Will eFuels save combustion engine motorcycles? Rob McGinnis answers.

-As an Earth scientist and semi-vintage motorcycle owner, I'm fascinated by what the future of transportation holds. What are we going to do with the planes? They don't become electrified very easily. What are we going to do with the tractors and trucks, the cars and scooters installed for the poor, billions of them around the world? I had the opportunity to interview a respected scientist working on this problem, Rob McGinnis. Who is now also the founder of a pretty popular company. Prometheus Fuels, which has a huge market cap. Its larger-than-life mission sounds a bit like science fiction: extract CO2 from the atmosphere, combine it with solar and wind electricity, and produce carbon-neutral gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. - As a government, if you have committed to ban the sale of internal

combustion

engine

s, based on the fact that they are net polluters, and then someone comes along with a technology and says, we can make this liquid that you could put in a car .

And, in fact, net zero carbon emissions. - We can prove that it is cleaner than making an electric car, you probably need to reanalyze the decision you have made. -I have to admit I'm a little skeptical about e-fuels, but I read some of Rob's papers, I read one of his patents, I heard some of his talks and I thought, "Oh man, this guy is real." . So maybe, just maybe the cost of solar power has dropped enough and the technology has developed enough that Rob has a real shot at making it. Let's interview him and see what you think. - Nice to meet you. - Yes, thanks for joining.

Congratulations on your funding round. That's a great assessment you have there. - Thank you, yes, we are the first unicorn in space. Electric fuels. - Yes Yes. - Incredible, then. - Thank you. - Have you ever wanted to take on a big mission in your life, and I suppose so, a difficult mission? You got it. - Yes, this is a big mouthful, definitely not for the faint-hearted. We are not in favor of half measures. This is like a really big effort. - Yes. - And goal. No doubt. - Can you talk to us about why it is so important, why it matters so much? - There are several reasons why it is important.

I think one reason, obviously, is that fossil fuels are destroying our environment, right? They are not good for people who are near refineries or processing facilities, they are not good for people who are near the exhaust gases of the vehicles that consume them, and they are not good for the climate. All the things that are happening, the floods and the droughts. These are things that are driven by fossil oil and gas. Therefore, solving that problem is the company's mission. It is about replacing fossil fuels as quickly as possible. The second answer to that question is that we cannot do it in a way that causes us to have an energy crisis or cause us to give up the things that, culturally, we value most.

Things like classic cars,

motorcycles

, boats or flying and traveling, right? The fact that we've been able to use energy and use so much energy is the reason we've been able to be so prosperous, right? If we compare how we were 150 years ago, with the advent of the oil era, walking with horses, of course, they did not live great lives. And what we could do was quite limited. And now we can do tremendous things, and we want to continue doing it, but doing it in a way that is decoupled from environmental damage. So I think people have come to associate the use of energy through fuels, like jet fuel or gasoline, as something to do with destruction or bad things for the environment.

And they don't have to be, they just have been. So what we want to do as part of our mission is to decouple those two things, to increase our ability to use energy, and this

will

come from the sun, primarily. But also the wind, which in a way derives from the sun. So taking abundant, cheap solar energy and then converting it into something we can use in all of our cars, boats, planes, and

motorcycles

is an incredibly useful thing. And thus, it solves both problems. Both the environmental problem and the problem of how we are going to continue to be prosperous and deploy energy at scale. - So, describe how it works.

There is a lot of carbon dioxide, too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So you're eliminating that, I'll let you continue. It seems like there are a number of critical steps there. - Yeah, I mean, one way to think about it, and we actually launched this perspective, this new description, to try to make our technology, which can be a little complicated, you know, for people who are not. t chemical

engine

ers. We're trying to make it make more sense and be as informative and authentic as possible, but also make it much easier to digest. And I think the best way to do it is to think of it as like an engine running in reverse, right?

This is like reverse

combustion

. So if you want to run an engine, you take in air, right? You take oxygen from the air, you take fuel and then you put them in a chamber where they are compressed and then they burn and then the CO2 water vapor is expelled and you get energy. (The engine roars) And we go in the opposite direction. This is how we get to CO2 and water vapor in the air. We take energy from the sun and then put it into an electrical chemical, recharging where we convert the electrical energy back into chemical energy.

