Our Finished Commercial Scale Stack Design Unlocks Lowest Cost Fuel
Our commercial-scale cell and stack design is complete. Why does this matter? Because it unlocks the only carbon neutral gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel that can beat fossil fuels on price. And when the war at the pump between e-fuels and fossil fuels begins, it’s going to come down to cost.
For anyone tracking the evolving narrative on e-fuels and whether they could ever displace fossil fuels, you know that the biggest knock on e-fuels is their price — 3-4x that of a gallon of “dino-juice.”
Why so expensive? Because most e-fuel makers are using tech that’s 50 to 100 years old to make their fuels — Fischer-Tropsch, methanol-to-gas — tech that costs a lot and uses a ton of energy. The only plan to bring the cost of these e-fuels down from the stratosphere relies on generous, permanent subsidies.
At Prometheus, our plan to fight the price battle with fossil has been different from day one. We don’t think you can win with a subsidy-based business model. We think the answer is new, better tech. So we’ve developed a new pathway to make e-fuels — one that gets us to the lowest cost of production through tech innovation. And just to be clear, by “lowest cost of production,” we mean a gallon of Prometheus fuel will cost the same as or less than a gallon of fossil fuel, before any subsidies come into play.
How low is low?
Last year, a techno-economic analysis done by a third-party engineering firm confirmed that our tech had succeeded. With cheap enough solar, we could achieve the holy grail for e-fuels — a gallon that costs less than $3.00.
That was our cue. We started optimizing our commercial-scale prototypes, setting ourselves up to scale like gangbusters. This summer, we focused on our Faraday Reactor, locking in its commercial-scale cell and stack design.
What’s a Faraday Reactor? Let’s review.
The Faraday Reactor is the heart of our Titan Fuel Forge. It’s a machine made of stackable cells, with each cell consisting of an anode, a separator, and a cathode. When you pump CO2 and water captured from the air and run an electrical current through the Reactor, the electricity first compels the CO2 and water molecules to break apart, and then to recombine into oxygen on the anode and hydrocarbons — a.k.a., liquid fuels — on the cathode.
The Faraday Reactor is the world’s first hydrocarbon electrolyzer. It’s the world’s only machine that can turn atmospheric CO2 into fuel at low temperatures and low pressure, which means fuel from the air at a rock-bottom price. And like every part of our process, it’s designed to run entirely off of renewable electricity, such as solar and wind, which means the liquid fuels coming out of it are 100% carbon neutral.
“A new machine that makes fuel from the air in a new way, that’s great,” you say, “but how does it get us to that affordable gallon of carbon neutral fuel?” Well, if you look at how it stacks up against Fischer-Tropsch, the expensive, energy-intense, century-old tech on which so many other e-fuel producers have built their fuel-making pathways, here are six good reasons. With our Faraday Reactor, there is:
- no separate H2 electrolysis
- no turning captured CO2 into a pure gas
- no compressing CO2 and H2 to high pressures
- no turning CO2 into CO
- no high-temp, high-pressure conversion of syngas to syncrude
- no cracking of syncrude waxes
In other words, the Faraday Reactor is a big part of why our tech is a radically simpler and cost-effective pathway to make fuel from the air.
But it’s also the most expensive component in our Forge. And as our CEO Rob McGinnis wrote earlier this year, driving down the cost of the Faraday Reactor is the single most effective way to drive down the cost of our Forges, and therefore, the cost of our fuel.
So we took the time to streamline it. We spent the summer methodically iterating on a single cell — that’s a single layer of anode, separator, and cathode. We know this irritated those who yearn to see fuel gushing from our prototype Forge, because a single cell only yields analytical amounts of fuel — i.e., tiny samples whose composition only looks sexy in gas chromatograph read-outs.
What can we say but that’s the tough reality of true tech innovation. It takes time. It’s not glamorous. But the payoffs are huge. The reward for our stubborn perseverance? We now have a commercial-scale cell and stack design optimized for high efficiency and dirt-cheap production. Which means we’re on our way to making quality, carbon neutral fuel that can win the coming showdown with fossil fuel at the pump — whether the subsidies are flowing freely, or not.
Now we start packing on the cells — and yeah, that means our prototype Forge will be making bigger quantities of fuel. Right now we’re up to five cells. Stay tuned.
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