Dude, where's my fuel?
prometheusfuels.com
prometheusfuels.com
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/...]
- 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/...]
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.
It may seem like a small thing, but it is an important detail, and it makes me question if the company is snake oil or not. It doesn't appear very professional to take this approach. Maybe it was ok in 1998, but not today.
It wasn't.
Not sure if the screwed up scroll behavior was possible in 1998 but it wouldn't have been ok then either.
Even more "interesting" is that in their news section was this article: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/prometheus-site-of-the-... - so I don't think they're going to be listening to HN about their design anytime soon, which is a shame as that site is awful.
For the love of god, throw your web site away and start again with some simple, static HTML pages.
Please please, for goodness sake, put a quick loading static page front and center quick! This stuff is too important and too cool to be lost to same hokey web design.
https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/prometheus-site-of-the-...
The first page view shouldn't be loading all that crap that isn't being used.
The site itself weighs 375MB, ~150MB after compression, and pins my CPU for about 3 seconds on load, using 1.70GB of real memory.
... and then looked and worked like 50kB static website from 10 years ago.
“Our tech works in the lab. Simple math shows it can be competitive in the market. Now, we’re focusing on scaling the tech.” Those words make sense when coming from a genuine effort that could succeed. Those words are therefore copied by charlatans as well.
I have no reason to think Prometheus is in the latter camp, but the presence of that camp makes life harder for them I think.
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.
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?
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.
His latest book is "The end of the world is only the beginning".
I follow him through the YT channnel "GEOPOP".
Accidental Superpower is his first, from 2014, and is the best overall introduction. It doesn't just look at current events; he applies his approach to pretty much all the great civilizations of world history, starting with ancient Egypt. Well worth reading for that alone, it's amazing. Also covers modern day, and while it's a bit out of date now, the broad strokes haven't changed. This book includes a prediction that Russia would invade the rest of Ukraine right about now. If you read just one, make it this one.
The next two books are entirely focused on present day.
Absent Superpower from 2016 has two parts. The first is probably more information than you want about the shale revolution in the US, but he keeps it interesting. Then he writes about individual countries, with more of an energy focus. This one's obviously most relevant to the tech we're discussing here, which could change everything if it scales up soon enough.
Now I'm partway through Disunited Nations, from 2020. This also goes country by country, and of course is the most up-to-date so far. He starts out with several chapters on China, and goes into more detail than the previous book on their situation, which is incredibly grim. Now I'm starting the next chapter, on Japan.
His next book comes out in June. I think he mentioned in a video that he focuses more on the outlook for various industries.
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.
Both of which are covered in the article.
If you hit that you're sorted in Europe.
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.
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.
ADM consumes a third of the US corn crop and billions of dollars of tax money, year in and year out.
A lot of EU countries also mandate E10 gasoline in a misguided effort to reduce GHG emissions. I'm not sure where they get all that ethanol from, but I'm sure it's a similar agribusiness scam as US corn ethanol.
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.
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|xRetrofitting with ammonia tankage and plumbing (making them cheaper to run) is an expense they might prefer to avoid until they have a reliable secondary supply of ammonia.
It depends on how efficient it is to use existing ICE tractors vs creating new electric tractors. If tractors are like other ICE vehicles then something like half the energy they take over their lifetime is used in their production so if you want to get to Net-0 sooner generating carbon neutral fuel might be the way to go.
While the question I was responding to was explicitly about efficiency, you might be right about cost. However, ICE tractors that are already owned along with the capital required for their use and maintenance are potentially a lot more attractive to keep vs new electric tractors. Sunshine might be free but it’s not available in sufficient quantities everywhere with current technology, and all technologies will require ongoing maintenance. With China becoming an untrustworthy trade partner the cost of solar panels will likely rise. If they do I hope they can make affordable efuel so that we make progress either way.
There is plenty of sunshine most places if you can bank fuel during off-season. Finns will probably still need to import from the south or via transmission line if the wind is off -- as they have done for many decades on a more regular schedule.
