Prometheus Fuels
Discussion
Granted I am not an engineer or scientist, in fact I get my BMI mixed up with my IQ score, but this company seems like a bit smelly to me. The website is very cool but their logo and name reminds me of the bad guys in futuristic movies, like Total Recall (the original), who control earths air or water.
So their idea is to "filter atmospheric CO2 using water, electricity, and nanotube membranes to produce commercially viable fuels". To me it looks they will be using a ridiculous amount of water and electricity, the latter of which they claim will be produced by them locally s the startup costs will be crazy.
I think BMW invested some money so maybe they just want to keep an eye on them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels
https://prometheusfuels.com
So their idea is to "filter atmospheric CO2 using water, electricity, and nanotube membranes to produce commercially viable fuels". To me it looks they will be using a ridiculous amount of water and electricity, the latter of which they claim will be produced by them locally s the startup costs will be crazy.
I think BMW invested some money so maybe they just want to keep an eye on them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels
https://prometheusfuels.com
Fuel from “thin air “ does seem very Emporors new clothes.
Assuming the theory is sound
and the fuel can be produced in quantities
and at a price which is affordable
and they find funding
My guess will be they could be the new Theranos.
An innotive theory from a brilliant scientist from one of the big universities in the states Years of development and 100’s of millions of investment with little progress and it all falls down like a house of cards amid a raft of lawsuits and evidence of widespread fraud.
Assuming the theory is sound
and the fuel can be produced in quantities
and at a price which is affordable
and they find funding
My guess will be they could be the new Theranos.
An innotive theory from a brilliant scientist from one of the big universities in the states Years of development and 100’s of millions of investment with little progress and it all falls down like a house of cards amid a raft of lawsuits and evidence of widespread fraud.
Edited by Rockettvr on Monday 3rd April 07:44
bongtom said:
Granted I am not an engineer or scientist, in fact I get my BMI mixed up with my IQ score, but this company seems like a bit smelly to me. The website is very cool but their logo and name reminds me of the bad guys in futuristic movies, like Total Recall (the original), who control earths air or water.
So their idea is to "filter atmospheric CO2 using water, electricity, and nanotube membranes to produce commercially viable fuels". To me it looks they will be using a ridiculous amount of water and electricity, the latter of which they claim will be produced by them locally s the startup costs will be crazy.
I think BMW invested some money so maybe they just want to keep an eye on them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels
https://prometheusfuels.com
BMW Corporate didn't invest in them, their venture fund based out in Silicon Valley (which acts independently of HQ) invested in them. The last few years have been interesting, investors were throwing money left, right and centre at anyone who came up with an impressive sounding pitch deck. So their idea is to "filter atmospheric CO2 using water, electricity, and nanotube membranes to produce commercially viable fuels". To me it looks they will be using a ridiculous amount of water and electricity, the latter of which they claim will be produced by them locally s the startup costs will be crazy.
I think BMW invested some money so maybe they just want to keep an eye on them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels
https://prometheusfuels.com
"The fact that the company widely missed its own targets for delivering synthetic fuels to the market has raised further doubts. McGinnis originally said that Prometheus would sell its alternative gas for $3 a gallon by sometime in 2020, undercutting fuel sold at the pump. Instead, two years later, the company has yet to piece together an integrated device that generates fuels that could power standard vehicles today.
All of this has created a perception among some that McGinnis, a theater major and playwright before he earned a doctorate in environmental engineering from Yale, is a bit of a showman. His bold claims have likely helped the company strike deals, observers say, but it’s made it harder to decipher the reality from the hype.
Most outside observers that MIT Technology Review spoke with still believe it could take decades before carbon-capturing factories can spit out fuels as cheaply as we can dig them up. Some think they never will."
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/25/105089...
SWoll said:
raspy said:
All of this has created a perception among some that McGinnis, a theater major and playwright before he earned a doctorate in environmental engineering from Yale, is a bit of a showman.
You really couldn't make this stuff up could you?Nikola 2.0
The alternative fuel space is the current preferred mechanism for selling penny shares to old white guys. There is a whole raft of them suddenly floating around the usual suspects in Berkeley Sq. and the other punter hubs.
The quality and genuine ones you don't really ever hear off as they get backed by genuine money but the stuff that goes out blazing spin articles, pseudo science, stuff to yet be invented or one of those rebranding of something from 100 years ago tends to normally just be few and salary vehicles to be financed by old geezer desperate to expand their wealth through investing with the big boys they can now join because they've got their hands on theirs and their wife's pension pots.
