[HN Gopher] Prometheus: Fuel from the Air
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Prometheus: Fuel from the Air
Author : swamp40
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-08-16 19:15 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prometheusfuels.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (prometheusfuels.com)
| ajsharp wrote:
| The visualization of the co2 extraction process is incredible.
| Kudos to whoever built this. Incredible.
| more_corn wrote:
| One of the best websites I've seen in years. Hopefully the tech
| measures up.
| gizajob wrote:
| Fuel from the air, website from the era of Flash.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| At least it is breaking the design monoculture, i.e. 99% of the
| violet iconed tailwinded SaaS cookie cutters with text set at
| #CCCCCC that's impossible to read and have zero personality. No
| one dares to be different anymore.
| mattnewton wrote:
| This is also nearly impossible for me to read on my iPhone
| 13, I somehow broke the site by scrolling while it was
| loading and now it won't let me browse the page. Reloading it
| fixes for a bit but it runs like a sick dog.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| The point is that it is nearly impossible, but in a
| different and original way. We're making progress, alright
| :-).
| sudobash1 wrote:
| I am not a fan of the site either, but apparently some people
| are: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/prometheus-site-of-
| the-...
| gizajob wrote:
| I'd have to go through the whole rigmarole again to read
| that.
| andwaal wrote:
| Love it! Reminds me of a time where every movie, game, band
| etc. had amazing creative websites like this, often filled with
| custom games, wallpapers and other cool stuff for a ten year
| old discovering the World Wide Web for the first time. One
| example of this that gets mentioned every time are
| https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
| bee_rider wrote:
| It was fun but it did make my laptop fan start.
| gizajob wrote:
| But this doesn't assume ten seconds of my time to load a
| headache
| throwntoday wrote:
| It's completely broken on my iPhone. Can't scroll, can't click
| on anything.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Their competitors' website comes from the gopher era.
|
| https://terraformindustries.com/
| scythmic_waves wrote:
| > Why does our website look like this? At TI we believe we
| can change the world by displacing fossil hydrocarbon
| production at global scale. Like our website, our machines
| are simple so we can build millions of them as quickly as
| possible. Our website embodies our cultural commitment to
| allocating resources where they solve the most important
| problems.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| The website is unusable from an iPad with a Magic Keyboard. It
| straight up _ignores_ platform scroll and demands that you use
| the touchscreen because they didn 't expect touch devices to
| have a scroll wheel.
| margalabargala wrote:
| It's all part of their plan to be carbon-neutral.
|
| If they just implemented their technology as designed, they
| would be carbon-negative. So they have to cause more carbon to
| be released, in order to get to break-even.
|
| They are crowd-sourcing increasing their carbon footprint via
| the power requirements to load their website.
| mszmszmsz wrote:
| the website crashes on safari on 2020 iphone se - many times
| throughout.
| swamp40 wrote:
| Better explanation of the process:
| https://www.prometheusfuels.com/news/dude-wheres-my-fuel
| singron wrote:
| It's not entirely dishonest, but it's a huge caveat that their
| process has 2 parts with an intermediate, so comparing just one
| part to other processes doesn't make sense. E.g. in one
| section, they mention that DAC to CO2 is targeted at $100/ton,
| but their process is only $36/ton. However, that's only the
| first half of the process. If you calculate for the whole
| process and assume they can produce a standard gallon of gas
| for $3 and 8.9 Kg CO2/gallon: ($3/gallon) /
| (8.9 Kg/gallon) * (907 Kg/ton) = $306/ton
|
| I.e. their goal is 3x more expensive at capturing CO2 than DAC.
| If you want to sequester carbon (e.g. by filling a cavern with
| this fuel), this is not the technique to use. The only reason
| to pursue this is to use zero carbon electricity to produce
| nearly net-zero carbon fuel.
| u320 wrote:
| > The only reason to pursue this is to use zero carbon
| electricity to produce nearly net-zero carbon fuel.
|
| That's the only thing they market it as
| bit_logic wrote:
| They're focusing on transportation fuel (cars and airplanes), but
| another area of great potential is power generation. The current
| trend is to build solar/wind and replace coal with natural gas
| plants as a stop-gap until some grid-scale energy storage is
| ready. Everyone assumes that energy storage will be batteries.
|
| But what if the natural gas plants don't have to be a stop gap?
| Just keep building more and more solar/wind, as much as the land
| can handle (imagine most of the desert in California converted to
| solar). Who cares if generation greatly exceeds daily demand. Use
| all the excess solar/wind to create fuel for the natural gas
| plants. There's already a vast infrastructure and experienced
| workforce to do this. Use the fuel during the evening and put any
| excess fuel into storage, there's so much existing ways to store
| fuel. Then use that during winter when solar generation
| decreases.
