If the founders are around... trying to understand their economics. They claim to sell Jet A at the market clearing price. Jet A goes for $0.45/L. The lowest industrial electricity rates in the US are $0.05/kWh (double that in California where they are selling today.) With 100% efficiency, no capital costs and no other opex, you get $0.05/kWh * 9.5 kWh/L = $0.47/L electrofuel Jet A. How can that work?
Their system is designed to easily start and stop to take advantage of wholesale wind and solar electricity rates, which are more like $0.02/kWh during certain parts of the day and times of the year. They sacrifice uptime for even cheaper electricity. If their capital costs and fixed opex are low enough this is a good strategy.
Ok so the 40% efficiency and 2.5x reduction in electricity prices cancel each other out... we're still at electricity costs == energy in the jet fuel. No room for electrofuel plant capex or any other electrofuel plant opex. And to get those low electricity prices you have to only run your plant at 30% duty cycle when the sun is shining (3x capex).
Jet fuel energy content is approx. 37 kWh/gallon. At 40% efficiency that's 92.5 kWh. At $0.01/kWh, $92.5 cents per gallon for energy cost. Spot price for jet fuel is approx. $2.00 average over 2006-2021 https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=E...
Add to this the LCFS credits which can be over $1.50 and there is a lot of room for Capex.
Not sure how we got to $0.01/kWh (half the cost of the lowest PPAs ever signed for solar in Saudi Arabia), but if the electricity cost is 10x lower than current California prices, I see how electrofuels could pencil.
The second important thing is to make the CAPEX really cheap. That's been the core focus for us for the last 2.5 years since demo day and we're looking at really low costs for equipment now. Hope to announce some new info on this in the next few months.
There is probably a fair bit of wishful thinking going on, but that is essentially a perquisite for starting a company like this. The pessimists don't get very far.
But something worth considering, in academic circles the "old" school of thought was that we could get a high penetration of renewable energy by building sufficient transmission capacity (i.e. send electricity from sunny/windy areas to places where it is not). The "new" school of thought is that instead of investing in transmission, invest in significantly overbuilding capacity. Think 3-4x the peak demand vs peak supply (i.e. in the summer months, if you have 100MW peak demand, build 300-400MW solar/wind). The rough idea is that renewables are so cheap and long term storage and transmission are so expensive, that it is better to just massively overbuild renewables and rely on shorter term storage to fill in the gaps.
And one major side affect of a strategy like this is that we will have a ton of extra electricity that we don't know what to do with during certain periods of time. This would be a great time to spin up carbon capture devices (among other industrial uses). There are still a lot of things that need to fall into place for a future like this to happen, but if you are trying to "skate to where the puck is going to be" it is not a bad target to aim for. There are plenty of well funded energy focused startups/companies that operating on worse future assumptions.
Exactly. They're doing what PARC was: looking a decade ahead and building the technology that makes sense in that future.
I'm quite optimistic about them. Even if they can't immediately compete head-to-head with fossil fuels, there are probably some ways to get early revenue, by making other industrial chemicals, or marketing higher-priced fuel to eco-conscious consumers, or the alcoholic beverages idea they mention on their webpage.
The idea of directly electrolysing the low-concentration CO2 in the air-capture fluid and then extracting the low-concentration product is brilliant. Most of the energy cost for standard air capture is heat used to 'boil' the CO2 out of the fluid. If their osmotic membrane can separate the fuel with better energy efficiency, it's a win. It's hard to produce high concentrations of fuel products electrolytically anyway, so there was always going to be a need to concentrate the fuel somehow. The big questions in my mind are:
1. How efficient can the osmosis be?
2. Does the low concentrations of CO2 imply the need for very large electrolyzers? These tend to be the biggest capital-cost item.