The carbon from air ones are brilliant because despite every single punter knowing that there is less than 400 ppm of CO2 in the air they want to believe that somehow massive amounts of free energy can be used to suck in millions of cubic meters of air a minute and somehow there is a magical process that will catch those CO2 molecules as they rip past near the speed of light and then there is some kind of process that splits away those two oxygen atoms, ignoring the really high covenant forces of both carbon and oxygen and then this carbon will used with a vast amount of hydrogen that has used a vast amount of energy to desalinate salt water, purify it, then electrolyse it to capture the hydrogen to make a simple alcohol. This alcohol will then be run through Fischer Tropsch using vast amounts of energy and needing another vast supply of carbon to create synthetic hydrocarbons in a blend long enough to burn in cars that aren't allowed to be used in urban environments where the multi millionaires with enough disposable to buy the stuff instead of just using real petrol tend to live and want to drive.
There's a reason why known spankers are leaping into this space. There is £billions of dumb provincial grants to be snapped up and £billions of mug punter penny share cash to be hoovered.
It's bigger than cannabis oils, bigger than minibonds, bigger than crypto and even bigger than SPACs because this is a mechanism to tap the vast and endless resources of lax provincial government awareness purchasing with free taxpayer money meeting the near endless pot of dumb pensioner cash. It's makes double glazing, tarmac and solar panels look like amateur hour.
Rooted said:
If their only source of carbon is captured carbon dioxide they would need to be co-located with an intense producer of carbon dioxide....and yes it will require an immense amount of power to run their electrolysers
National Grid say we will have plenty though, often quoted by the EV "team"?TX.
DonkeyApple said:
The carbon from air ones are brilliant because despite every single punter knowing that there is less than 400 ppm of CO2 in the air they want to believe that somehow massive amounts of free energy can be used to suck in millions of cubic meters of air a minute and somehow there is a magical process that will catch those CO2 molecules as they rip past near the speed of light and then there is some kind of process that splits away those two oxygen atoms, ignoring the really high covenant forces of both carbon and oxygen
Only quoting the bit that stood out when i skim read...You may find it interesting to hear that this is already happening. Climeworks have been doing this for years.
delta0 said:
Terminator X said:
National Grid say we will have plenty though, often quoted by the EV "team"?
TX.
It’s more efficient to just use the electricity directly rather than put it through many processes and have so many losses. TX.
It's a pity if so many charlatans are entering the e-fuels arena as DA intimates.
I blame Musk personally, he demonstrated you can succeed by just lying about what you're going to achieve.
Richard-D said:
Only quoting the bit that stood out when i skim read...
You may find it interesting to hear that this is already happening. Climeworks have been doing this for years.
No they haven't. They crush igneous rock to create a high surface area powder of mainly Olivine. The industrial exhaust is then passed over this olivine which slowly reacts to absorb a small fraction of the CO2 heavy industrial exhaust gases. The amount of CO2 removed is known via chemical formula, the rock dust is then dumped at sea, sequestrino the CO2 and a tax credit is claimed or a tax penalty mitigated. You may find it interesting to hear that this is already happening. Climeworks have been doing this for years.
They are a supplier of DCC services not DAC and their system sequesters the CO2 at source as opposed to harvesting it for further industrial use.
It also only removes a small percentage of the CO2 and the stream has to be very CO2 rich. The most perfect use would be to decarbonise the exhaust from gas power stations but it can only remove a small amount so you'd need to pass the gases again and again over a vast surface area of dust at enormous expense.
What you need to note is that these efuel enterprises are claiming they can or will be able to run viable DAC which is the big spin because that doesn't exist and the moment it does the whole need to stop using fossil fuels disappears overnight and all cO2 issues are solved.
Climeworks is kosher but it doesn't do what you think. The company you want to look at is Carbon Technologies in Canada. They do run DAC but it requires endless fundraising and local government grants. The resultant CO2 is then sold to the oil industry for the extraction of oil. This is where the oil industry is trying to get that process classed as sequestering so they can claim a tax credit but you can't sequester CO2 like that as it leaks back out to the atmosphere via all the well fissures over time.
Edited by DonkeyApple on Monday 3rd April 11:00
DonkeyApple said:
Richard-D said:
Only quoting the bit that stood out when i skim read...
You may find it interesting to hear that this is already happening. Climeworks have been doing this for years.
No they haven't. They crush igneous rock to create a high surface area powder of mainly Olivine. The industrial exhaust is then passed over this olivine which slowly reacts to absorb a small fraction of the CO2 heavy industrial exhaust gases. The amount of CO2 removed is known via chemical formula, the rock dust is then dumped at sea, sequestrino the CO2 and a tax credit is claimed or a tax penalty mitigated. You may find it interesting to hear that this is already happening. Climeworks have been doing this for years.