|
| We need to stop thinking carbon fuel = fossil fuel and so carbon
| fuel = bad. Carbon fuel is simply a form of energy storage, a
| kind of "battery".
| ReadTheLicense wrote:
| Yes! The same way, using CNG or bio-diesel (for example wood or
| algae-derived) in plug-in hybrid vehicles with smaller
| batteries (50 km) would be much more ecological than large
| battery vehicles.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Would they be more efficient? Burning gas is horribly
| inefficient and has engines have weight as well.
| ReadTheLicense wrote:
| The conversion might not be as efficient but all cars
| having a 350km battery for the rare occasion when they
| leave the city 2-3 times a month seems like a bigger waste.
| They would normally use the 50km battery and the lesser
| efficiency would kick in only during long distance trips.
| Modern range extenders can be pretty lightweight... It
| could even be modular/take-out in your frunk.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| > imagine most of the desert in California converted to solar
|
| I would start making a regulation that says all parking-lots
| MUST have a light-weight roof on top of them on top of which
| are solar panels.
|
| Imagine all (outside) parking lots having solar-panel covered
| roofs.
|
| This would be easy to enforce in regulatory terms, which
| regulating all of deserts is not. You want to have a parking
| lot? You must have solar panels as well. And it could double as
| a charging station.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I think you'd crush any brick-and-mortar business smaller
| than Walmart like that.
| MH15 wrote:
| They've got smaller parking lots.
| nagisa wrote:
| My intuition would be that it is overall cheaper in the long
| run to produce green hydrogen and build new or adapt existing
| plants so that they can consume hydrogen. Just a few percentage
| points in efficiency of the fuel generation would entirely
| negate any capital cost savings of reusing the old plants.
| dvirsky wrote:
| > Use all the excess solar/wind to create fuel for the natural
| gas plants
|
| I don't know what the efficiency of the process described in
| TFA, but from Wikipedia I see that
| Electricity->Gas->Electricity has an efficiency of 30-40%.
| There are other alternatives like pumped hydro stations that
| are way more efficient.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| > Just keep building more and more solar/wind, as much as the
| land can handle (imagine most of the desert in California
| converted to solar).
|
| This is called a dystopia.
| immmmmm wrote:
| I wish that the 3 law of thermodynamics laws were more commonly
| taught... because here you are battling the 2nd and the 1st.
|
| A calculation by Jean Marc Jancovici showed that for a small
| airport (GVA in this case) you'd need half a dozen nuclear
| reactors just to produce the fuel for departing flights. That's
| obviously assuming this kind of technology is functioning and has
| 100% yield.
|
| I'm not saying that these technologies are not to be pursued, but
| thinking that we (the rich) can keep flying as much as now due to
| a miracle technology is unsupported by Science, to say the least.
|
| ps: i did 2 postdocs in material science trying to improve
| various industrial/energy technologies. there's no miracle.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Or as their competitor puts it, we're going to need a lot of
| solar panels.
|
| https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2022/07/24/were-go...
| immmmmm wrote:
| a few dozen of km2 according to my napkin calculation. for
| one minuscule airport.
| vagabund wrote:
| The proliferation of solar farms is well underway and not
| abating with or without e-fuels, this just gives greater
| optionality to the energy they output and helps with
| intermittency. The land-use footprint of their tech as such
| is 100,000 gallons of car fuel per year per 'forge', each
| of which fits on a flatbed truck, plus a slated 5
| manufacturing facilities to make the forges. That doesn't
| seem too bad.
|
| On the land-use of the solar panels themselves, I wonder if
| at some point in the future it might be possible to beam a
| directed laser to earth from space-based solar arrays, so
| the earth-based footprint is reduced.
| steve76 wrote:
| kaibee wrote:
| Solar is cheaper than nuclear and still getting cheaper, so
| looking at what you'd need in terms of nuclear reactors is
| likely to be misleading.
| defterGoose wrote:
| I don't even want to think about how much surface area you'd
| need for solar panels intended to replace 6 megawatt-scale
| nuclear reactors, but I'm guessing football fields is the
| wrong unit to use...
|
| Last time I checked, land wasn't cheap and they weren't
| making any more of it.
| immmmmm wrote:
| yeah and there's crop failure coming decades in advance
| compared to IPCC's predictions, so better not using crop
| space.
| usrusr wrote:
| Regarding land use, just yesterday I was pondering about
| what technology it would take to create survivable off
| shore solar. Some loose grid of floating collectors happily
| bouncing on the waves like a flock of resting seabirds,
| perhaps cleverly reeling in and out link and anchor lines
| to match the geometry of the waves? Or _just_ the right
| amount of springyness, dynamically tuned to the wave
| situation?