And then we go through a final step where we convert it into the hydrocarbons we want. So, exactly the same type of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, but made from CO2 from the air instead of from CO2 or carbon from the soil. And so when you burn the fuel, the CO2 just comes back in a circle and you're not actually adding any CO2 to the atmosphere. - So, it seems that there are three rather difficult steps. One, I suppose, is CO2 sequestration. It seems like that's probably the best developed step. And then you have... Yes, it's actually very well known.

Sorry, continue. - Yes, and then you have a hydrolysis to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen, because you want to add hydrogen to the sequestered CO2. - Let me address that. So it's close, but the first thing we do is capture CO2 in the water, which is really easy to do, right? The oceans do it all the time. If you put a glass of water on the counter, you

will

absorb CO2 from the air. We control the pH of that water, so we can do it faster with a smaller footprint, but you would need to have a lot of surface area.

So these are like cooling tower type structures where you blow air through the water and the CO2 absorbs and forms bicarbonate. And this is the oldest and best known way to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. I think most people have gone astray in trying to capture carbon from the atmosphere when they try to convert it into pure CO2 gas. And that could be due to several reasons. Maybe they want to feed it in a greenhouse or put it in a drink, or maybe they want to put it in the ground, or something like that. But getting it out of the water again, as pure CO2 gas, is where almost all the energy and cost is.

So we don't do that. We do not produce pure CO2 gas. We don't sell it or bury it. We use it like baking soda in water. And so when we get into our electrochemical system, which looks like a hydrogen system, it looks like a water splitter, and it splits the water, but also, at the same time, we call it, it reduces. . In other words, it adds electricity to carbon. And so in room temperature water in this electrolyzer, we have cathode and anode layers, right? And on the cathode side, what's happening is we're splitting water and reducing carbon and forming hydrocarbons at the same time.

So we don't have to produce hydrogen separately, say, or buy hydrogen. In fact, we produce hydrogen as a co-product. And that's pretty valuable in its own right. So every time we produce jet fuel or gasoline, we will also produce green hydrogen. And now those things are in water and they're usually in the form of alcohols, right? Something like a butanol or a hexanol or something like that. So there are a lot of carbons in a chain, hexanol has six carbons, but at the end there will be like a little OH group, a hydroxyl group. And that helps make it soluble in water.

And that's another trick we have: we can get that alcohol out of the water at a very economical price. And we do it in a way that, really, only we do. Most people, if they're trying to get alcohol, one of the most well-known examples of alcohol is ethanol. If you try to get ethanol out of water, you must use a large distillation column. It's about 40 feet tall. If you've ever seen a bioethanol plant, like a biofuels plant, that's what they have. It kind of dominates the aesthetics, right? Three 40-foot-high distillation columns. We don't need that. We have a nanotechnological solution where we have a membrane whose pores are nanotubes.

Made of carbon, carbon nanotubes. People who are kind of enthusiasts, who are not chemical engineers, don't have to follow these fine details. But essentially, what it allows us to do is that the alcohols like the inside of these tubes, and they come out, but the water doesn't like it, and they stay behind. And so, we can get these alcohols out of the water at very low cost. And so we continually capture CO2, feed it with the water from this electrolyzer, and extract the alcohols. So that's happening all the time. And that's the first part of reverse combustion.

In theory, you could use alcohols as fuel, right? If you had a flex fuel vehicle, it would certainly run on it, but we want to give people jet fuel, gasoline and diesel, right? So we have a final step, where we extract those little hydroxyl groups and make sure they are saturated with hydrogen from our process. We don't have to use an external source and then we get true octane, for example, or kerosene, and that's the finished product. And so, I think we try to map it on the analogy of suck, squeeze, hit, blow, but in the opposite direction. (Laughter) So we absorb CO2 from water from the air.

We squeeze it together with the electrolyzer. We add electricity to convert it back into chemical energy and then convert it into fuel. And then we also release oxygen into the atmosphere. And so, the only inputs to our reverse combustion process are air and electricity. And the only thing that is produced is the fuel, which includes both liquid fuel such as jet fuel or gasoline, and hydrogen, but also oxygen. So there is no waste product. And there are no agricultural or industrial inputs. So, we don't use any crops. We don't use wood or anything like that. So we are really different from biofuels.