Energy storage is woefully insufficient yet to cover days let alone seasons so that is a very big "if."
If you mean we have not yet built out as much storage as we will ultimately need, because we anyway haven't enough renewable generating capacity built out yet to charge it from, then yes we know. The solution to that is obviously to continue building out renewable generating capacity, and then storage for the excess.
I just misread what you wrote. I didn't see "fuel" and thought you were referring to other means of renewable storage. Fuel as an efficient and much less geographically limited means of storage makes a lot of sense.
https://twitter.com/vivekgani/status/1426017955398176770?t=0...
It also omits liquified hydrogen, which is inconvenient to handle, but not much moreso than liquified methane.
Given how much cutting edge process chemistry is involved in this fuel manufacture, it will be a long time before it's available in small units, which will of course be more capital-intensive and less efficient than large units because that's how scaling works.
It's far more likely this fuel will end up simply co-mingled with the global market and shipped all over the world from a few sites which are good for generation but not for direct consumption.
> 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.
What would make a difference are whether it is expected to start and stop operation, how much supervision it needs, and how much customization is desirable. The quoted text above cites ability to manufacture mass numbers of units, and by implication to distribute, install, and operate them with minimal attention to details.
Er, tractors often tow implements that are significantly wider than the tractor itself.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
If we don't care about toxicity, might as well go with hydrazine, which is liquid at room temperature and has higher energy density than ammonia. ;)
(No idea about the cost of hydrazine synthesis, though)
> most sane options for an e-fuel are methanol and ammonia
The article seems to say their process produces ethanol. If it really works as well as they claim it does, it could be a gamechanger.
NASA and ESA are phasing out use of hydrazine because of its unfortunate handling characteristics. But solid hydrazone might still find uses.
Among the chief attractions of ammonia is that it is very simply synthesized with free feedstock. You bond hydrogen stripped from water to nitrogen from air. Although toxic, it is a lot lighter than air, so if it leaks it goes up, and does not hang about poisoning people in a broadening area.
The main problem with hydrocarbons as synthetic fuel is that you need the carbon, which in air is at below 0.05% concentration. It is certainly possible, but seems unlikely to approach ammonia in cost.
I read about various 'green propellant' efforts over the years, but it seems in practice hydrazine is still used for orbital manouvering systems. Of course for those the volumes are small compared to the launch rockets themselves. For launch vehicles it seems only old Russian and Chinese designs still use hydrazine.
> Although toxic, it is a lot lighter than air, so if it leaks it goes up, and does not hang about poisoning people in a broadening area.
Eventually yes it will dissipate upwards, but typically ammonia accidents result in a vapour cloud traveling close to the ground. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIi4_Poo2HY
> The main problem with hydrocarbons as synthetic fuel is that you need the carbon, which in air is at below 0.05% concentration. It is certainly possible, but seems unlikely to approach ammonia in cost.
There's certainly a largish cost to concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere. Carbon Engineering, one of the companies in the DAC space, claims 8.8 GJ/ton. Just some back of the napkin comparison to the enthalpy of formation for CO2 and H2O (+ adding an assumed 70% efficiency for CO2 dissociation and water electrolysis), and assuming we're building hydrocarbons with a 2:1 H:C ratio, that would mean a roughly 40% energy penalty compared to starting with a concentrated CO2 feedstock.
One the plus side you get a fuel with cheaper and safer handling, better energy density, and compatibility with existing equipment. Hard to say which approach will win. Might well be as you said, that for large industrial users that can take appropriate precautions like maritime shipping or peaker power plants ammonia will be a better solution, but for other smaller scale usage synthetic hydrocarbons will win.
Hydrazine is troublesome because it is readily absorbed through the skin, in liquid form, or the lungs, in vapor form, whence it destroys the liver and other internal organs. As vapor it is slightly heavier than air, so its vapor spreads out from point of release.
