This Startup Wants To Convert Carbon To Usable Gasoline

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur believes that in the future, we can still use gasoline. All we need to do is rather than taking gasoline from the ground, we use the air as its main source.

Rob McGinnis is Prometheus’s founder and CEO. His startup is working on a machine that can pull carbon out of the air and then convert it into ready-for-use gasoline.  He said, “I used to drive a Tesla Roadster. But now I’m making gasoline cool again.”

The idea behind this is that the amount of carbon that would be trapped and converted by the device would be more than the carbon produced by McGinnis’s car. This will help to turn vehicles that run on fossil fuel into a carbon-neutral mean of transportation.

Prometheus is receiving funds from reputable accelerator Y Combinator, which in October announced plans to pay more attention, as well as money, to developing carbon capture technologies.

At that time, in a blog post, Sam Altman, CEO of Y Combinator wrote:

For now, the project is still in its moonshot phase. Back in Mark, when Bloomberg got the chance to view the prototype device of McGinnis, it had not generated enough gas for his Volkswagen Golf hatchback to run even for a mile.

That has not prevented the entrepreneur to continue working on his project. In an interview with Bloomberg, McGinnis said before 2020 ends, he will be getting $3 per gallon gasoline.

Within weeks, McGinnis had succeeded in raising enough money to hire some staff and begin to move beyond a prototype machine.