The costs of emissions mandates, steep carbon prices, and other supportive policies make most observers believe that the market won't gain a foothold without them. Carbon Engineering says it uses government subsidies to make the economics work.
Prometheus promises that its fuels will compete directly with those made from oil. The company claims it won't be decades before this happens, but just a few years.
In 2012 he left a startup he co-founded, Oasys Water, but continued to work on ways of improving the technology.
He was interested in the potential of carbon nanotubes, which can be used to reject certain compounds. He spent a lot of time figuring out how to put them in the plastic sheets.
He was the author of a paper that showed he could make carbon nanotubes that could reject salt and magnesium sulfate. Additional refinements and experiments yielded nanotubes with openings large enough to allow complex alcohol molecules through, while the interior tended to repel water. The technology could be used to simplify the process of producing synthetic fuels.
He says that the formation of Prometheus Fuels was marked by the fact that he got in to the Y Combinator program.
During YC's demo day in San Francisco the following March, McGinnis stood on stage to deliver his pitch to the crowd of investors and show off a prototype of the device he had completed days before the event.
It had sprung a leak and wasn't operating, Science wrote at the time, but that didn't stop him from making a bold claim. We will be selling it for $3 per gallon next year.
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