This $1.5 billion startup promised to deliver clean fuels as cheap as gas. Experts are deeply skeptical.

The system

The process breaks down into four principal levels, according to Prometheus’s trader supplies. 

In phase a single, industrial admirers attract in air and blow it through a combine of water and other compounds, which McGinnis claims could include sodium carbonate. That then easily reacts with carbon dioxide molecules in the air, shifting a great deal of the carbonate to bicarbonate.

The ensuing remedy then moves into a battery-like mobile with a membrane in the middle and electrodes on both close, which employs electrical power to spark a series of chemical reactions that make elaborate alcohols. It is outfitted with a catalyst based on technological innovation certified from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In an previously description, that lab stated it had made a catalyst built from tiny carbon spikes embedded with copper nanoparticles. When a voltage was utilized, it converted carbon dioxide dissolved in drinking water into ethanol “with a generate of 63%.”

Prometheus’s carbon nanotube membranes come into play in move 3, separating the alcohols from the h2o. 

And in a final phase, distinctive catalysts are applied to merge the alcohols and transform them into artificial gasoline, diesel, or jet gas. In 2020, Prometheus certified separate technologies from the Oak Ridge lab that can be employed to create jet fuel from ethanol, via a multistep method that depends on a novel although unspecified catalyst. 

The in general procedure is substantially different from the a single other organizations converting captured carbon into fuels are taking. As McGinnis explained in a Joule commentary, the Prometheus techniques can function below normal atmospheric pressure and at home temperature. The technological know-how also avoids the warmth vitality essential to create concentrated carbon dioxide as nicely as the cash expenses of an electrolyzer committed to developing hydrogen. Instead, the company claims, it can synthesize alcohols straight from carbon dioxide dissolved in drinking water, and then transform individuals into conventional fuels.

If they’ve indeed figured out how to do this, it “could direct to sizeable electrical power and price financial savings,” says Evan David Sherwin, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford who manufactured the Environmental Science & Technological innovation review.

A person of the very last slides in the investor products shows a Prometheus-branded gasoline station, with a red neon “Zero Net Carbon” sign advertising gasoline selling prices of $3.50 a gallon and diesel at $3.75, well below latest ordinary US prices.