We are really different from processes that use a lot of heat and methane, like Fischer-Tropsch processes, which are very expensive. We distinguish ourselves by being the only ones who carry out this reverse combustion through electrochemistry. - Yes, so you say that you have created a fuel that is molecularly identical to gasoline or diesel or whatever. Can you really have the same octane level? Can you double the same octane levels? Does it have the same performance? Do you have the same rank? Are there any contaminants you can get rid of, like sulfur or something? - Absolutely, so we say it's the same because you don't have to modify your engine or your plane or whatever to use it.

So if it's gasoline, you can use it unmodified, in an engine not modified like gasoline. But it is also superior to fossil gasoline. So fossil gasoline is pretty dirty, right? It can contain a lot of pollutants and it can be very different in the South than it is, for example, in California or the Midwest, at different times of the year, in different parts of the world, while ours will be very different. consistent and very clean. So no sulfur or sulfur oxides. No heavy metals, no particles or aromatics, and at the same time it has a high octane rating.

I think we'll be able to offer much higher octane than people are used to, at the same price as unleaded, regular unleaded, and we'll be able to have high energy density, just as high or better. So our goal is to produce superior fuels, right? So at first we'll go out, we'll use carbohydrate-certified California renewable gasoline. It will work the same or better. And then we'll start to present maybe more information about how much cleaner it burns. And you don't have the same particles, you don't have the same hits. You have zero SOx, sulfur. And the same goes for jet fuel.

We're looking for a jet fuel that maybe offers better range, maybe has better characteristics. It doesn't create the same trails, for example. So I think the fuel can be a lot better, because we're basically making it from scratch. And so, we have a lot of capacity to do it really well. And the absence of aromatics is important, because they are carcinogenic and cause the majority of particulate emissions. - Is this like benzene? - Benzene or toluene are great examples of what you generally don't want to have, but they are found in gasoline and jet fuel, but not in ours. - Is that what you breathe when you fillthe tank at the gas station? - Yes, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, benzene, toluene, those things are not good for you.

You know, while our fuel won't have that, to chemical engineers, it will just be linear and branched alkanes. And maybe some cyclic saturated alkanes, which are great for the engine and aren't harmful to people like those aromatics are. - What does it look like and what does it smell like? I have seen bottles that looked transparent. - Yes, it tends to be amber in color, from clear to amber. I'm trying to remember why it would be a different shade of amber. It has to do with its composition. And we're still deciding exactly where we want to be with gasoline before we launch it next year.

There are a couple of shades, but I think it will look pretty much the same and won't smell as bad. And I don't think you have to worry that much about your health when filling the tank. - So if you spill it on your pants or your hands, you won't stink when you get in the car? - It could still suck, because there are going to be, so in gasoline there is always a mixture of carbon chain lengths, right? So if you have a chain length of four or five carbons, instead of saying an eight or a 10, the eight and the 10 will remain liquid.

They are not going to have much vapor pressure. But one of the things that gasoline is supposed to have is a certain vapor pressure to ignite it. And, if it has the ability to form vapor pressure that ignites, that means it will, perhaps, smell a little. - Oh, I see, yes. - I haven't received any yet, but I'll report back when that inevitably happens. (laughs) - It happens a lot with our public, many motorcyclists, and that's why we have it on us all the time. So why are you the guy who pulls this off? - So my experience is that I am an environmental engineer.

I did my PhD in environmental engineering at Yale. And my first company was in water, water purification and desalination. - That was Oasis, Oasis Water, right? - Oasis water, that's right. And we did it very well. We halve the energy of zero liquid discharge, meaning total water reuse, compared to what was previously possible. - Yes, tell that story. When you were in the service, did you see a plant that was manufacturing, they salinize the oil and remove the water? - Yeah, before I went to college, I was in the Navy, I was in the Persian Gulf and I saw my first desalination plant, and it was huge, right on the coast.

And I asked people what they did. They said it essentially had oil going in one end and water coming out the other. Because an enormous amount of energy had to be consumed to desalinate the water. And when I ended up leaving the service and going to college, I started studying science and engineering, and for some reason I became a little obsessed with desalination. And I ended up developing a new type of process called forward osmosis desalination as a college course. And then I ended up doing my PhD on it. - This seems to be your second big swing at bat to make a change in the world, really difficult, because desalination is one of the biggest problems in the world, right?

It's from California, one of our biggest problems here in California. According to the press reports I read, you made progress with Oasis and reduced the cost of desalination and everything, but you didn't solve California's water crisis. - Yes, the water crisis in California is complicated, because much of it has to do with agricultural and environmental use, competing with urban use and industrial use. Desalination is likely part of a solution. You know, if you look at Israel, they used to have water shortages, pretty badly, all the time. And they built a bunch of desalination facilities, really state-of-the-art, and now they're water exporters.