|
| Then it occurred to me that even nature hasn't really
| solved ocean surface plants, what could be a more clear
| indicator that it's a really hard problem...
| Kon5ole wrote:
| The correct unit to use is parking lots. If you base this
| unit on the current area used for parking in the USA, you
| can even use centi-parkinglots ;-)
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Land isn't cheap, but there's a lot of land that can have a
| solar panel on top of it without causing problems. A good
| place to start is every building roof.
| incrudible wrote:
| > I don't even want to think about...
|
| I'd call that an argument from laziness.
|
| > Last time I checked, land wasn't cheap and they weren't
| making any more of it.
|
| Land that is remote, not fertile and that doesn't harbor
| any natural resources is actually rather cheap. Moreover,
| "they" _are_ making more land in certain coastal areas
| where land is expensive.
| nine_k wrote:
| What area would it take to produce several GW that a few
| reactors would produce?
|
| In clear weather, a surface perpendicular to the sunlight
| gets about 1 kW / m2. So 1 GW would take a square kilometer.
| If our solar cells are top-notch 25% efficient cells, 1 GW
| will take 4 km2 at best weather. And we need many multiples
| of that.
|
| Verily, Sahara must be the best place for such an oil
| factory. Maybe some of the US Midwest and West, with many
| sunny days. And, unlike the cute pictures on the side, they
| will need to be massive, all the way to the horizon.
|
| Maybe with a few nuclear plants thrown in if we learn to
| build them efficiently again.
| immmmmm wrote:
| let's assume we can scale renewables+nuclear fast enough so
| that our civilisation is not damaged too much by climate
| change.
|
| let's also assume we stabilised biodiversity and avoided a
| mass extinction.
|
| should we continue to produce massive amounts of energy so
| that some can commute by plane daily and others can stream
| cute kitten video in 8k?
| usrusr wrote:
| If all that were true, I'd say definitely, we earned it.
| Make it a 80k kitten!
| nine_k wrote:
| If we can continue producing them in a renewable or at
| least sustainable way, why not?
|
| If the only way to keep that up is burning oil, then no.
|
| Please also note that some of the most intense producers
| of CO2 are poor(er) countries which burn coal because
| it's cheap. Even natural gas can be too expensive for
| them, let alone solar or wind installations.
|
| I wonder when the West would consider buying and
| converting such plants. It's likely feasible in Africa,
| hardly so in China.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > What area would it take to produce several GW that a few
| reactors would produce?
|
| Out of curiosity, I tried some napkin math on this. If
| Nevada went whole hog, used say, 1% of their total land for
| solar, they could produce almost half the electrical needs
| of the US, if I haven't mucked up the math too much.
|
| Sounds plausible, but 1% of Nevada's land for solar would
| indeed be 'all the way to the horizon' in many places.
| dools wrote:
| I don't think the goal is to keep flying as much, but to be
| able to fly at all.
|
| Also electrifying entire trucking and car fleets will take
| decades.
|
| This provides a means of producing an incredibly densely stored
| source of energy from abundant inputs, that is the same price
| as oil.
|
| It can solve for the problem of net zero production and
| transportation of equipment used in renewable energy
| production, for example, using present day transportation
| technology.
|
| There are no silver bullets, but all of these innovations add
| together in order to create a combined solution to the worlds
| energy problems.
| janef0421 wrote:
| Why is commercial aviation as a form of transport a useful
| goal? There are alternatives that have realistic energy
| efficiencies and use available technologies, like rail and
| nuclear shipping.
| immmmmm wrote:
| yes! rail is amazing in term of efficiency, a common high
| speed train has around a credit card worth of contact area
| with the rail for the whole train! it's also quite relaxing
| and socially interesting.
|
| the problem is that rail is "boring" and rarely get
| sufficient funding.
| immmmmm wrote:
| > There are no silver bullets, but all of these innovations
| add together in order to create a combined solution to the
| worlds energy problems.
|
| i worked all my professional carrer in science and
| innovation, if you have a reference for that statement i'd be
| glad you share it. maybe i missed something.
| drpyser22 wrote:
| Do you mean that there is a silver bullet,or that
| innovations don't add together to provide solutions?
| immmmmm wrote:
| there's none. and (unfortunately for me) the best
| solutions often involve less technology rather than more.
| bartimus wrote:
| I think the goal should be to be able to fly as much and
| more.
| paul wrote:
| Show your math. Unless those nukes are very small, your claim
| seems way off.
| Sevii wrote:
| Would be amazing if we could cover baseload power with
| nuclear/hydro and then use zero marginal grid cost solar for fuel
| synthesis.
