolved and chemical storage has some pretty big upsides.
- doctaj 4y agoCan’t scroll down the home page in iPad safari. Boo.
- wiz21c 4y agoOn the main page one can read: "functioning as 'mechanical' forest" then there is a foot note numbered one. Where's the foot note ? It's usually the place where the "yet works BUT ..." is...
- rigelbm 4y agoNote about the title: I really clicked the link to learn about how to use cloud metrics to fuel my monitoring needs. Imagine the surprise with what I found.