<story><title>A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/in-silicon-valley-the-quest-to-make-gasoline-out-of-thin-air?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hasz</author><text>Soooooo many questions.&lt;p&gt;Gasoline is a distillate made up of several hydrocarbons -- is he synthesizing all of them, or just octane? What about additives, like anti-knock agents? Plans for diesel?&lt;p&gt;No amount of fancy CNTs gets around thermodynamics. CO2 and H20 are far more stable, thermodynamically, than octane, it&amp;#x27;s partially why octane is a good fuel. Where does the extra energy come from? What is the efficiency of the conversion? What kind of thoroughput are we talking about?&lt;p&gt;How scalable - is the CNT manufacturing mature enough to support large scale rollout?&lt;p&gt;Who is on his team? Research chemists, or experienced chem Es, both hopefully?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure he knows these answers (man has a PhD is chem), would have loved to sit through that pitch.&lt;p&gt;The Bloomberg piece is very light on details; the secrecy is frustrating but understandable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rmcginnis</author><text>Hi, this is Rob, founder of Prometheus. The conversion of CO2 and water to gasoline is not a super efficient process, likely 50-60% at best in the near term, but that&amp;#x27;s ok, if the electricity is from a zero carbon source like solar or wind, and the cost of the electricity is low (which these days it is).&lt;p&gt;The CNT membranes are being made at full commercial scale now by my previous startup, Mattershift. Ready to go!&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve got scientists and engineers from national labs and previous efforts like Project Foghorn at Google. Hope to share some new hires soon.&lt;p&gt;There was a podcast that was associated with the article, that runs 21 minutes and goes into more details: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;megaphone.link&amp;#x2F;BLM3585271197&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;megaphone.link&amp;#x2F;BLM3585271197&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>A Quest to Make Gasoline Out of Thin Air: Prometheus (YC W19)</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/in-silicon-valley-the-quest-to-make-gasoline-out-of-thin-air?</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Hasz</author><text>Soooooo many questions.&lt;p&gt;Gasoline is a distillate made up of several hydrocarbons -- is he synthesizing all of them, or just octane? What about additives, like anti-knock agents? Plans for diesel?&lt;p&gt;No amount of fancy CNTs gets around thermodynamics. CO2 and H20 are far more stable, thermodynamically, than octane, it&amp;#x27;s partially why octane is a good fuel. Where does the extra energy come from? What is the efficiency of the conversion? What kind of thoroughput are we talking about?&lt;p&gt;How scalable - is the CNT manufacturing mature enough to support large scale rollout?&lt;p&gt;Who is on his team? Research chemists, or experienced chem Es, both hopefully?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m sure he knows these answers (man has a PhD is chem), would have loved to sit through that pitch.&lt;p&gt;The Bloomberg piece is very light on details; the secrecy is frustrating but understandable.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ThrustVectoring</author><text>&amp;gt;Where does the extra energy come from?&lt;p&gt;It doesn&amp;#x27;t particularly matter. Centralized clean energy production is often significantly easier to solve than figuring out clean alternatives to gasoline use. Especially when the problem with clean alternatives to gasoline is political - it&amp;#x27;s hard for the US to ban ICE engines in China, but it&amp;#x27;s significantly easier to sell them carbon-neutral gasoline.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;What is the efficiency of the conversion?&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking it&amp;#x27;s pretty atrocious. I don&amp;#x27;t remember exact numbers the last time I looked into things, but the sense I got is that it&amp;#x27;s roughly an order of magnitude away from economic viability at current prices.&lt;p&gt;Also, a significant switch to carbon-neutral fuel would be a significant bump up in electricity and energy consumption. So it&amp;#x27;s not a cure-all, we&amp;#x27;d still need a massive investment in low-carbon energy production.</text></comment>