Prometheus Fuels is long tail pipe scam part 2, 3 or 4...

All of a sudden usual suspect BMW has invested in a Prometheus fuels. This is the BMW that was part of diesel gate but didn't get hammered as hard as its co-colluders for some reason. Prometheus fuels is a synthetic fuel maker (a bit like the Reich when it was pressed in WWII- uses a nice Swiss Octogon type logo too.) It is amazing in its own way. It is a room temperature process that sounds relatively solid state that will make ethanol and even a gasoline equivalent at 50%-60% efficiency. Really it sounds like a way to make negative plastics much more than carbon neutral fuels.

It has a couple massive problems. One is even if wind and solar are used it would use about a gallon of fresh water per person or more (maybe much more) to replace gasoline use in the US. Fine if it were using salt water but if it were the desalinization would presumably require a ton more energy when it can only break even with fossil fuels as is. The idea that pressure should be put on people's fresh water to allow it to take longer to transition to electrics powered by green energy is idiotic. It is also lame to use this to keep the price higher for green energy when efficient use would lower it much quicker to help kill of toxic 'natural' gas quicker. It is part of the bait and switch long tail pipe scam. You see that unfolded in many fradulent phases. Way back when Exxon discovered the climate disaster in the 70s they started trying to go for the light cigarette version of fuels. Deodorize natural gas, get the lead out of gasoline, use MBTE to stop the acid rain but put in cobalt. If people don't know they are breathing it they won't whine about being forced to smoke tail pipe and we can scam along a lot longer... Diesel gate was the same kind of bait and switch where they lied their arses off and were totally belligerent and righteous about it. Hydrogen was the same idea- idiotically thinking they could force a premium (its far worse than anything else in energy usage) and keep the subsidies going , claiming they were green hiding the tail pipe in the fossil fuel smoke stack farther away from town that would just like the lies with diesel gate be providing most of the energy and the actual hydrogen and keep their sunk cost in the liquid fuel transport system from evaporating. Yep, just lie about it like with diesel gate. So this is a marketing scam like light cigarettes sold to teens. It is a bait and switch. And it plays into their idiotic notions of trying to create water scarcity through big thieved and enclosed water. They've already tried this with the poisonous plastic fossil fuel water they ship around on big fossil fuel burning trucks where people spend on dirty water literally contaminated by the plastic fossil fuel based water bottles they've been conditioned to drink out of (not putting money into the up keep of municipal water) much worse in terms of polluting your body when its recycled because you can't get it clean like glass.

The seething terms are already there in BMW's tripe this can delay to the medium term electrics, delay by another decades (so these government tit sucking losers can get a little more free of their sunk costs- or rather the public's fraudulently appropriated sunk costs)... so electrics can be for the medium and long term because gas made today are not coming of the road instantly.

Smart regulators and a smart public and a smart green movement could do the follow with them:

1. Only use of ocean water- no exceptions ever, not ever- unless they want to use aquafoil tech to pull water from the air but that still takes away from local vegetation and ultimately ground water to an extent and is presumably more expensive than desalinization.
2. They can't use any outside source of energy production except what they have purchased and run themselves- so they have to purchase up front all the solar, wind and battery production equipment themselves and make us of what they own. They can obviously never under any circumstances use fossil fuels as an energy source to create their synthetic fossil fuels which is surely exactly what they want to do.

3. They can't add stupid additives or petroleum products to their products- no watering it down.
4. A level of transparency never before seen where there books and proceedings and everything they do is literally open to anyone that wants to know.

5. No importing has to be made local for inspection purposes, no exceptions.

6. Kill switch- any ethical transgression, even the appearance of it equals instant shut down and forfeiture of all assets strict liability on everything and revocation of charter- no waiting shoot first investors can go after managers. This is an industry not even on parole it has made itself into an obvious public enemy, this should really get a treatment worse than the nuclear industry got.

Stuff sounds more viable as a way to kill the fossil fuel plastics industry a lot of its chemical industry which amounts to about 9-10%, good for a way of taking the fossil fuel industry to 0 literal zero- always important when arguing for their literal no future and against any of their present lines of bs. Blue Planet's method of carbon sequestration using concrete and cement seems more viable- it is apparently strongly carbon negative and it uses plastics a seed particles- likely recycled of course take that pollution out of the stream.

 

Agreed and I think battery tech and propulsion tech will soon be up to the task of full electric in every area.