| schainks wrote:
| I do like where this is going! Grid demand fluctuates during
| the day by quite a bit. You have to have "peaker" generation
| above base load to efficiently utilize your grid and respond to
| dynamic conditions (especially things like equipment failures).
|
| Heavy investment in nuclear could create a grid with such cheap
| energy we can use all the excess capacity for fuel synthesis
| along with renewables.
| beautifulfreak wrote:
| The founder announced the launch of Prometheus (May 2019) on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19842240
| lallysingh wrote:
| FTA: The most important cost after electricity
| is equipment cost, typically called capital cost. Adding
| up the electricity and CO2 costs, we get $1.86/gallon. If
| we want to stay below $3.00/gallon (for example), then we
| need to keep the capital and maintenance costs less than
| $1.14/gallon. Our cost models tell us that we can have
| capital and maintenance costs that are significantly lower than
| that
|
| The fonts are gigantic on my desktop monitor.
| doitLP wrote:
| Aren't all of these net zero or worse when accounting for
| construction and lifespan?
|
| Or is the fact of using renewables to power going to hopefully
| net positive over a long enough time scale?
| warmwaffles wrote:
| My father pointed out to me that it's a form of battery. In the
| end we are still consuming energy to make the battery and will
| burn that fuel at a later time. You could take excess power
| created by solar or wind and create fuel and store it to burn
| later when demand goes beyond what the panels can produce
| during the night.
| swamp40 wrote:
| The fuel is also transportable...
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| There will likely always be a need for hydrocarbon fuels until
| there are order of magnitude improvements in battery energy
| density, or we decide small nuclear reactors are acceptable for
| things like cargo ships and aviation.
|
| Plus, having much better carbon capture tech means just simply
| removing CO2 for some sort of inert long term storage is
| cheaper.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Using renewables must be the plan, to make this sort of thing
| environmentally beneficial.
|
| They could even run it when electrical demand is low (sucking
| up extra watts and essentially subsidizing renewable over-
| building) and then maybe even use their output to fuel a power
| station, to help shave demand peaks. So, acting like an energy
| storage device. Of course there are plenty of other ideas in
| the energy storage device space, and probably most of them are
| more efficient, but they don't produce legacy car fuel.
| lallysingh wrote:
| It's a lot less net than regular gasoline.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| There are a lot of situations where direct electrical storage
| is unfeasible and chemical fuels will still be necessary. From
| a carbon perspective this switches us from unearthing old
| carbon out of the ground towards recycling it.
|
| Governments could also pay to have carbon pumped out of the air
| and buried back into the ground as reconstituted liquid fuel.
| Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote:
| In theory you could take some percentage of hydrocarbon
| production and store it to reach zero.
| phtrivier wrote:
| I'm tented to trademark "Breevr : Air out of thin Air".
|
| Anyone with a couple billion dollars laying around ?
| schainks wrote:
| If you're literally blowing CO2 into water to get the process
| started, where's the threshold between doing this with air and
| just extracting acidic seawater or wastewater from somewhere?
| supernova87a wrote:
| I am intrigued by the idea but find the details hidden in the
| Faraday reactor and separation nanotube membrane to be hard to
| sanity check / the most important factor that is not well
| understood. (or at least, I don't understand it / have not read
| enough)
|
| What's the magical material in the Faraday reactor that can
| somehow combine CO2 + water to form hexanol? I've never heard of
| such a process occurring (again, probably my ignorance). And then
| similar question for the separation filter?
|
| If I had to guess an analogy, it strikes me as similar to mining
| and then recovering + refining miniscule fractions of uranium
| isotopes at a similar energy cost. And when you require that much
| energy/cost to get some small amount of material, it had better
| be very valuable, and not something you just burn at $3/gallon.
|
| But I am glad to be educated on how this is breaking that
| analogy.
| stevespang wrote:
| crazypython wrote:
| Definitely worth getting excited about, though it seems the
| current cost of fuel production as of Aug 8 including crude oil
| cost is $3.40/gal minus taxes and distribution.[0] Prometheus
| will likely cost less to distribute, since it doesn't need to be
| shipped across seas, funneled through pipelines, and between
| refineries, it can be produced next to solar or wind generation.
|
| For reference, Prometheus costs $1.86/gal to operate and they are
| aiming to reduce the cost of the machine so it can be produced
| including capex at $3.00/gal.
|
| [0]: https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-
| almanac/transp...
| jensenbox wrote:
| I would love for someone to provide me additional details on
| exactly what a "Faraday Reactor" is.
| jensenbox wrote:
| Why does their logo remind me of Peloton?
| mikkergp wrote:
| P's man, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Neat site! Reminds me of something showcased on Awwwards/CSSDA.
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