When you see dramatic videos of spilled ammonia, that is generally liquid, either boiling anhydrous or dissolved in water and spreading out on the ground. Purely gaseous leaks go up. But liquid spills can be pretty bad.
All that said, synthetic hydrocarbon fuels will clearly be better for small and consumer-grade use in places where batteries do not suffice.
"Might as well go with hydrazine." --Unknown, heard before explosion.
I missed the bit on ethanol when I skimmed through the first time, but you're right. That's actually fairly exciting if it's something that can be scaled.
The part that baffles me is that if you have a workable fuel like ethanol, from an efficient process that doesn't compete with arable land, why try to make petrol from it? Ethanol is perfectly fine, and inherently cheaper than any hydrocarbon you would make from it.
Indeed. Even replacing the current usage of ethanol in the gasoline pool would be a huge market, and AFAIU most Otto engines can be relatively cheaply modified to work on up to E85 fuel.
Perhaps they're trying to fly under the radar of the corn ethanol lobby?
Seems much more scientifically plausible however. I'm just a natural skeptic.
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.
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.
It's important to ask these questions of what the tradeoffs really are when thinking about Energy Returned on Energy Invested, whether e-fuels would actually decrease new car production (i.e. older cars get used longer if e-fuels really make sense), the political economy ramifications if these things really worked, etc.
In prior waves of interest of things like algae-based fuels (see https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/lessons-from-th... ), my rough understanding is that they could be done but the numbers just didn't work out.
Finally, it's really worth pointing out the concern of any of these things falling under solutionism when also thinking about the state of our planet from a more integrated framework such as the planetary boundaries: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...
The price of electricity is variable, sometimes negative. You would not need to produce at levelized cost, but only when the sun is shining.
I think here they would really have to get a working prototype / pilot plant up and running, with a transparent demonstration. That's how the Haber process got support from Bosch c. 1909.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Haber_process
Generally speaking however, industrial processes run with pure streams of ingredients are more efficient. The rate-limiting step in the process as they describe it looks like the first one, because they're just using 400 ppm CO2 air as the input, with no pre-concentration. You'd need some kind of energy return on energy investment, i.e. how much electricity input per liter of produced fuel, plus lifetime of the catalyst etc. to make sense of how plausible it is.
https://twitter.com/ramez/status/1516199169911713794?s=21&t=...
> There are no shortcuts around the physics required to assemble a molecule.
So the process is viable, but the cost is prohibitive?
Current processes use heat+pressure, which are pretty wasteful, and often rely on burning fossil fuels in the 1st place, which will mechanically increase the financial cost”
What I understand from Prometheus is that they have a different way to “assemble molecules”, which relies on “electrocatalysts” instead of “catalysts requiring high temperature and pressure”. On the face of it, I can totally see how such a catalyst would decrease the “financial cost” without necessarily impacting the “energy cost”. It’s simply using a cheaper energy than the current processes.
The twitter answer rings similar to someone who would say “There is no shortcuts around the physics of producing light” to justify why LED lightbulbs would never make it. Most of the energy of incandescent bulbs is just heat, and there are physical process that produce light without all that heat. I don’t see any reasons why the extra heat would be needed to produce fuels
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/1050899/promethe...
Because that scrolling is so bad I’m almost impressed.
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.
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/
If they could sequester, say, half their captured carbon, that would be a good look.
Natural gas burners inject ammonia to cut their NOx output. Maybe they know something.
edit: By using excess ammonia, you reduce nitrogen oxides with a mechanism similar to AdBlue in diesel engines.
Fuel cells using ammonia seem much safer, but they are farther from being a commercially available solution.
Water vapor is itself another greenhouse gas, so it could be important for big users of hydrogen and ammonia fuels to make an effort to condense out exhaust vapor, e.g. by using it to warm incoming fuel, or air after the initial compression stage. Probably natural-gas burners should be doing it already, as burning methane produces copious water vapor.
Condensing exhaust water vapor from these systems could increase efficiency by creating a vacuum at the exhaust.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels#:~:text=The%2....