The fact is that desalination has become very cheap. It is between 50 cents and a dollar per cubic meter, which is 264 gallons. It's fractions of a cent, but it's the most expensive type of water, compared to, for example, natural water resources, like groundwater and river water, which is just purified and that kind of thing. This is my original passion as an engineer, trying to solve this problem. And at Oasis Water, we really improved the ability to completely reuse water. Therefore, there was no discharge of brine and that technology was very successful. and is now mainly marketed in China, which had much more appetite for environmental technologies of this type.

And the second company I formed was looking for a better membrane; in fact, it was intended to be better for desalination, as well as many other types of separations. And it ended up being the carbon tubeless membrane that is so important to what we do at Prometheus. And one of the reasons I knew I could solve this problem is because I had been working for years on technology that I thought filled the gaps in this technological path. - Yes, in fact, Prometheus applied for a patent shortly after the company launched, and it went through the patent office pretty quickly.

I read that patent and thought, "What?" Is that part of why you got a 1.5 billion valuation? - Yeah, I mean, it's hard to speculate why anyone thinks we're valuable. I think we are valuable because of how well we adapt to demand. We launched it on Y Combinator, and Y Combinator's motto is to build something that people want, and people definitely want this. So, in our ability to offer it at a lower price than fossil fuel, we launched jet fuel at 1 cent less per gallon than the spot price of fossil jets in California. And no one in the alternative fuels sector has ever been able to talk about doing so.

Most people trying to produce synthetic fuels talk about the need for more subsidies or new laws. And we don't. - Why did you call him Prometheus? There are other Prometheus when you Google, you find Supreme Court cases about Prometheus Laboratories, which I guess is the pharmaceutical company, and there's a Prometheus technology company, and so on. I mean, it's a great name, but. - So I guess the original thought was that the myth, the story about Prometheus is that Prometheus really liked humanity. And we were living in cold caves, you know? And so he gave us fire, which is kind of a metaphor for technology, but in this case, it was actually literally fire, and we overused it.

As if we had burned too many things with this gift. So the idea of ​​using that gift in a way that doesn't cause harm is kind of an original metaphor that we were toying with. And we just liked the idea of ​​the Promethean fire representing technology and humanity's ability to do extraordinary things and come out of a cold cave, a kind of reality. - And you also have experience in theater arts, right? Wasn't that your degree? - Yes. In theater. - So you are a storyteller. Is that why your website became such a narrative website? - There are a couple of reasons for this.

So, it's true that I have a theater background. So when I was in the Navy, I was in a technical field. He was in explosive ordnance disposal, which involves disarming unexploded ordnance. People usually call it the bomb squad. And, when I got into Yale, I was so excited about their theater program that I basically put all of my scientific engineering into extracurricular activities and just got a bachelor's degree in theater. (laughs) And in the end, I ended up going back and getting a PhD in engineering. But I'm very glad I did it, because theater training underpins a lot of what happens in the world, because if you're trying to engage in scientific research, or you're trying to design tools, you're trying to lead.

In a team, everything comes together. It comes down to taking reality as you are able to perceive it and putting it into a story that makes sense. So being able to tell a good story about the world as it is and where it's going is very critical. It was really helpful. And the brand is what it is for many other reasons. But I think the reason it's so good is because myself and our brand leader, Amanda Martinez, who I met in college at Yale, also in theater, realized that we needed to try to communicate what the fuel was for. .

And let's not just talk about fuel or the environment, let's not just talk about all the things we fear or all the shame people are asked to feel about their energy use, but let's focus on how exciting the life. we could be, how adventurous and ambitious we could be. If we could solve the problem of decoupling energy from environmental damage. - It would be a great achievement. So what's your business? Will these physical plants be manufactured that extract CO2 and create, what did you say? Can one of your extraction units produce a million gallons of gasoline a year or something like that? - Yes, the way we have defined it is, we have said, that one system is equivalent to one million gallons a year.

And the reason we did that is because if you take all the gas stations in the United States and you look at all the total consumption, that's about one gas station, right? Millions of gallons a year, on average. Obviously, if you're right outside LAX, you'll use a lot more fuel at that gas station than if you're near the Mojave Desert, or something, but it's still an average of 1 million gallons per year. . So, the equipment that is used, we call it Titan Fuel Forge. So, a Titan fuel, Titan being a tribute to Prometheus, who was a Titan.

