They seem to be heavy on vision, marketing and zero-net-carbon partnerships with huge brands, light on technical detail (i wouldn't hate some links to papers or a PoC of their reactor or something), all of which feels a little Nikola-y.
Hopefully someone can chime in with an explanation of why the technology is viable now (and not in the past) or why Prometheus is equipped to execute on this vision.
I've done a decent amount of research on Prometheus Fuels, and I'm a believer.
They've licensed a couple of key technologies out of Oak Ridge. First is a catalyst that converts CO2 + H2O + electricity directly into ethanol. The other is a membrane with parallel carbon nanotubes that are just the right size to filter that ethanol. The rest of the business involves the chemical conversion of pure ethanol into other types of hydrocarbons.
The result is the ability to efficiently create carbon-netural fuel, effectively capturing a percentage of the electricity as gasoline (or jet fuel, etc).
Of course, this is less energy efficient than simply burning fuel that you found in the ground. The advantage is that they can bypass the expensive drilling, refining, and transportation steps and use cheap renewable energy to create fuel literally anywhere they can stick a shipping container.
That's the goal, anyway. I really hope they succeed.
I myself don't like much how my brain sees Musk everywhere, yet I think similar methanol production will first come from SpaceX for Mars.
Also i wonder whether moonshine style distillation is worse than the carbon nanotubes membrane filtration, especially if you have a source of cheap waste heat.
Distillation is pretty expensive, energy-wise, and if you can't run continuously [e.g. if you're trying to use cheap intermittent renewables] you lose energy in the cooling-and-reheating cycles.
I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power large-scale industrial processes.
[Disclosure: I've invested in Prometheus Fuels, but don't speak for them.]
Moonshining is less than 400 KJ per kg of source, i.e. about 1.5 KWh per kg of ethanol produced from 15% ethanol/water source. Given that one can use waste heat from almost any other industrial process the real monetary cost is way less than the cost of electrical 1.5 KWh.
>I have yet to see a significant source of usable "waste" heat that's not already being used for something else. Low-grade heat isn't helpful--you generally need reasonably high temperature differentials in order to power large-scale industrial processes.
Moonshining is 78 C degree - such cheap waste heat sources are plentiful exactly because it is hard to use for almost anything else.
>you lose energy in the cooling-and-reheating cycles.
not an issue for a 78 C process - basically like your water boiler, takes minimum of thermal isolation.
I've often wondered if I could justify a crypto mining rig if I used the waste heat for something, literally anything, useful. The tech is interesting and I want to for the sake of "doing something cool" but the environmental cost has me iffy on ever trying.
I think it's fair to assume that this technology is feasible at this point. McGinnis' other company, Mattershift, specializes in these kinds of membranes. IIRC they started in the desalination world, but have since found other applications.
Welcome to 2021. In a few years, Chase Coleman will pick up large stake in this company, take it public and financially engineer it enough to stuff it into the S&P at a $500bn valuation.
If the founders are around... trying to understand their economics. They claim to sell Jet A at the market clearing price. Jet A goes for $0.45/L. The lowest industrial electricity rates in the US are $0.05/kWh (double that in California where they are selling today.) With 100% efficiency, no capital costs and no other opex, you get $0.05/kWh * 9.5 kWh/L = $0.47/L electrofuel Jet A. How can that work?
Their system is designed to easily start and stop to take advantage of wholesale wind and solar electricity rates, which are more like $0.02/kWh during certain parts of the day and times of the year. They sacrifice uptime for even cheaper electricity. If their capital costs and fixed opex are low enough this is a good strategy.
Ok so the 40% efficiency and 2.5x reduction in electricity prices cancel each other out... we're still at electricity costs == energy in the jet fuel. No room for electrofuel plant capex or any other electrofuel plant opex. And to get those low electricity prices you have to only run your plant at 30% duty cycle when the sun is shining (3x capex).
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.
Not sure how we got to $0.01/kWh (half the cost of the lowest PPAs ever signed for solar in Saudi Arabia), but if the electricity cost is 10x lower than current California prices, I see how electrofuels could pencil.