They are a supplier of DCC services not DAC and their system sequesters the CO2 at source as opposed to harvesting it for further industrial use.
It also only removes a small percentage of the CO2 and the stream has to be very CO2 rich. The most perfect use would be to decarbonise the exhaust from gas power stations but it can only remove a small amount so you'd need to pass the gases again and again over a vast surface area of dust at enormous expense.
What you need to note is that these efuel enterprises are claiming they can or will be able to run viable DAC which is the big spin because that doesn't exist and the moment it does the whole need to stop using fossil fuels disappears overnight and all cO2 issues are solved.
Climeworks is kosher but it doesn't do what you think. The company you want to look at is Carbon Technologies in Canada. They do run DAC but it requires endless fundraising and local government grants. The resultant CO2 is then sold to the oil industry for the extraction of oil. This is where the oil industry is trying to get that process classed as sequestering so they can claim a tax credit but you can't sequester CO2 like that as it leaks back out to the atmosphere via all the well fissures over time.
Edited by DonkeyApple on Monday 3rd April 11:00
The relationship between carbon footprint and efficiency is worthy of more discussion.
Whilst it would be ideal to be able to have an independent relationship between these two things, right now, I don't think we have that as an option.
This is the crux of what ail this about, i.e. how to decarbonise cars.
There are at least four pathways.
Pathway 1 would be to keep burning fossil fuels and simply capture CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it.
Efficiency has a role to play in determining CO2 per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, albeit a front-end hump.
The magnitude of materials required (and therefore the size of the front-end hump) to do this on an effective scale is difficult to get one's head around and there remains a huge question mark about commercial viability of such an approach.
There is also the small matter of non-sustainable source for the fuel.
I guess most would agree that this is a can kicking exercise, and with a low probability of being realistic.
Pathway 2 would be to use renewable electricity directly to propel cars using a battery.
Efficiency has a role to play in determining renewable energy per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, with what looks to be a very modest front-end hump because of the relatively low amount of new power generation required, the known quantity of what the charging network involves and the well-documented but (in comparison) manageable production footprint of the batteries.
The rate of adoption is also the fastest achievable due to the high well-to-wheel energy efficiency.
This pathway also creates the opportunity to make further gains by good aerodynamic design of the cars and whatever mass gains can be made by incremental battery technology improvements. That then has a positive knock-on effect to new infrastructure.
Large scale greenwashing of energy sourced from fossil fuels is a low risk for this pathway, as it is almost impossible to hide the fact that the renewable generating infrastructure doesn't exist.
Pathway 3 would be to produce fuel from renewable electricity, aka e-fuel.
Once again, efficiency has a role to play in determining renewable energy per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, again, with what looks to be a monumental front-end hump because of the number of power generation and conversion stages and the need for not only CO2 as a feedstock but water as well.
The rate of adoption is never going be fast enough to feed this fuel to the existing fleet of ICE cars, which means that the production footprint of new ICE cars in not an avoidable thing, which some people seem to think it achieves.
This pathway requires at least 6 times as much electricity as pathway 2, and more likely round 10 times. It's not just a little bit more, it's possibly an order of magnitude higher.
Large scale greenwashing of energy sourced from fossil fuels is a significant risk for this pathway, although with adequate checks and balances, it should be possible to get a grip on this as it would be quite difficult to hide the fact that the renewable and capture infrastructure doesn't' exist.
Pathway 4 would be to use green hydrogen to propel cars.
This is essentially a halfway house between pathways 2 and 3 but essentially it combines the worst aspects of those two pathways into one, whilst adding a level of safety protocol required never before seen in the public arena.
Efficiency has a role to play in determining renewable energy per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, again, with what looks to be a very large front-end hump because of the number of power generation and conversion stages.
This pathway requires around 3 times as much electricity as pathway 2.
Large scale greenwashing of energy sourced from fossil fuels is a significant risk for this pathway as there is no easy way to work out where a hydrogen molecule comes from if you don't have access or insight to the upstream processes.
SUMMARY
The inherent link between efficiency and carbon footprint appears to be unbreakable at this juncture and by choosing low pathway efficiency we unavoidably increase the risk of greenwashing fossil fuel sourced energy.
Whilst it would be ideal to be able to have an independent relationship between these two things, right now, I don't think we have that as an option.
This is the crux of what ail this about, i.e. how to decarbonise cars.
There are at least four pathways.
Pathway 1 would be to keep burning fossil fuels and simply capture CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it.
Efficiency has a role to play in determining CO2 per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, albeit a front-end hump.