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.
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.
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).
Hyperloop made no sense whatsoever, from day one.
Probably they are putting seed funding into a bunch of different start-ups, and will invest more as they see further evidence of viability. That is a much more productive activity than carping ignorantly from the sidelines.
Most startups flop for reasons unrelated to their technology underpinnings. E.g., incompetent website implementation.
This is exactly what I'm saying: they're testing to see if this technology is viable, because we don't know if it's viable.
If not this one, one or six among the other dozens. It's trivial electrochemistry, so the problems to be overcome are of manufacturing, which just needs money. And, we know hydrogen and ammonia synthesis work at scale; this is extra.
They're not talking about carbon offsets for the linked article, they're literally talking about using captured carbon to make fuel.
Remember "Don't Let the Perfect Be the Enemy of the Good"
They just pass the air through water. A part of the CO2 from air will dissolve in water, up to its solubility limit.
The water with dissolved CO2 is then used in their electrolytic cells, which produce ethanol (dissolved in water). Presumably the water depleted in CO2 is reused to dissolve again CO2 from the air. (Some of the initial water is also converted into ethanol, so some fresh water must be added to the recirculated water.)
So they claim that they achieve in a sufficiently cheap way both the capture of CO2 from air and its conversion to fuel.
> “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/promethe...
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
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.
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?
See it, then believe it.
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.
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?
Fuel manufactured out of CO2 might be easily verifiable proof of capturing CO2.
So assume today we have 100t CO2 in the air. You capture 20t of that and make efuel from it. Now we have 80t of CO2 in the air. Which is great. However you went through all the effort so you could actually sell that efuel instead of sitting on it. So lets say I buy it from you. And then I'll burn some in my car and use some to heat my house. As a result, we now have 100t of CO2 in the air, again.
Would I use fossil fuel and heating oil, then we would have 120t of CO2 in the air. So non-ironic hooray, we prevented that. We're neutral. But once we're upgrading me to an electric heat pump and an electric car that energetic detour won't be necessary anymore, since I can use the electricity directly. That's also much more efficient: The heat pump by a factor of 4 to 9 (77kWh produces 1 gal efuel, which burns for 33.7kWh of heat; 77kWh used in a heat pump produces 154 to 308kWh of heat), and the car by a factor of 10 (math given previously).
If the goal was to have 80t in the air on the other hand, then at least it didn't make it worse; but until we dump CO2 somewhere it isn't released into the air again, we will never get to that goal.
It's not like I'm anti-efuel; for a long time to come and for some specialty use cases it will be a good solution to not make things worse (e.g. space rockets), but in the general case: It's a stop-gap, not a solution.
//edit: What we could do is tax people who release CO2 for the subsequent, necessary capture. That can then be scrubbed from the air again using the 36$ process the people on the linked page claim to use/have invented. Use that CO2 in an efuel and release it again, you pay to have it scrubbed again. To reduce the total amount of CO2 in the air, require that you not only pay to scrub the emissions, but some additional % (until the problem is solved, then just pay to scrub what was actually emitted). That's essentially a simplified & more strict CO2 certificate trade.
Yes. But at the same time is displaced a product that would put out CO2 into the atmosphere. So you reduce the amount of CO2 that is being put out.
So while neutral, not negative, it initially has the same effect that a novel carbon negative activity might have that doesn't replace anything.
I agree with you that later orther solutions will be better.
> 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.
(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.)
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?
Seriously, that page took 10s to load, pegged my laptop CPU and got the fans spinning. WTF?
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.
There are dozens of others working toward the same or similar goals. If his company does not succeed, another will.
Fossil fuels should be eventually taxed into oblivion. Even at current taxation level their distilled fuel would be competitive if tax exempt for example in Europe.
It's a bit like investment madness, in which investors are being swindled because no one is doing their due diligence to vet the tech and instead throwing money in a blind panic in FOMO.
Messing with scrolling semantics just makes people hate you.