Titan Fuel Forge essentially captures CO2 from the air, reverses combustion, and produces the fuel. And you can have a dial at the end that says, I want jet fuel, I want diesel, I want gasoline, or maybe you could have dedicated systems for each type. And we're still trying to decide those kinds of things before the end of the year, when we lock in the design specifications. And there will be any number of these Titan Fuel Forges in a system that produces a million gallons per year. So we tried to show what that looks like on the website, like a field of white boxes, because they're all 40-foot shipping containers.

They are all designed to be modular, mobile and distributed, and cooling towers could also fit in the back of a truck, for example. The idea is that we want to make those Titan Fuel Forges in mass production. And so, starting next year, we will be able to build, say, the first five ourselves. And these will be built by hand. This is like building a custom car or something (engine roars) like a McLaren or something. But then we'll get to the point where, around 2023, we think we'll have enough orders for these fuel forges, enough demand, that we can start building a factory to make them, we call that metaforging.

And that's where we can start mass producing them. And then you go from making McLarens to making BMWs. Which are really pretty, but they're mass produced, so they're like 10 times less expensive. (laughs) And so along the way, we'll build these things and operate them ourselves, sell gasoline under our brand. It will send jet fuel to American Airlines, which bought the first 10 million gallons. To Boom Supersonic, which was the first company to buy jet fuel from us. And then to other partners that we may announce later and start shipping fuel. And so, we will also be in the business of producing fuel.

But once we get the metaforge online, we'll really focus on building these systems, because we'll make them as cheap and reliable as possible. And we want to send them all over the world. And then once we do that, I think people will use these fuel forges with their own renewable systems that they own or build. And so we have this new, really distributed way of producing fuel around the world. - I see, so if I live in a place geographically suitable for this, which I assume is a place that has abundant green energy, solar, wind, in the desert or something, then I can call 1-800.

Mark up a solar farm, call you guys and put in one of your fuel forges and I'm in business? - Well, I mean, I think the places where this will be done are the places that have the cheapest commercial scale solar, so that will be the southwestern United States. It will be like Spain, the Middle East and North Africa. It will be Australia and Western China. These are the places in the world where these systems will likely have the lowest cost. But you could also have a smaller one, you know, in your house. So you have a ranch somewhere in the Dakotas, you know, you just have your own fuel, you have your own solar panel, you generate your own fuel.

Now, obviously we're not going to prioritize small systems like that from the beginning, because we want to solve the big, big problem, but you can do it either way. But, if you just try to produce fuel at the lowest cost and compete in the global market, you're going to end up in one of those places that has really high solar radiation. - Some people would say, "Yes, but solar and wind are pretty dilute fuels. You need a lot of land and a specialized place to put them." - That's how it is. - "These fuels are so diluted that we are havingproblems supplying electricity to people's homes.

And now Rob is going to step in and try to divert some of that to power airplanes and cars and all that." Do you get pushback for that? - Yeah, I think one of the things that's important to point out, and thank you for asking that question, is that the greatest difficulty in expanding solar and wind energy has been to interconnect it. Deliver it and interconnect it to the networks of the cities. difficult, because at night the sun doesn't shine. And because the wind sometimes blows and sometimes it doesn't. So, we actually solved that problem in many ways, because we don't have to be connected to the grid to do what we do.

You go to a place that has really great solar radiation, you have some really cheap land, that maybe you rent from whatever regional government you're in, whether it's Australia or Texas, or whatever, and you put these mobile systems on. its place. You bring them in on a truck that morning and that afternoon and you're producing fuel. That allows you to build much more solar and wind power than you could if you were to build transmission lines for cities. For example, if you wanted to get more solar energy in the Mojave Desert and deliver that energy to Los Angeles, the transmission lines are already full.

So you have to find some way to get new rights of way, you have to form some kind of consortium, maybe raise more taxes to build more transmission, it's really difficult, right? But we can build a solar panel in the middle of nowhere, produce fuel and ship it on trucks, very cheaply, fractions of a cent per gallon to ship fuel on a truck, by rail or through a pipeline. The energy density is 40 times that of lithium-ion battery. You can store it practically indefinitely without losing charge, there are certainly no problems with cycling. So in many ways you could think of what we're doing as energy storage.