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.
There is probably a fair bit of wishful thinking going on, but that is essentially a perquisite for starting a company like this. The pessimists don't get very far.
But something worth considering, in academic circles the "old" school of thought was that we could get a high penetration of renewable energy by building sufficient transmission capacity (i.e. send electricity from sunny/windy areas to places where it is not). The "new" school of thought is that instead of investing in transmission, invest in significantly overbuilding capacity. Think 3-4x the peak demand vs peak supply (i.e. in the summer months, if you have 100MW peak demand, build 300-400MW solar/wind). The rough idea is that renewables are so cheap and long term storage and transmission are so expensive, that it is better to just massively overbuild renewables and rely on shorter term storage to fill in the gaps.
And one major side affect of a strategy like this is that we will have a ton of extra electricity that we don't know what to do with during certain periods of time. This would be a great time to spin up carbon capture devices (among other industrial uses). There are still a lot of things that need to fall into place for a future like this to happen, but if you are trying to "skate to where the puck is going to be" it is not a bad target to aim for. There are plenty of well funded energy focused startups/companies that operating on worse future assumptions.
Exactly. They're doing what PARC was: looking a decade ahead and building the technology that makes sense in that future.
I'm quite optimistic about them. Even if they can't immediately compete head-to-head with fossil fuels, there are probably some ways to get early revenue, by making other industrial chemicals, or marketing higher-priced fuel to eco-conscious consumers, or the alcoholic beverages idea they mention on their webpage.
The idea of directly electrolysing the low-concentration CO2 in the air-capture fluid and then extracting the low-concentration product is brilliant. Most of the energy cost for standard air capture is heat used to 'boil' the CO2 out of the fluid. If their osmotic membrane can separate the fuel with better energy efficiency, it's a win. It's hard to produce high concentrations of fuel products electrolytically anyway, so there was always going to be a need to concentrate the fuel somehow. The big questions in my mind are:
1. How efficient can the osmosis be?
2. Does the low concentrations of CO2 imply the need for very large electrolyzers? These tend to be the biggest capital-cost item.
I haven't had a loading screen for that long on a website, or a framerate that low, since I last used Flash in 2007.
This is a shame because I think the company does something interesting? I'm not sure, because the website is getting in the way of understanding what it is, but reading the Wikipedia entry it sounds fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Fuels
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.
$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.
Here's the relevant text, since the website makes it hard to get to.
We’re excited to announce the close of our Series B funding round, with investment by Maersk, Metaplanet, and BMW. As a result of the round, we’ve achieved a $1.5 Billion valuation, making us the world’s first electrofuels unicorn.
This month, we received strong support from the White House, as well as some of world’s largest, most iconic brands that have been nothing short of bold in backing innovative tech to decarbonize their industries — American Airlines, Maersk, and BMW. Their support marks a rising recognition of the incredible promise that our zero net carbon electrofuels hold in getting the planet to Net Zero by 2050.
On September 9, the Biden administration included Prometheus and our zero net carbon electro-Sustainable Aviation Fuel, or electro-SAF, in its plan to phase out fossil jet fuel and make aviation carbon neutral by 2050.
American Airlines, responding to the White House’s goal, cited our zero net carbon electro-SAF as key to decarbonizing its fleet, which, at over 880 aircraft, is the world’s largest. The airline’s support came on the heels of its recent agreement to buy 10 million gallons of our fuel.
Said Doug Parker, American Airlines Chairman and CEO: “We’re excited to partner with Prometheus to scale up the production of zero net carbon electrofuels. Their ability to produce 100% carbon neutral SAF at a price lower than fossil jet fuel and to not be limited in the scale of future production is the strongest indicator we’ve seen that a 100% carbon neutral aviation future can be achieved in time.”
Maersk Growth, the venture arm of A.P. Moller - Maersk, led our Series B round. Maersk, the world’s largest container logistics company, responsible for moving nearly 17% of the world’s container capacity, has been a take-no-prisoners, accept-no-half-measures trailblazer in decarbonizing its operations and the maritime shipping industry at large.
