Independent Review of @syntholene Facility Confirms World Class Proof-of-Performance, Supports Potential for Cost-Competitive Synthetic Aviation Fuel.
What our production data has demonstrated:
World class efficiency demonstrating the structural cost advantage of our thermally-integrated process.
Continuous, baseload operations, mitigating the need for battery and hydrogen storage.
Capability to scale into a low cost producer across the low-carbon fuels market, and a credible potential to compete with fossil fuels, completely decoupled from crude oil.
This is what a 10MW single geothermal borehole looks like.
This is the energy equivalent of ~200 football fields worth of solar panels located on the sunniest desert on earth. Plus another 5 football fields worth of battery storage to stabilize the load.
It is capable of delivering consistent baseload energy for over 100 years if well maintained. Feasibly much longer.
@syntholene’s architecture is designed to convert geothermal wells like this one into low cost oil wells that never run dry.
As long as the earths mantle is hot, we can produce clean synthetic hydrocarbon fuels to power human civilization long after the economic limitations of crude oil have been exhausted.
This is how we make unlimited fuel. Forever.
Once we have cheap hydrogen, we use the century-old Fischer Tropsch process to synthesize it with captured carbon into targeted hydrocarbon chain lengths.
These hydrocarbon chains are the same ones refined out of crude oil, and are drop-in substitutable for the liquid petroleum fuels we use en masse today.
The same engines, motors, turbines, pipelines, and tankers we run civilization on can all work with synthetic fuels, which are in fact chemically superior.
In short: The geothermal heat is obscenely more abundant than local electricity demand. Many, many potential gigawatts of stranded and untapped energy to serve a population of ~400k. True of most large geothermal resources.
Moving electrons across large bodies of water is not economic, and they have been trying to figure that out for 30 years.
So converting to liquid, dispatchable, energy dense hydrocarbons is reasonable in the context of gluts of stranded energy.
You will be pleased to learn fuel synthesis has been well understood for almost 100 years! Not new nor controversial.
Just never been economic due to the high cost of cracking Hydrogen (the "hydro" in hydrocarbon).
Through thermally integrated SOEC, this hydrogen cost comes down significantly, as my company @syntholene recently demonstrated at our demo site in Iceland.
A fully functioning powerplant of this scale on this site would easily be <20% of the CAPEX of the equivalent solar + BESS.
Maintenance and replacement costs a tiny fraction. Best panels out rated for ~25 years, and doubt they would actually last that long in true desert conditions.
Geothermal is for those of us who think long term.
@sludgeandwater These are amazing questions, you are more dialed in than 99% of the investors I have ever spoken to about this.
May I present our proprietary thermal coupling heat exchanger, now demonstrated with proof of performance over 4000+ field operating hours.
@sludgeandwater These are just sites with infra today. Future of geothermal is evolving rapidly. It is also not the only source of combined clean heat and electricity…
@_Faraz Iceland does this with geothermal.
Even better, it’s the low grade district heating water that has already delivered 80C to homes for hot water. Stepped down to 40C for heating roads and parking garages.
They don’t waste any BTUs!
@sludgeandwater Not at all. Lots of diverse high temp geothermal at shallow depths, and actually far more geographically diverse than sweet light crude with easy lifting costs.
The low-carbon fuels market is growing from $250B in 2026 to $390B by 2030. Low-cost production is an essential discipline for firms who aspire to capture meaningful market share and proven performance that can deliver structurally advantaged costs is not widely distributed.
What does Iceland's geothermal energy have to do with jet fuel?
$SYNTF CEO @DSutton1986 joined me to explain Syntholene's approach to synthetic fuels and the path toward commercial production.
Listen:
https://t.co/u1qfTSPJ1M
You can't make cheap hydrocarbon fuels without cheap hydrogen.
Syntholene has now demonstrated a structural hydrogen production cost advantage. This advantage is unique to the company's thermal hybrid production architecture, and can widen as we scale commercially.