Prometheus Fuels: Our First Product

(Prometheus Fuels) We’re proud to announce our first product — a 99.9% pure, carbon neutral methanol fuel that is molecularly identical to fossil methanol, but made from air. Orders for our first million tons of the fuel are sold out.

What do we mean by “molecularly identical”? Here’s an FTIR analysis that compares Prometheus methanol to fossil methanol.

FTIR, or Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, is a common lab test to identify fuels. It shines a beam of infrared light through the fuel sample to measure how much light gets absorbed at different frequencies. Then it matches the absorption pattern to patterns of known substances.

In the chart above, Sigma — a laboratory standard for fossil methanol — is the black line. Our methanol is the red line that you almost can’t see given how closely it matches the fossil methanol fingerprint.

What you’re seeing are two kinds of the same fuel made from CO2. It’s just that one was made from CO2 extracted from the ground while ours was made from CO2 captured from air.

The answer in a word: versatility. Methanol can be turned into everything from plastics to electricity to really any other kind of fuel. It’s liquid at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, making it easy to store and transport. It’s also a known commodity with an established market and global logistics network. Make it carbon neutral as we do and now you’ve unlocked:

> a drop-in gasoline that zeros out carbon emissions from ICE cars and meets regulatory standards for immediate use

But methanol’s killer app may be methanol-to-power. You’ve no doubt seen the hockey stick graphs that show how explosive electricity demand is projected to be over the next five to ten years. Manufacturing, data centers, electrification, crypto exchanges. All are forcing a market whose growth was nearly flat for two decades to suddenly make big quantities of new electrons at hypersonic speed.

And then there’s AI. Historically, armies fighting ground battles were limited by their supplies of food and ammunition. The developers competing to deploy AI in the global “arms race” are constrained by their supply of electrons. Compute uses a breathtaking amount of power. Divining just how much electricity AI data centers will need in the near future has become a wild game of speculation. Estimates range from approx. 30 GW to 325 GW by 2030.

So how does one pull a few dozen new gigawatts of electricity or possibly ten times that amount out of a hat at the speed and scale needed to meet this demand?

The world’s electric grids aren’t up to it. Even if they had the cash to upgrade their infrastructure — a cool $720 billion by Goldman Sachs’ estimate — grids would need to overhaul a permitting process that currently stalls new power connection requests in a queue whose average wait time is five years.

Fission and fusion are too slow. Geothermal, too landlocked. And we all know the rap on renewables plus batteries — peak availability when demand is lowest, intermittency, and the inability to store for more than a few hours.

Turn the world’s cheapest, cleanest, most plentiful source of energy — electrons from off-grid solar — into a carbon neutral methanol e-fuel that can be transported anywhere in the world and turned back into electrons at any time.

1. a once-in-a-century innovative technology for turning the electrical energy of solar into the chemical energy of liquid fuel that is capable of operating 100% off-grid and behind-the-meter so as to collect electrons from the cheapest solar locations on the planet. Read about what makes our tech a once-in-a-century innovation here.

2. the aforementioned global logistics network of trucks, rail, pipelines, planes, ships, etc. to carry said electrons preserved as fuel to be used far and wide or stored indefinitely.

Our solution yields exactly what hyperscalers seek — 24/7, steady, independent, clean, quality power that lets them grow as big and as fast as they want without increasing their carbon emissions.

It also happens to be a silver bullet for long distance and duration energy storage.

But this approach only works if the cost of the methanol fuel is low. Why? Because businesses can’t afford to lose their competitive edge in the market and drivers can’t afford to pay more at the pump — something we at Prometheus have understood and designed our tech platform to achieve from the start.

How low? The price to match or beat is that of fossil methanol at $1.81 per gallon or $600 per ton. Our price to produce? Less than $1.50 per gallon or $500 per ton*. Which means not only can we make the world’s lowest-cost methanol that’s carbon neutral. We can compete with fossil methanol to make the world’s lowest cost methanol, period.

As evidence of our methanol’s appeal, we’re also proud to announce that our first commercial project, to make 100,000 tons of the fuel per year, is sold out for the next decade. We’ll reveal our customers soon.

Oh yeah, one more reason we chose methanol. It makes a pretty fantastic racing fuel. Stay tuned. READ MORE