So we were honored when Maersk’s Head of Decarbonization, Morten Bo Christiansen, had this to say: “Prometheus Fuels is developing a very exciting and innovative technology to produce carbon based electrofuels from direct air capture of CO2. Electrofuels are expected to play a key role for the decarbonisation of shipping and, if scaled successfully, Prometheus Fuels’ technology will address a key constraint for carbon based electrofuels — namely the cost competitiveness of direct air capture.”
BMW i Ventures, who led our Series A round last year, doubled-down to join our Series B as well.
The website really glosses over the part where they turn alcohols into gasoline. Is this an existing technology that is already available? I dont know as I'm not really plugged into energy generation technology.
Also, it says that Titan turns 9 millions kilotons of CO2 into 1 million gallons of gasoline. Does it actually do this or is that what they expect it to do?
Trying to click this on my phone in a low-service area (I waited 10 seconds and got nowhere besides a loading screen) is a great reminder of why companies should strive to have at least some of their materials — anything related to fundraising is a good candidate — in plaintext.
There was a lot of excitement around this business in their Launch HN post [1]. I recall the reception being positive and the technology sounding legit, not snake oil. Pretty cool to see that they've been plugging away and must have got the interest of some big players.
While I generally agree with some of the comments about the usability/accessibility/load times, this is a visually amazing website and is a super impressive piece of design. Ran really nicely on my admittedly over-spec'ed laptop.
(I say this as someone that would be happy if every website on the Internet was just written in plain HTML with no CSS and just a few images.)
You are obviously aware of the issues with the site. I like the vision and how you've laid it out, but I felt you were missing a trick with design a bit.
You lay out the "for centuries the way.." really well, and it's fun. I feel like I'm in Mad Max. But then, you introduce your technology, and everything is still desert. I don't feel like you've "changed the world" because your tech is so great.
Also, for LOTS of people (as you can see in the comments) this sort of web experience doesn't work when they want to dig into real details, or want to feel like they aren't watching a movie. They want it to feel real, so I'd recommend a place they can go with a simple layout, almost whitepaper like description of what you're doing. Perhaps that exists, but I couldn't find it, and you even had a comment (more highly voted than yours) which has copied the text from your site, and pasted it here to be easy to read.
How would that be better for the environment though?
Unless we have a way to electrify all planes (we don't currently), this is the next best thing. I think the key is to ensure biofuel never gets cheaper than regular fuel, to avoid incentivizing flying more.
If you sequester what you pull out in some old oil well, while American Airlines is pumping out from the next oil well, it has to be less effective (and thus release more CO2 in the process), than just you sending your oil from captured carbon directly to them.
What's the current density on the electrolyzers? Does the low concentration of CO2 impact it? What kind of air contactor do you plan to use?
I'm a big fan of what you are doing. If I weren't already working on fusion energy, this would be the technology I'd most like to work on. People forget that decarbonizing electricity is only 1/3 or 1/2 of the energy/fossil fuels problem. We need to find a way to turn massive amounts of renewable electricity into fuels and chemical feedstocks.
I really enjoyed Prometheus's launch discussion here on HN. I've followed them on a regular basis because I believe in their vision and mission largely because of Rob's responses here on HN. I'm glad to see they've got funding for the next steps to start scaling.
Feasibility aside, this is exactly what people want to hear today. Eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere and sell gasoline. You have to give them credit for the pitch, regardless of what is or isn't delivered.
I have this great idea about doing blood assays for all of the common tests out there out of a little pinprick worth of blood from your fingertip. It's exactly what people want to hear today. How about some funding?
I'm confused about how this is on the front page. The title says they've raised a Series B at a big valuation but the link is just their marketing page, with no mention whatsoever of a raise.
Serious question for all atmospheric carbon capture companies:
What happens once you're super successful and atmospheric carbon densities are dramatically lower? Is there a point at which the density is too low for the economics to work?
