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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The Centre for climate and energy solutions say there are currently 26 commercial scale carbon capture facilities online and more in development.

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"

https://www.c2es.org/content/carbon-capture/

Those examples aren't actually capturing carbon from the atmosphere. They're capturing carbon produced as a byproduct of industrial processes. There's a massive difference when you're already working with concentrated carbon dioxide and when you're trying to capture it from the atmosphere.

If it’s capturing co2 that would otherwise go into the atmosphere…does it matter ?

It makes the burning of fossil fuels more efficient, e.g. you can X tons of coal to produce Y MW of power and get Z additional gallons of gas. But it's really a stretch to call this carbon neutral.

There are other processes that produce CO2. E.g., cement manufacture.

Yes, because Prometheus fuels is trying to extract from atmosphere. Scavenging industrial CO2 byproduct is something you can only do opportunistically.

There are plenty of opportunities. Those will be taken up first.

As described in the parent article, by far the most important advantage of their technology is that they do not need a traditional expensive process for capturing CO2 from the air, and then releasing it into a concentrated form (which requires much energy), to be used in fuel synthesis.

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.

Maybe, just maybe, they understand the actual business they are actually in better than you do?

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.

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".

>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).

Current capture is $600/ton. They point out they don't need to perform the expensive part of that.

They still need to capture the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere. They claim that because it doesn't need to be pure carbon dioxide it'll be a lot cheaper. But that's based on an engineering assessment not an actual bill of materials from a working prototype. Just like how the hyperloop is amazing technology on paper.

Let somebody else invest. You can sit around and watch. Maybe amuse yourself with rude remarks.

Hyperloop made no sense whatsoever, from day one.

Yes, I'm more than comfortable letting BMW put $12.5 million into Prometheus. If they shared even half of your confidence in this tech, they'd invest a lot more than that. My take, and likely the investors' takes too, is this is yet another carbon capture company, and it's success hinges on whether or not they can actually hit the performance their promising.

BMW are certain to understand investment strategy better than you.

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.

> 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

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.

"Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip", "Count your chickens", and "Grass is greener" shed as much light.

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.

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