rmcginnis

Our HN Launch was number 1 for two days straight 6 years ago, and I wanted to follow up with this huge update - We’ve done it. We now have the technology to revolutionize how energy is used and fuel is made. Our goal is to flood the world with cheap energy that drives prosperity and human achievement.

Thanks!

Yes, only inputs are air and electricity. If you have an equipment payback of only a few years, then after that all fuel is close to opex only. Similar to solar itself.

$3.00 / gallon is our v 1.0 (before taxes)

Thanks! Really appreciate the positive comment :)

Thanks for the feedback. Working on the site and hope to have improvements in the next few months with improved tech explanations, clarity, and speed.

Jet fuel energy content is approx. 37 kWh/gallon. At 40% efficiency that's 92.5 kWh. At $0.01/kWh, $92.5 cents per gallon for energy cost. Spot price for jet fuel is approx. $2.00 average over 2006-2021 https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E... Add to this the LCFS credits which can be over $1.50 and there is a lot of room for Capex.

The second important thing is to make the CAPEX really cheap. That's been the core focus for us for the last 2.5 years since demo day and we're looking at really low costs for equipment now. Hope to announce some new info on this in the next few months.

One cent per gallon less than the fossil jet fuel spot price - in California (we will use LCFS credits to start)

Project Foghorn was technically successful but couldn't hit the economics. The tech lead on that project is now a scientific advisor for Prometheus - Matt Eisaman

Sorry to all about the drop in website performance. Working on it!

$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.

Working on it!

In order to make electrofuels cost competitive, you've got to use new utility scale solar, which is now less than $0.02/kWh : https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/07/01/new-sola...

Assume an overall efficiency of approx. 40% to be conservative.

If you'd like to see some of my publications (including old desalination stuff), check out my Google Scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=t4ZIFUoAAAAJ&hl=en

Hi everybody, I'm the founder of Prometheus. Happy to answer any questions!

$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.

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

The CO2 is absorbed in the electrolyte, and that's where we use it in the catalysis process. It is turned into fuel within the electrolyte, then we extract that fuel from it.

Yes, we're actually agnostic on CO2 source. To get to scale we'll need to use CO2 from direct air capture, but we could by the collection from someone else.

Thanks! We haven't done a unique analysis yet, but here is a paper that does a good overview of energy balances and efficiencies for CO2 to fuels and products. In their separations discussion you can see why distillation of alcohols is not favorable. A membrane approach is approx. 6x better, but until the CNT membrane was shown to do this job, there was no practical way to do the separation at this efficiency.

https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30042-4

We want to replace fossil fuels with renewable fuels, at the largest possible scale, over 300 billion gallons of fuel per year. Point sources of CO2 and biofuels can't scale to this level.

Lanzatech uses a biological process.

There should be a peer review article with this data by the end of the summer. Mattershift, the company that makes the membranes, got a DOE RAPID grant to get bench and pilot data for this: https://www.aiche.org/rapid/news/08-27-2018/rapid-manufactur...

The membranes are robust and should have a long life in this application.

The energy content of the gasoline is less than the energy used to make it (only 50-60% efficiency), but the CO2 released is the same as the CO2 used. So the energy efficiency is low, but the net CO2 emission is still zero.

Ultimately anything we make now with petroleum feedstocks could be made from CO2 mined from the air instead. Gasoline and other transportation fuels is a logical first step, but we don't need to stop there. Agreed!

It's about half of global annual gasoline consumption. It's going to be hard, but worth it to try.

There are a couple of kinds of efficiency, i.e. Faradaic efficiency vs overall efficiency. We are talking about overall efficiency, which is electrical energy turned into useful chemical energy.

That is the main input. We also have to keep the capital costs low, but that looks good too.

We'll want to filter our air, yes. This means replacing filters, etc, which factors into the maintenance costs.