Development

Making a cost-effective system

Inspired by a scientific paper that detailed a promising process, the team started collaborating with researchers at PARC to develop an end-to-end prototype and see if it was possible to make “seawater fuel.” After a few months of work, they successfully created methanol, but it turned out creating the fuel wasn’t the hard part. Creating it at a reasonable cost was.

Early theoretical models suggested that it would be possible to make seawater fuel for somewhere between $5 and $10 per gasoline gallon equivalent (gge). So when work began, the team set themselves a cost target of $8 per gge and outlined a path to $5 per gge within five years. This way, seawater fuel would be cost-competitive enough to give them a foothold in markets like the Nordic countries where gasoline is very expensive.