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Comment by filleokus | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how YC backed Prometheus Fuels will stack up. They claimed that they are able to sequester Co2 directly from the air for around 36 USD / ton [0]. If they truly can scale it at that price point, it seems very competitive.

[0]: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/happy-earth-day-...

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There may be a pattern here of YC funding carbon removal techniques that perhaps cannot work at all. Here's another one: Remora https://www.remoracarbon.com/

As far as I know there is no research paper on the topic ... nothing to indicate it actually is a viable solution.

They also don't want to talk to anyone about hard questions. It's like the Theranos of carbon removal, using Silicon-valley style secrecy.

I can't help but feel that if we are to successfully save the climate, it won't be dependent on secrecy.

> “ As far as I know there is no research paper on the topic ... nothing to indicate it actually is a viable solution.”

Come on.

Remora is literally founded from their CTO’s PhD thesis.

From their website: “ Christina pioneered Remora’s technology during her engineering PhD at the University of Michigan, becoming one of the world’s leading experts on mobile carbon capture. She went on to test a mobile carbon capture prototype in the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Lab”

If you Google “Christina Reynolds Carbon Capture” you will get, as a first result, a link to her PhD thesis:

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/1515...

Are they really sequestering it? If I understand their tech correctly they are recycling it back into fuel which then gets burned and the CO2 goes back into the air? It’s a fascinating process but unlikely to undue our decades of harm.

Yeah, that's how I understand it also. But they are talking about putting it in (plastic) goods "that store it forever". So I'm thinking that they could just solidify it somehow and bury it in the ground? Feels fairly cheap?

But I'm not clear on wether their price point includes the revenue they get from selling the carbon (in the form of fuels or plastic)?

I.e, does it cost them 36 USD, or 351 USD? [0]

[0]: 36 USD + (1 tonne of Co2 / 19 lbs of Co2 per gallon of fuel) * 3 USD / gallon of fuel ≈ 36 + 105*3 = 351 USD. Makes a huge difference...

$36 is the cost of the capital equipment and energy needed to remove the CO2 from the air. Just an internal metric. Not tied to sale prices.

Thanks for you response (and looking forward to the announcement you mentioned in your other comment).

That's so much better than what I could have thought!

Even though my skeptical self almost falls in the "too god to be true" category I see you mention on Twitter, I'm very excited about following Prometheus' progress :-)

BTW: Make sure to let people know when/if human-drinkable ethanol "fuels" from Co2 are available for order! ;-)

They claim that their technology will "replace fossil fuels". If it actually hits a price point where that's possible than I'd expect it to not be a problem either way.

I guess in that future we're getting power mainly from renewables and using hydrocarbons as power storage? We'd probably be using those same hydrocarbons to make plastics and the like as well.

Still, halting new fossil fuel extraction would be an excellent first step, even though the energy costs don't make much sense to me.

There are about 2.2 teratonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. There should be about 1.5 Tt. That's ~700 billion tonnes of CO2 to remove, or about $25tn at your quoted price. Not impossible, but certainly not cheap.

At that scale, the price per ton would probably drop by a factor of 5-10 or more, so it looks quite doable.

Founder of Prometheus here - stay tuned for a relevant announcement tomorrow!

Sounds interesting/almost too good to be true. Do they have a working system?

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