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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

Just so people are aware, Prometheus comes up every now and then among people on twitter following the climate tech space, and most think that their claims are bogus and completely unbelievable.

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...

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> can capture CO2 from the air with 36$, which is like 20-30 times lower than what current best tech can offer

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.

$36/ton is our cost to capture CO2 from the air. For us it is an input to making things, not a product, so we don't need to purify it to 100% pure CO2, just need to capture it into water (approx. 2% concentration). This requires way less energy and equipment, so much much cheaper.

Prometheus's vision is very hard not to like. And, at the same time, there are likely good reasons to be skeptical. (I have very little expertise in this area myself.)

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.

> FYI, I didn't find the tweets you've linked to to be convincing.

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.

Also, if you read the Science article, the defensive moat comes down to a new way to align carbon nanotubes in the material they use to filter the ethanol from water. I'm bullish.

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