Most carbon capture schemes like this tend to have some sort of concentration step, often using amine sorbents or other chemical equivalents. The atmospheric concentration doesn't tend to be the bottleneck here, from what I can tell.
There is the question of "what happens when we're at pre-industrial carbon levels", which yeah, means that we'll have to stop getting our carbon straight from the atmosphere :)
we burn the generated fuel and cycle the carbon again. The fuel essentially acts like a battery. You would have to use renewable energy to power the capture.
I feel like a high school kid just told me about a great idea.
Pretty much ignores pollution beyond CO2. The 289 engine in the '67 Fastback in their cartoon is what I would call a 'gross polluter'. Burning gasoline also produces NOx, CO, SO2, particulates, and more. There is a reason that electric cars are a thing.
This is an interesting one since it may be more about market timing than technology. Doing a bit more research but it is likely they are getting the valuation based on LCFS (CA) and 45Q (Federal/IRS) carbon capture credits in addition to the potential of displacing jet fuel.
The US Navy continues to research similar technology for manufacturing synthetic kerosene out of sea water onboard aircraft carriers. They aren't too concerned about economics. Their goal is to reduce the amount of jet fuel they have to haul around.
- I have to spend less money on logistics because I don't have to put out fires, I don't have to train people to put out fires, I don't have to hire people, etc. etc.
- Less fuel needed to be held means more working capital needed for energy consumption, less time to fuel up.
- Less fire risk means I have to allocate less money for risk based allocations (insurance, hospitalization for people getting burnt, emergency planning and services required to deal with fires, etc.)
- Less fuel means the cost to create an aircraft carrier is much less
- A smaller fuel tank required means a smaller overall aircraft carrier, which means I spend less
No that's nonsense. The ships will still have all the same fire fighting equipment and they will continue the same damage control training for crews. If this fuel synthesis technology is built into future aircraft carriers then they won't be any smaller or cheaper. The large size is a requirement to maintain high sortie rates and handle rough seas, and reducing the size wouldn't significantly reduce costs (steel is cheap). If anything they will be more expensive due to the complex machinery and increased power generation requirements.
The suggestion that there isn't some powerpoint presentation that the US Navy created (or consultants to them) that says "if we invest $X millions/billions to create smaller fuel jet fuel tanks we won't save money" is total nonsense. That's not how capital intensive government projects work.
Couldn't edit my original but I finally had some time to google this:
> The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is the single-largest consumer of fuel in the world and Jet fuel accounts for 71% of the entire military’s petroleum consumption. Therefore, DoD needs to maintain a strong logistical support to provide jet fuel for its equipment across the world.
That doesn't mean that synthetic is a cost savings measure.
The DOD could be interested in it purely for the tactical and strategic advantage.
For example, it could cost 2X when everything is taken into account, but still be attractive because it provides a type of combat advantage that can not be obtained in any other way. Not everything is fungible.
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
If Norway took their entire sovereign wealth fund from the extraction of oil, and spent it on carbon capture, what percentage of carbon they extracted through their oil industry, could they recover? 0.1% 1% 100% ?
Why should anyone be excited about reusing captured C02 as fuel for gasoline?
The climate crisis is incredibly dire, do not forget. We are rapidly sleepwaliking into a catastrophic 2 degrees C of warming.
EV passenger cars are feasible for the average person today. But without an order of magnitude leap in battery tech, it's never going to be feasible to electrify planes, cargo ships, farm equipment, etc.
Other carbon capture tech doesn't have a useful end product, so the only incentive for it to exist is to offset other carbon emissions in some sort of larger cap and trade or carbon tax scheme. So it would be great if this also drives down the price of carbon capture in general.
> EV passenger cars are feasible for the average person today.
Where? California? The world's bigger than the US and Europe and massive EV adoption in the developing world isn't a thing. EV are still a expensive luxury in most countries.
Thin articles touching on the technology: https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/meet-our-v3-faraday-... https://prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/worlds-1st-machine-t...
Hopefully someone can chime in with an explanation of why the technology is viable now (and not in the past) or why Prometheus is equipped to execute on this vision.