I wanted to clarify about that the Prometheus tech would seem to require at least one gallon of fresh water per day per person (I didn't specify the unit of time) to replace gasoline in the US. That may not sound like much given how much we waste but it really is and we don't want it used to keep ICE viable or reduce the financial displacement of ICE players that put their 'profits' subsidized as they were (really just grant based nonsense) ahead of everyone's survival.

 

Thinking more about the Nikola announcement made me realize I was likely off but a good bit in claiming it was likely about water fraud.

On second thought maybe not quite as much a scam as I thought but still scams for both companies. Take the Nikola truck- the hype of $2 per equivalent of diesel fuel sounds like a savings of up to a dollar per gallon. Also sounds like a weight savings because diesel weights about 3x as much per equivalent energy as a fuel source. But its not. On a super long haul it might seem like almost 1500lbs in fuel might not have to be hauled around (really half the difference because the gas is used along the way) but it is not when one considers that the compressed hydrogen tanks weigh more than diesel fuel tanks and take up more space (about 2x at 70 MPa) and when one adds in the weight of that tank 18x the 93kg of hydrogen (hydrogen is apparently only 5.5% of the weight of its tank) you get a 4000lbs tank vs maybe 2200lbs for a full diesel tank and that's not including the fuel cell stack and of course remember that none of that is as durable or reliable as a gasoline tank. Odds are it come out behind on weight by a good bit but may balance on volume even with the stack and bulky tanks because no need for ICE engine. Electric motor advantages presumably make up for the durability and maintenance of the fuel cell against ICE but not against BEV.
Nikola claims it will also do BEV.

Let me say I thought it was a water scam but I was wrong. Even if either company used 2.3 gallons of water per equivalent gallon of fuel be it syn gas (Prometheus) or hydrogen (Nikola) it should take up less to water to replace the whole countries fossil fuel usage than LA uses for sewage. Ouch so wrong on my part! But its not like these people aren't water privatizers who want to gouge over water as the new oil. And you'll note that 45% of our water is used by the thermo electric fossil fuel industry when our rates are going up way up for residential water. But again for perspective if each American uses more than 8x what is used by an Israeli on a given day or about 300 gallons this would be less than 1/10th that amount- unfortunately for my suspicious argument that is a tiny amount even 3x-ing to replace all fossil fuels it might just be 3 LA sewage systems worth of water- so I was wrong! Of course it will still be important to make them produce their fuel in places where water is abundant and not in drought stricken areas.

Its also important to remember their likely real aims and still I think assume they are lying about where this stuff will come from. It will be about bait and switch because if you look at Prometheus's pitch they say new cars will be on the road for 8 years and they should fuel with carbon neutral fuel not fossil fuels. Maybe so but it would take Prometheus way more than 8 years to scale to cover it that use case of residual vehicles, this crap is about buying decades for fossil fuels with another light cigarettes bridge fuel scam. It is just as stupid as those trucks that say 'clean' natural gas. It is the same scam.

Let us remember the real math and analysis behind why it is a scam. You don't move nucleons around they weigh 1835x more than electrons and electrons in green energy come to you essentially for free and are free themselves and are collected by solid state devices made of sand that last for decades and even if you have to send those electrons some place they go long distance down direct current super conducting wires like the ones American Super conductor been putting into the grid for decades for super cheap. All this means it so much cheaper to carry around even a heavy low energy density battery at the point of usage than to drag a bunch of super heavy protons around in the form of fuels not to mention the externalities and all the compounding radical inefficiencies of the whole grind your society to a halt fossil fuel logistical stack. The weight of the energy necessary to move a Model S 400 miles weigh something like 3.5 micrograms why haul around fuels thousands of miles? They are forced into arguing that their green fuels will be made on the spot right. Because otherwise well before they have dragged things along their green energy will suffer from Tony Seba's God point where it is cheaper to produce and consume the energy at the point of the roof top than it is to send it over super conducting wire where that wire trip even a thousand miles long is already cheaper than going from a power company transformer in front of your house to your house. Both Nikola hydrogen and Prometheus syn fuel need to be hauled around. What grants both a sliver of credibility is the claim that they know BEV is inevitable but what undermines them is trying to pitch another decades delay and saying BEVs aren't practical in the short term.

Natural gas pusher and almost perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy for it just did a forum for Nikola company that has never produced anything in 6 years and won't for another 4 but somehow despite suing Tesla for a generic truck look, got 38 billion in an IPO but which just lost 18 percent.