Valar Atomics: Pulling oil and gas out of thin air with nuclear fission | Hacker News Reader

Valar Atomics: Pulling oil and gas out of thin air with nuclear fission

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5 pointspr337h4m11 comments

I'm quite bullish on synthetic hydrocarbons, but a few things they mention give me pause:

> Today, the vast majority of our energy comes from oil and gas. So if you want cheaper energy, the most direct way to get that is to make oil and gas much cheaper!

Which is far less direct than renewables and electrification. Only when those aren't possible is synthetic hydrocarbons a sensible choice.

> you need a cheap power source to extract those elements and make them into oil and gas. That power source is nuclear fission.

Which isn't as cheap as renewables.

I was expecting some technical breakthrough that used both the heat and the electricity from nuclear in some clever way, but it seems it's just a weird nuclear fetish they've got.

edit: and this sounds more like someone off their meds than something I'd expect in an investment pitch:

https://twitter.com/isaiah_p_taylor/status/17194164524979860...

> a few things they mention give me pause

I don't think it's even a "they", as in an actual company with more than one employee. This appears to be a twenty-something guy with delusions of grandeur, no experience in nuclear energy, and a habit of name-dropping billionaires he's never met.

I liked when he said single people are lonely and don't know what they are missing because his wife makes him frozen pizza when he comes home from working at his nuclear startup. I may have embellished it a bit.

Would for you to expand more on why you're bullish on synthetic hydrocarbons (also called e-fuels or power-to-gas). Is there a specific company you're bullish on, such as Prometheus Fuels or Terraform Industries?

Just that there's going to be a lot of cheap renewable energy available and finding ways to turn that into something useful will likely involve generation of various chemicals like methanol, ammonia, methane and sustainable aviation fuel from green hydrogen at prices that fossil fuels won't be able to match when externalities are included, and in some cases even without.

IRA subsidies have kick started this in the USA already. The main input cost is green hydrogen and the main cost input to that is electricity and I'm very bullish on wind and solar continuing to get cheaper and cheaper.

> The main input cost is green hydrogen

I wasn't aware that was the current consensus, due to a lack of knowledge around this domain. Prometheus Fuels' process to generate ethanol doesn't see to require green hydrogen as an input step, so I assumed other production processes were also going to get around needing that input?

Don't feel obligated, but I would appreciate a quick link to something I could read about green hydrogen uses other than "burn this instead of fossil fuels"

Depends on what you mean by direct. Wouldn't it be cheaper/faster/more "direct" in a different sense to exploit existing oil/gas-consuming infrastructure?

Reads like “free range” energy

Yawn. Another nuclear fission startup, seems to be a new one every week.

Couldn't they do this just as easily, say, in Iceland, with all of the geothermal? Does it require unsafe nuclear levels of heat to break up CO2? I thought it was only 700c?

Or with solar in Arizona or some other sunny place, as proposed by Terraform Industries.

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