So we can talk about the practical uses that we all know, putting it in our car, truck or bike or flying with it. But really, what we're talking about is a technology that can take sunlight and turn it into an essentially exchangeable and completely stored energy source. This fuel could be used to run a city's power plants at night. Power plants outside Los Angeles could be switched to our hydrogen or our gasoline. And generate energy at night. You've somehow solved the problem with the grid, the transmission line, and the fact that the sun doesn't shine at night.

And so when you think about it from that perspective, it's much bigger than transportation. It is a way to finally implement solar energy in a way that takes advantage of its potential. - Who is your client, who is going to buy these things? Why aren't you Exxon or Mobile, why aren't the oil companies investing in you? Will they try to crush you in the future? Who will buy these units and then sell the fuel, either using it or selling it at gas stations for distribution around the world? - Well, if you look at the people who are building solar plants to produce hydrogen now, you begin to glimpse who they will be.

In some cases, these are oil and gas companies. Saudi Aramco recently built the largest and cheapest solar panel, down to a penny per kilowatt hour on a 600-megawatt facility, and it's intended to produce hydrogen. So if someone wants to use our systems on a solar resource like that, to produce our fuel, that's our customer. We are open to the fact that it could be an oil and gas company. I'm pretty sure the big oil and gas companies still want to be in the business of selling their fuels, but hopefully we'll give them a way to produce those fuels in a way that's much more responsible and doesn't cause harm.

Initially, we will sell gasoline directly to consumers. We're going to sell jet fuel to American Airlines. We may sell it to other airlines and international carriers; There will be so much demand for this fuel, once, I think, people understand that they can actually get it for a penny less than the spot price of fossils. We hope that there will be many, many people using these fuel forges to make fuel. And we're pretty open to who they will be. And as far as not attracting oil and gas investors, that was really my decision not to entertain those discussions.

Because I think it's really important for us to be separate from the opposition that those groups have been involved in for decades. I think it's very important for people to see our brand as something separate from those activities and those incentives, for now. - Why are they the opposition? Is it because they have huge assets underground that they've drilled and are on their balance sheets and everything else? And then they want to sell it desperately, and they don't want anyone to put a stop to it, or what's the problem? - Well, I mean, there has been a lot of documentation of disinformation campaigns and climate denialism by some of the oil and gas companies, some more than others.

You know, I would point to those resources to talk about it. I certainly would love for the new leaders of these companies to see their companies differently. And for them to be our friends and everyone's friends and be our customers, they haven't been those types of leaders in the past, if you read these stories and believe them to be true. So I think it's important not to engage with those companies until they essentially say, "Hey, we want to use your fuel forges to produce fuel in a new way." And we're going to say, "That sounds great." - You know, I am a terrestrial scientist by training and I was very active in the eighties.

And at that moment we knew what was happening. And at first we received great support. George HW Bush passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, I mean, things were really going well. And then when Exxon Mobil, and I know you don't want to name them, but Exxon Mobil and the Koch brothers and the Murdoch Media Empire, once they went into their denial mode, they just circled around us as scientists, because they have a lot of money. and they know how to market. And they have done a brilliant job. - It seems like that kind of activity, to the extent that some can remember it or can read about it.

I think the course has changed. If you look at Exxon, for example, they had activism on the board of directors that caused some internal changes. We look at companies like Shell and BP. They have said they want to decarbonize. I think we are turning a corner, but if we look at the energy crisis that is happening around the world right now, we can see that we cannot simply stop using fossils unless we have something to replace them. And this technology aims to be the way to do it. So even if we can, say, move completely to electric vehicles in the future, because people may want them, or maybe they are better in some way, it will take too long for that to happen.

And there are too many unresolved problems there. And so, we're like the cavalry running in and saying, "Hey, we've got this for now," to give everyone time. If they want to make a complete transition to electric vehicles, there will be time. But of course, once there is a zero-carbon fuel, maybe you want to drive that classic Mustang and you don't want to give it up. It will be up to people to choose for themselves. - Yeah, also, there's actually no plan for electric airplanes, right? - Not for medium or long-term trips, nor for transport in a maritime container.

