This $1.5 billion startup promised to deliver clean fuels as cheap as gas. Experts are deeply skeptical.
The approach
The approach breaks down into 4 principal phases, in accordance to Prometheus’s investor components.
In phase one particular, industrial followers draw in air and blow it as a result of a mix of water and other compounds, which McGinnis says could involve sodium carbonate. That then readily reacts with carbon dioxide molecules in the air, shifting much of the carbonate to bicarbonate.
The ensuing option then moves into a battery-like mobile with a membrane in the center and electrodes on either end, which makes use of electrical power to spark a collection of chemical reactions that develop sophisticated alcohols. It is equipped with a catalyst primarily based on technology certified from Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory. In an earlier description, that lab claimed it experienced designed a catalyst created from little carbon spikes embedded with copper nanoparticles. When a voltage was applied, it converted carbon dioxide dissolved in drinking water into ethanol “with a produce of 63%.”
Prometheus’s carbon nanotube membranes appear into engage in in phase three, separating the alcohols from the drinking water.
And in a remaining move, distinctive catalysts are applied to incorporate the alcohols and change them into synthetic gasoline, diesel, or jet gas. In 2020, Prometheus accredited separate engineering from the Oak Ridge lab that can be utilised to create jet gas from ethanol, by way of a multistep system that relies on a novel even though unspecified catalyst.
The general process is significantly different from the 1 other companies converting captured carbon into fuels are getting. As McGinnis stated in a Joule commentary, the Prometheus techniques can run beneath typical atmospheric tension and at area temperature. The technological innovation also avoids the warmth power necessary to produce concentrated carbon dioxide as very well as the capital expenses of an electrolyzer dedicated to creating hydrogen. Instead, the business statements, it can synthesize alcohols straight from carbon dioxide dissolved in h2o, and then transform all those into standard fuels.
If they’ve without a doubt figured out how to do this, it “could direct to considerable electricity and charge price savings,” claims Evan David Sherwin, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford who made the Environmental Science & Know-how study.
Just one of the final slides in the trader components reveals a Prometheus-branded fuel station, with a pink neon “Zero Net Carbon” indication promoting gasoline charges of $3.50 a gallon and diesel at $3.75, well underneath recent ordinary US price ranges.