Prometheus Fuels (YC W19) Closes Series B with $1.5B Valuation
prometheusfuels.com
prometheusfuels.com
Thin articles touching on the technology: https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/meet-our-v3-faraday-... 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.
His breakthrough technology is supposed to be the carbon nanotube membrane as explained here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
But, the two papers he cited in the Joule article don't go as far as actually separating water and ethanol. It's questionable whether this is possible or has been done successfully yet. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1674-0068/25/04/4... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1700938
https://www.greencarcongress.com/2018/03/20180310-mattershif...
Air capture is also quite expensive and I'm not sure how much the "only need small concentrations of CO2" trick does.
They've licensed a couple of key technologies out of Oak Ridge. First is a catalyst that converts CO2 + H2O + electricity directly into ethanol. The other is a membrane with parallel carbon nanotubes that are just the right size to filter that ethanol. The rest of the business involves the chemical conversion of pure ethanol into other types of hydrocarbons.
The result is the ability to efficiently create carbon-netural fuel, effectively capturing a percentage of the electricity as gasoline (or jet fuel, etc).
Of course, this is less energy efficient than simply burning fuel that you found in the ground. The advantage is that they can bypass the expensive drilling, refining, and transportation steps and use cheap renewable energy to create fuel literally anywhere they can stick a shipping container.
That's the goal, anyway. I really hope they succeed.
Also i wonder whether moonshine style distillation is worse than the carbon nanotubes membrane filtration, especially if you have a source of cheap waste heat.
I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power large-scale industrial processes.
[Disclosure: I've invested in Prometheus Fuels, but don't speak for them.]
Moonshining is less than 400 KJ per kg of source, i.e. about 1.5 KWh per kg of ethanol produced from 15% ethanol/water source. Given that one can use waste heat from almost any other industrial process the real monetary cost is way less than the cost of electrical 1.5 KWh.
>I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power large-scale industrial processes.
Moonshining is 78 C degree - such cheap waste heat sources are plentiful exactly because it is hard to use for almost anything else.
>you lose energy in the cooling-and-reheating cycles.
not an issue for a 78 C process - basically like your water boiler, takes minimum of thermal isolation.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530072-800-the-comp...
https://www.science.org/news/2019/07/former-playwright-aims-...
(Not claiming it's feasible, but playing devils advocate because of course I'm hopeful)
Here's an article about this strategy form the CEO: https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(20)30002-7.pdf
Theranos 2.0 ?
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.
Exactly. They're doing what PARC was: looking a decade ahead and building the technology that makes sense in that future.
I'm quite optimistic about them. Even if they can't immediately compete head-to-head with fossil fuels, there are probably some ways to get early revenue, by making other industrial chemicals, or marketing higher-priced fuel to eco-conscious consumers, or the alcoholic beverages idea they mention on their webpage.
The idea of directly electrolysing the low-concentration CO2 in the air-capture fluid and then extracting the low-concentration product is brilliant. Most of the energy cost for standard air capture is heat used to 'boil' the CO2 out of the fluid. If their osmotic membrane can separate the fuel with better energy efficiency, it's a win. It's hard to produce high concentrations of fuel products electrolytically anyway, so there was always going to be a need to concentrate the fuel somehow. The big questions in my mind are:
1. How efficient can the osmosis be? 2. Does the low concentrations of CO2 imply the need for very large electrolyzers? These tend to be the biggest capital-cost item.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola...
Assume an overall efficiency of approx. 40% to be conservative.
How does capex and other opex fit in?
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
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://mobile.twitter.com/rutherdan/status/1385459168107057...
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.
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.
To be clear, no, they're not convincing arguments. It's people who know this space and find the claims by prometheus so unbelievable that they make fun of them.
I was quoting this more to illustrate the tone of the discussion. The argument is ultimately: Prometheus makes claims about costs that are very hard to believe, and doesn't provide much evidence that they are true.
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.
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?
Please use a million or so and just make the website a static site.
That said, the technology seems suspect. Carbon nanotubes are just as hard to use today as they were twenty years ago.
It's obviously hard to find an economic incentive to do this, but maybe carbon credits would make it possible.
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.
Though, I do see your point-- This only pencils out once you've captured 100% of the available fuels market, which is quite large.
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.
(I say this as someone that would be happy if every website on the Internet was just written in plain HTML with no CSS and just a few images.)
I'm a big fan of what you are doing. If I weren't already working on fusion energy, this would be the technology I'd most like to work on. People forget that decarbonizing electricity is only 1/3 or 1/2 of the energy/fossil fuels problem. We need to find a way to turn massive amounts of renewable electricity into fuels and chemical feedstocks.
"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"
https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/prometheus-is-first-...
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.
I guess I was thinking more of CCS, but for fuel it makes total sense.
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 :)
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.
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.
Which has economic consequences :)
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.
> The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the single-largest consumer of fuel in the world and Jet fuel accounts for 71% of the entire military’s petroleum consumption. Therefore, DoD needs to maintain a strong logistical support to provide jet fuel for its equipment across the world.
https://patentyogi.com/aircraft/us-navy-plans-produce-jet-fu...
The DOD could be interested in it purely for the tactical and strategic advantage.
For example, it could cost 2X when everything is taken into account, but still be attractive because it provides a type of combat advantage that can not be obtained in any other way. Not everything is fungible.
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.
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.
This seems more like a device to capture subsidies.