Those things really require some kind of high energy density fuel and ours, of course, is only intended to solve that problem. - I know we're running out of time. I just wanted to ask you a little bit about competition, is it cooperation or competition? And there is a plant that Porsche and Siemens are building in Chile, where the wind always blows. Do you see this as a good thing to keep the industry going and there will be several profitable players, or do you see them as competition? Or what do you think about that? - There are a couple of ways to ask that.

In one case, it's a startup and we're competitive and we want to be the best at what we do. So I would say they are competitors, however anyone trying to solve this problem has my support. So, there's a little bit of cooperation there. The caveat, I would say, and perhaps this falls into the language of my competition, or competitive spirit, is that the Fischer-Tropsch technologies they are using are too expensive and cannot be cheap. And that's why they don't keep me up at night as competitors. I think if they're going to build that renewable resource, I'd love to sell them fuel forges, Titan Fuel Forges, so they can make cheaper fuels. - How is it possible to have so much confidence in being able to reach those prices?

And, in addition to that, there is one last question: you said in another interview that a startup lives or dies according to its moment. You have to get the moment perfect. - That's how it is. - And now is the perfect time for you. I think you said that because suddenly the price of renewable energy has become quite cheap. - Yes, that's... - Can you comment on that? - Yes, there are a couple of good questions. Let me first address the issue of timing, which is that I saw that the cost of solar had become so cheap that I knew it was the right time to convert that, call it energy to liquids or energy to x.

For more than a decade, people have been talking about what will happen when solar-powered electricity hits 1 cent per kilowatt hour. And everyone's been saying, "Well, you become everything." With solar power at a cent or two per kilowatt hour, there's plenty of room to compete with fossil fuels, right? You have to go find the oil or gas resource. You have to drill it, send it to the refinery, refine it, and then ship it. There are a lot of costs associated with that. Whereas, in reality we can just take cheap electricity and produce the fuel where it is used or very close to where it is used.

Therefore, we have many inherent advantages if electricity is cheap. That's the macro controller. As far as trust goes, my premise for Prometheus was that we would use technology that was already fully tested, but not scaled. So every piece of technology that we're using was already what they call technology readiness level, TRL, let's say three or four, which means bench tested, right? We have some of that under license from National Laboratories. So the catalyst we use to convert bicarbonate into alcohols is from a National Laboratory. The catalyst we use to convert our alcohols into hydrocarbons is a National Laboratory.

Some of the things I knew I had, I had spent five years at my previous company developing this nanotechnology, an alternative to distillation. So I knew we had that. The CG capture, I knew that if I designed the process integration in such a way that we didn't produce CO2 gas, we could actually use CO2 in water, I guess, I saw how all these things came together a little bit before everyone else. did. And you're right, when I founded the company, I wrote a patent for it and went on the fast track, but it was granted in about nine months and it was very broad.

And I think it's just because, for some reason, I had been thinking about it for years and I saw some connections that other people hadn't seen. And then on the testing side, before we raised our B round here, we did a third-party engineering report. So we brought in a fairly competent, prestigious, multinational engineering firm and we showed them all of our equipment, we showed them all of our data, we showed them all of our plans and they built a techno-economic assessment and a life cycle assessment. And they calculate what the price will be and what the attention to carbon will be.

And so obviously having a third-party report like that gives you a lot of confidence, and it certainly gave confidence to our investors, which is why we're at a 1.5 billion valuation. - Well, I have a thousand more questions, but I'm going to call. This has been a great interview, thank you very much. - My pleasure. - Man, I hope you make it. - Thank you. - Speaking as an earth scientist, on the one hand, and as a motorcyclist, on the other, motorcycles do not become electrified very easily. Are you in Santa Cruz, I believe? - That's how it is. - There is a motorcycle company down there, I am friends with the CEO of Zero.

But the problem with motorcycles is autonomy, anxiety about autonomy. You can only carry a limited amount of bulk weight and batteries. - That's how it is. - So, cars electrify better than motorcycles. So we all hope that we can still ride our motorcycles, even with ice engines, you know, internal combustion engines and... You know, that classic movie, "Easy Rider," was about, essentially, an endless open road. You can't do that in a Zero. As much as I think those bikes are cool, I see them around town. It has a different purpose than the open road. - Thank you so much. (upbeat music) Go change the world.

I hope this isbecome a Grand Slam home run. - Thank you so much. I think we are on the right track and hope to ship gas next year. - Thanks for watching. Now that you've seen the interview, I'd love to know what you think. Will I fuel Prometheus in a year or two? (laughs) Let us know in the comments.