The magnitude of materials required (and therefore the size of the front-end hump) to do this on an effective scale is difficult to get one's head around and there remains a huge question mark about commercial viability of such an approach.
There is also the small matter of non-sustainable source for the fuel.
I guess most would agree that this is a can kicking exercise, and with a low probability of being realistic.
Pathway 2 would be to use renewable electricity directly to propel cars using a battery.
Efficiency has a role to play in determining renewable energy per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, with what looks to be a very modest front-end hump because of the relatively low amount of new power generation required, the known quantity of what the charging network involves and the well-documented but (in comparison) manageable production footprint of the batteries.
The rate of adoption is also the fastest achievable due to the high well-to-wheel energy efficiency.
This pathway also creates the opportunity to make further gains by good aerodynamic design of the cars and whatever mass gains can be made by incremental battery technology improvements. That then has a positive knock-on effect to new infrastructure.
Large scale greenwashing of energy sourced from fossil fuels is a low risk for this pathway, as it is almost impossible to hide the fact that the renewable generating infrastructure doesn't exist.
Pathway 3 would be to produce fuel from renewable electricity, aka e-fuel.
Once again, efficiency has a role to play in determining renewable energy per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, again, with what looks to be a monumental front-end hump because of the number of power generation and conversion stages and the need for not only CO2 as a feedstock but water as well.
The rate of adoption is never going be fast enough to feed this fuel to the existing fleet of ICE cars, which means that the production footprint of new ICE cars in not an avoidable thing, which some people seem to think it achieves.
This pathway requires at least 6 times as much electricity as pathway 2, and more likely round 10 times. It's not just a little bit more, it's possibly an order of magnitude higher.
Large scale greenwashing of energy sourced from fossil fuels is a significant risk for this pathway, although with adequate checks and balances, it should be possible to get a grip on this as it would be quite difficult to hide the fact that the renewable and capture infrastructure doesn't' exist.
Pathway 4 would be to use green hydrogen to propel cars.
This is essentially a halfway house between pathways 2 and 3 but essentially it combines the worst aspects of those two pathways into one, whilst adding a level of safety protocol required never before seen in the public arena.
Efficiency has a role to play in determining renewable energy per mile and therefore the amount of new infrastructure required, the production and installation of which obviously produces more CO2, again, with what looks to be a very large front-end hump because of the number of power generation and conversion stages.
This pathway requires around 3 times as much electricity as pathway 2.
Large scale greenwashing of energy sourced from fossil fuels is a significant risk for this pathway as there is no easy way to work out where a hydrogen molecule comes from if you don't have access or insight to the upstream processes.
SUMMARY
The inherent link between efficiency and carbon footprint appears to be unbreakable at this juncture and by choosing low pathway efficiency we unavoidably increase the risk of greenwashing fossil fuel sourced energy.
Terminator X said:
@GT9 National Grid say future leccy no problem though^ so who cares about efficiency.
^EV posters have been quoting that for years
TX.
Which bit about "the inherent link between efficiency and carbon footprint appears to be unbreakable at this juncture and by choosing low pathway efficiency we unavoidably increase the risk of greenwashing fossil fuel sourced energy" is unclear.^EV posters have been quoting that for years
TX.
I'm saying that low efficiency means there is no carbon reduction for a long time, especially if fossil fuel sourced energy is sold under the guise of something else.
In which case, let's just burn petrol.
It's EV or that, as far as I'm concerned, for the bulk of cars.
As far as the National Grid are concerned, they are saying 'no problem to a 1% increase year-on-year for 25 years to power electric cars.
That does not mean they are saying 'no problem' to a 10% increase year-on-year for 25 years to produce e-fuel.
One is a total increase of 25% of 25 years, the other a total increase of 250% over 25 years.
Surely you understand the difference?
That does not mean they are saying 'no problem' to a 10% increase year-on-year for 25 years to produce e-fuel.
One is a total increase of 25% of 25 years, the other a total increase of 250% over 25 years.
Surely you understand the difference?
Richard-D said:
No, they do exactly what you're claiming they don't. You're incapable of listening to anyone but yourself though so carry on...
No. They don't. You are confusing the prospectus words for the multiple funding rounds for ESG cash with the reality. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/climeworks...
Their stuff keeps landing on my desk and it's not yet passed any basic scrutiny.
No one is doing viable DAC and no one has a system yet capable of viability. And this is a DCC system that is being pushed as DAC for ESG funding and if that funding dries up then the next we'll hear is of a floatation and a need to tap punters for cash. Which they'd need to do relatively soon as the more data the Orca project delivers the further away they'll be at the current rate.
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